The movie Christopher Nolan called his most “underrated”
From the moment he released 2000’s Memento, Christopher Nolan became one of the most famous filmmakers of his generation. Although his debut film, 1998’s Following, made waves in the independent film scene of the late 1990s, Memento was the movie that pushed Nolan’s dense head trips into the mainstream. Scores of critics and excited fans began to anticipate the director’s follow-up.
In many ways, 2002’s Insomnia seemed like a logical step forward. With a bigger budget and famous Hollywood figures like Al Pacino, Hilary Swank and Robin Williams working with him, Nolan looked to bring his unique storytelling style closer to mainstream movie audiences. That’s not to say Insomnia was simpler or easier to digest than Memento – its frequent twists and turns, along with Pacino’s unreliable point of view thanks to his titular affliction, means that Insomnia keeps you guessing until the very end.
Insomnia was Nolan’s first film to be released by a major studio, kicking off his relationship with Warner Bros that lasted all the way up to 2020’s Tenet. It was also Nolan’s first film to make more than $100million at the box office, establishing him as not just a thoughtful provocateur but a legitimate blockbuster filmmaker. Still, the film was one of his earliest, and perhaps because of that, Nolan himself sees it as something of a hidden gem.
“I’m very proud of the film, I think, of all my films, it’s probably the most underrated,” Nolan told Tom Shone in the book The Nolan Variations. “The reality is it’s one of my most personal films in terms of what it was to make it. It was a very vivid time in my life. It was my first studio film; I was on location, it was the first time I’d worked with huge movie stars.”
“That’s not really for me to say, but every now and again, I meet a filmmaker, and that’s actually the film that they’re interested in or want to talk about,” Nolan added. “Yeah, very proud of the film.”
In the wake of Insomnia, Nolan agreed to take the reigns on the Batman film franchise with 2005’s Batman Begins. The box office returns for that movie tripled what Insomnia made, almost instantly overshadowing the success of Insomnia. Batman might have secured Nolan’s ability to make big-budget films until the end of time, but Insomnia is the movie that contains most of Nolan’s creative DNA that would appear throughout his career.
Check out the trailer for Insomnia down below.
