The sci-fi movies that changed Christopher Nolan’s life: “The maximum potential of the Hollywood blockbuster”
It can be easy to forget that Christopher Nolan is a science fiction director. Over the years, he’s forged a career and style so singular that he is practically a genre unto himself. But glance down his filmography, and you’ll find science fiction everywhere, from the time-hopping of Inception and Tenet to the epic space travelling of Interstellar.
Early in his career, Nolan gravitated more towards gritty neo-noir. His feature debut, Following, centred on a writer who follows people around London looking for creative inspiration, only to become increasingly obsessed and intrusive. His second feature, Memento, was even more neo-noirish, complete with shadowy cinematography, a beleaguered everyman, and a dangerous love interest.
Despite what the tone of these first films might have you believe, Nolan’s entire career was inspired by science fiction movies more than film noir or classic psychological thrillers. Sure, he’s name-checked Alfred Hitchcock as the greatest director of all time and an artist whose work he’s sought to emulate, but way back in childhood, Nolan was fascinated by sci-fi.
“I think right from the moment that I saw George Lucas’ first Star Wars it was cemented in my mind as being the sort of maximum potential of the Hollywood blockbuster, if you like,” the director told NPR in 2014 around the release of Interstellar. “I mean, there’s a golden age of blockbusters that I grew up in: You had Lucas, you also had Spielberg, you know, Close Encounters [of the Third Kind], these films.”
Being a kid during this renaissance of the Hollywood blockbuster would certainly have instilled a special kind of thrill for an aspiring filmmaker. Spielberg had set the bar high with Jaws in 1975, creating the template for the summer blockbuster. When George Lucas came along with an unusual concept about samurais in space, it blew the doors off of everything the executives in Hollywood thought they knew about the industry, and reshaped the business of filmmaking as we know it.
It’s easy to trace the scourge of franchises and algorithm-based storytelling to Lucas’ groundbreaking creation, but it’s worth pausing to appreciate the influence his movies had on the generation of young filmmakers who were just starting to attend the cinema at the peak of his success. For Nolan, movies like Star Wars and Close Encounters were not a roadmap for box office domination, though he clearly learned a thing or two about that as well.
“They really spoke to me about the potential of what movies can do in terms of taking an audience on an adventure,” he explained.
Interstellar was the director’s clearest foray into the genre of his science fiction idols, but it’s far from a carbon copy. Where Lucas’ films centre on world-building and Spielberg’s film focuses on family and the implications of humans coming into contact with aliens, Nolan’s film, like all his others, puts the emphasis on time. Love, faith, and sacrifice are also there, creating a jam-packed epic that requires multiple viewings.
The film is much more esoteric than either Lucas’ or Spielberg’s work, but according to Nolan, making it brought him back to his memories as a kid watching their films in the theatre. “It’s a real, sort of, childhood dream of mine to do this film,” he explained, “And so I feel like I certainly got a lot of things out of my system.”
