The full collection of Christopher Nolan’s guilty pleasure movies
Even filmmakers famed for their cerebral, intelligent, and complex features aren’t above enjoying some truly trashy or unheralded works of cinema, with Christopher Nolan‘s list of guilty pleasure favourites making for interesting reading.
He isn’t somebody famed for injecting their movies with a huge amount of levity and laugh-out-loud humour, but ridiculous comedies have made quite the impression on Nolan, with two in particular standing out as raucous flicks he finds himself drawn to repeatedly.
The Dark Knight trilogy director named Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby as one of his ultimate “remote drop” titles, meaning that he’ll never be able to stop watching or change the channel if he stumbles across it showing on TV. Along similar lines, Saturday Night Live spinoff MacGruber made such an impression on Nolan that Anne Hathaway revealed it was a good day on set when he was found quoting its lines.
Broadly speaking, Nolan’s filmography has hardly been a barrel of laughs, so it’s not as if he’s been liberally channelling his love of Talladega Nights and MacGruber in his own work, but that sentiment doesn’t necessarily apply to some of the other titles he’s listed among his guilty pleasures at one time or another.
Rutger Hauer’s road trip slasher The Hitcher, the fleet-footed heist thriller Topkapi, and Disney’s The Black Hole were named previously as guilty pleasures, a list that also included On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. However, the latter exists on a plane above the rest, if only because Nolan has spoken of it so highly on multiple occasions.
“I think, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service would be my favourite Bond. It’s a hell of a movie, it holds up very well,” he said. “Of all the Bond films, it’s by far the most emotional.” It’s hardly a secret that Nolan is a lifelong 007 enthusiast, with the Academy Award-winning director making no bones about the ways in which both his Dark Knight trilogy and Inception “mercilessly pillaged” from the back catalogue of cinema’s foremost secret agent, allowing him to indulge his Bondian sensibilities without having to board the franchise itself.
His appreciation of Rutger Hauer’s bespoke brand of European villainy weaponized to great effect in The Hitcher manifested through the Blade Runner star’s casting as underhanded Wayne Enterprises board member William Earle in Batman Begins, while the fleet-footed stylings of crime caper Topkapi and Nolan’s fondness for them are apparent in Inception, with the entire crux of the narrative hinging on an elaborate cross-continental act of thievery, albeit one that unfolds in the subconscious of the mark.
Meanwhile, 1979’s The Black Hole was Disney’s attempt to jump on the Star Wars bandwagon – another classic that endures as one of Nolan’s favourite sci-fi flicks – a genre he eventually tackled through Interstellar. While his mind-melting inter-dimensional epic does indeed feature a black hole, it’s hardly a spiritual successor, although it can be stated with a reasonable amount of certainty the filmmaker’s desire to dive headfirst into cosmic storytelling was driven at least in part by the sci-fi films that shaped his love of the genre, of which The Black Hole was an integral part.
However, his ongoing fixation with Fast & Furious is rooted in nothing more than popcorn-munching escapism, with Nolan explaining how the long-running action saga – especially third instalment Tokyo Drift – comfortably ranks among his favoured form of bombastic entertainment.
His fandom does extend right back to the very beginning, though, as he outlined on Happy Sad Confused. “I’m sort of original recipe, the Rob Cohen original. But I’ve got a very soft spot for Tokyo Drift actually,” he said. “And Justin Lin’s iterations, as they got crazier and bigger and crazier and bigger they became something else, but something else kind of fun.”
“I have no guilt about being a fan of the Fast & Furious franchise,” Nolan stated with the utmost honesty. “A tremendous action franchise. I watch those movies all the time. I love them. It’s only the last few where a specific arc and mythology develop. I would start with Tokyo Drift and watch it as its own thing.”
It’s a typically esoteric list of guilty pleasures, but it offers an insight into the sort of light and frothy flicks Nolan watches in his downtime when he’s not embarking on his next meticulously planned and expertly-crafted picture destined to do huge box office business and make an awards season splash.
Christopher Nolan’s guilty pleasure movies:
- Topkapi (Jules Dassin, 1964)
- The Black Hole (Gary Nelson, 1979)
- The Hitcher (Robert Harmon, 1986)
- On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Peter R. Hunt, 1969)
- MacGruber (Jorma Taccone, 2010)
- Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (Adam McKay, 2006)
- The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (Justin Lin, 2006)
