‘Topkapi’: The movie Christopher Nolan calls a “wonderful heist film”
It’s hard to imagine Christopher Nolan being interested in a simple story. Over time, he’s become known as the director of vast and spanning epics. In both Oppenheimer and Dunkirk, he took huge historical moments and somehow made them even huger. But when discussing his own tastes, perhaps sometimes a simple story is the best.
Does it get much simpler than a classic heist movie? Or a classic tale of a gang of criminals attempting to steal something shiny? When picking out some of his favourite films, that’s exactly what Nolan went for as he chose the 1964 flick Topkapi.
“It’s a wonderful heist film,” he said of the movie. “The central conceit of which is stealing a dagger from Topkapi palace in Istanbul.” As far as heist movies go, this one follows the blueprint to a tee as Melina Mercouri plays the glamorous and cunning Elizabeth Lipp, who recruits her ex-lover and a team of criminals to plan the heist. The team include the typical archetypes of beauty, brains and brawn.
For Nolan, it’s the artistry of the actual heist sequence that amazed him. “That sequence is almost entirely wordless, a bit like Jules Dassin’s earlier heist job Rififi with its sort of high wire act in the middle of the heist,” he says, drawing reference to another key film in the genre. He deems the two movies “very influential on a lot of modern films, particularly the Mission Impossible franchise.”
While Nolan connects the dots between these heist movies and major blockbuster action films, there are definitely elements of them in his own work. Especially when considering his love for silent yet dramatically choreographed sequences of high tension. In Oppenheimer, he used silence masterfully in the pin-drop quiet of his big bomb scene. Designed to keep the audience holding their breath until the director allows them relief; that seems to be a trick he picked up from heist films.
“It creates a wonderful, glamorous sense of the world and has a very engaging, very entertaining story,” he added. When it comes to world-building, that might be another trick he picked up from these crime films. Even though Nolan’s worlds are more gritty than glamorous, he manages to make them gripping enough to keep his audiences invested. Managing to turn battlefields or stark government test camps into a cinematic setting and one interesting enough to excuse a lengthy run time is no easy feat.
Even though some people might not deem Nolan’s long-running times and mammoth historical or twisted fantasy tale as “entertaining” but rather adventurous or cinematic, he definitely seemed to learn a thing or two about keeping viewers engaged from these old crime flicks.
Alongside Topkapi, his other favourite films are just as left field. He selects Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as a more predictable choice, declaring it “an unbelievable film” that has had a clear and evident impact on his work. But his other options of the basketball documentary CP Dreams and a 1920s silent movie, The Lady, feel just as strange as a classically corny heist flick.
So, while Nolan might be the modern master of the epic, his taste doesn’t discriminate when it comes to more shallow entertainment value.
