How ‘Star Wars’ inspired Christopher Nolan: “It changed everything”
The cinematic impact of Star Wars is impossible to quantify. In 1977, George Lucas launched a worldwide franchise which now encompasses 12 movies, nine television shows, video games, and more. From ‘The Imperial March’ to the iconic opening crawl to “May the force be with you”, Star Wars has become one of the most referenced and beloved series of all time.
As kids and adults alike aspired to become Jedis, the franchise quickly turned from a summer blockbuster into an unstoppable cultural force (no pun intended). Over four decades later, it still retains that influence – Star Wars has continued to thrive and capture the hearts of contemporary film-goers, but its influence on cinema extends far beyond the franchise itself.
Star Wars was one of the earliest influences on a young, budding filmmaker named Christopher Nolan. The director was born in 1970, meaning he grew up with Lucas’ sci-fi franchise. After he first saw the film at just seven years old, Nolan became enamoured with science, a theme that would later appear in many of his own movies.
Nolan once recalled seeing Star Wars for the first time, telling MTV that it “completely changed movies” for him: “It changed everything, really,” he said. “It created a world that lived on in your mind after you saw the film and seemed to have this limitless potential.”
The Interstellar director would try to emulate this in his own output, explaining: “I think, for me, my whole career in making films, really every time I set out to make a film, I want to try and give somebody in the audience that experience I had watching that film, where it really felt like anything was possible in that world.” He calls that experience, as a moviegoer, “extraordinary”.
Star Wars inspired Nolan to forge films around limitless worlds and endless possibilities, but it also sparked his interest in science. Speaking with The Talks, he suggested that growing up around sci-fi films prompted his “initial interest in physics, in science and the universe and so forth”.
He recalled: “I grew up in the late seventies and when I was a young child, George Lucas’ first Star Wars came out, and science-fiction was something that really fired up the imagination.”
It certainly fired up Nolan’s imagination as he went on to explore dream worlds in Inception, the bending of time in Tenet, and, most recently, real-life nuclear physics in Oppenheimer. For Interstellar, Nolan even worked with Nobel Prize-winning scientist Kip Thorne. Initially sparked by Lucas’ space epic, Nolan’s enduring interest in the workings of the universe has permeated his filmography, which often marries the human and the scientific.
