The movie Christopher Nolan loves but doesn’t understand: “I have no idea what it’s really about”
Christopher Nolan has always been open about the films he loved the most as a young moviegoer and an aspiring filmmaker. As a child, he loved Star Wars and James Bond, just like millions around the world, and as he got older, he became a huge fan of Ridley Scott thanks to Alien and Blade Runner. However, one of the first movies that opened his young mind to the possibilities of cinema is an undisputed classic whose true meaning has puzzled and fascinated people for more than 50 years. Yet, Nolan admits even he doesn’t fully understand it.
Nolan first saw the movie as a wide-eyed seven-year-old who was taken to a screening in London’s Leicester Square by his father. As he sat back to watch a science-fiction masterclass re-released in the UK a decade after its original engagement, he was stunned by how fully the film transported him to another world. He had already seen Star Wars at this point but admitted the experience of this quieter, more ruminative picture couldn’t have been more different than George Lucas’ action-packed space opera.
The movie was, of course, Stanley Kubrick’s iconic 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it blew the young Nolan’s mind to smithereens. He confessed, “I was seven years old, so I couldn’t claim to have understood the film. I still can’t claim that. But as a seven-year-old, I didn’t care about understanding the film. I just felt this extraordinary experience of being taken to another world.”
Interestingly, Nolan revealed that when he tells this story to people now, they tend to express surprise that he would have been interested in a movie like 2001 at such a young age. He insists he wasn’t alone at that time, though. In fact, all his friends went to see the picture because there was a cultural hunger for sci-fi, and director Stanley Kubrick’s films were viewed as “pure cinema.” He mused, “We would all sit and talk about what it meant…The fact that it’s challenging cinema in an intellectual sense doesn’t bother you when you’re a kid.”
In truth, challenging an audience intellectually was always Kubrick’s aim with 2001. He and screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke, a legendary sci-fi novelist in his own right, purposely left the movie’s story opaque and ambiguous, as they wanted audiences to interpret its meaning in their own unique ways. In ’68, Kubrick told Playboy magazine, “You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film…but I don’t want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he’s missed the point.”
Over the years, fans and critics have, therefore, interpreted the film’s events in a myriad of ways. Some see it in religious terms as a search for God or an attempt to scientifically define what the Divine is. Others see it as an allegory for the human life cycle of conception, birth, and death. When he was a kid, Nolan revealed that an adult in his orbit had his own theory. He told the future filmmaker, “The meaning of 2001 was that going into outer space is like going deep into yourself.”
Amusingly, when Nolan recounted this theory to The New York Times in 2014, he thought about it for a few moments but then stated, “I don’t think that’s what it’s about. In fact, I have no idea what it’s really about.”
Ultimately, the fact that Kubrick didn’t spell out his film’s meaning has never hindered Nolan’s enjoyment of it. If anything, to Nolan, watching it so many times over the course of his life and still being unable to put his finger on what it all means is a testament to the movie’s power.
In the end, 2001 was Kubrick’s esoteric vision through and through, and making that kind of film within the confines of a major studio also proved to be a huge influence on Nolan – especially when it came time to make his own sci-fi epic Interstellar. To Nolan, Kubrick is “the great example of someone who is able to make films that were very personal to him, very idiosyncratic, with a great degree of passion, while collaborating with the studios and making what he did fit within the economic models of their times.”
