The movie Christopher Nolan was bullied into making: “Don’t be a chickenshit”
Becoming one of the industry’s most consistently acclaimed and bankable auteurs carries a certain set of privileges, and unless his next four or five films tank at the box office, Christopher Nolan will be able to write his own ticket for the rest of his career.
There aren’t many directors in Hollywood who get complete creative freedom and carte blanche to make whatever they want, however they want to make it, and for however much they need it to cost, but Nolan is right up there with Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and Quentin Tarantino in that elite club.
Of course, you need to put in the work and deliver the results to get there, and Christopher Nolan, the writer and director, didn’t become Christopher Nolan, the brand, until after the release of The Dark Knight. Batman Begins may have elevated him into the pantheon of top-tier directors, but his follow-up, The Prestige, was still a cost-effective affair.
Since helming the first billion-dollar superhero blockbuster, which is also seen by many as the greatest comic book adaptation ever made, Oppenheimer is the only movie he’s helmed to cost less than $150 million, and even then, his Academy Award-bothering biographical thriller wasn’t exactly cheap.
However, even though almost every big-budget affair with designs on launching a franchise is envisioned as such from the outset, Nolan wasn’t entirely convinced that he wanted to return to Gotham City. In fact, he was actively against the idea for a spell, until some sibling peer pressure and light bullying changed his mind.
“Chris was on the fence about making another one,” his brother, Jonah, told Variety. “He didn’t want to become a superhero movie director.” Batman Begins ended with a blatant tease that the sequel would feature the Joker, but Nolan wasn’t exactly frothing at the mouth to return to the world of costumed crimefighters, fancy gadgets, and kindly butlers.
“I was literally sitting with Charles Roven and Chris and being like, ‘Dude, don’t be such a chickenshit. Let’s do this!” the other Nolan explained. “Once we had the script done, I was like, ‘This is going to be great. This is exciting. We gotta make this movie’. And eventually, he came around. He did manage to avoid being pigeonholed.”
That’s one way of putting it, with the Dark Knight trilogy providing the springboard for Nolan to continue making movies on a similar scale, without being beholden to existing properties. It worked wonders for Inception, Interstellar, and to a much lesser extent, Tenet, but Oppenheimer and The Odyssey have shown that he isn’t averse to an adaptation when it piques his creative interest.
Realistically, would Warner Bros have moved forward with The Dark Knight without Nolan steering the ship? On one hand, it might have, since there was money to be made, and it’s called the movie business for a reason. On the other hand, he was already settling into his groove as the company’s golden goose by that point, but those discussions didn’t need to be had once his brother had a word in his ear and told him to stop being such a chickenshit.
