The movie Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan agree might be the best ever made
Is Christopher Nolan the Steven Spielberg of the 21st century?
That might be a bold statement to pose considering that Spielberg hasn’t exactly gone anywhere, but if anyone has followed in the Hollywood icon’s footsteps to make consistent box office smashes with wide appeal, it’s Nolan.
The pair have a lot in common, having both risen from independent beginnings to become blockbuster champions. Spielberg was making feature films before he had Hollywood’s backing, even making a movie for $500 when he was just 17, Firelight, simply because he couldn’t quench his thirst for filmmaking any sooner. Meanwhile, Nolan made his first feature, Following, in 1998 with just $6,000 to cover all costs. Within a few years, however, the filmmaker was trusted to helm some big productions, landing the gig to direct Batman Begins just seven years later.
Like Spielberg, Nolan has never pigeonholed himself into one genre, although they both have a soft spot for sci-fi. Interstellar was a big one for Nolan, and it’s probably not hard to guess that Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey proved to be a key influence on the film, and it’s one that Spielberg also looked to when making Close Encounters of the Third Kind. You can trace this impact on all of his work, really, which borrows the expansiveness of Kubrick’s classic, such that even his non-sci-fi films bleed with the kind of looming scale that 2001 did so well.
Kubrick’s film is an undisputed masterpiece, shot magnificently in a way that feels incredibly ahead of its time. Considering it was released in 1968, the scope of the special effects is really quite staggering, and who can forget that light tunnel sequence? Psychedelic and deeply philosophical, 2001: A Space Odyssey poses some big questions about the evolution of humanity and the dawn of technology, and even all these decades later, the exploration of artificial intelligence is still scarily relevant.
Appearing on James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction, Spielberg explained, “2001 had a profound impact on my life and my daily life. It was the first time I went to a movie and really felt like I was having a religious experience. I watched the film 18 times in its first couple years of release, all in theatres.”
Nolan was similarly inspired when he first saw the film, telling Entertainment Weekly, “I just felt this extraordinary experience of being taken to another world. You didn’t doubt this world for an instant. It had a larger-than-life quality.”
This is the essence of Nolan’s films: taking audiences to a separate plane of existence where anything that’s possible is totally believable and immersive. Who knows what his career would look like if he didn’t have 2001 permanently lingering in the back of his mind?
