The one movie Christopher Nolan has watched more than any other: “Literally hundreds of times”
One of the most well-known filmmakers contemporary filmmakers in the world, Christopher Nolan is known for his complex interpretations of the sci-fi genre. Building on the unprecedented success of the Dark Knight Trilogy, Nolan has gone on to direct multiple beloved movies like Inception, Interstellar, and the Oscar-winning smash hit Oppenheimer. However, one of his more recent projects, Tenet, failed to impress most fans who criticised the unnecessarily convoluted time-travel flick.
Nolan challenged the critical consensus by defending his artistic vision, claiming that Tenet is a unique project that deserves to be praised for what it is: “The idea that you’d watch a large-scale studio blockbuster and come out feeling like maybe there are things I didn’t understand that I should go back and take a look at or whatever. I think that’s kind of fun.”
Adding, “As an audience member, I’ve always enjoyed movies that, if you want to see it a second time, you’re going to see a different movie. You’re going to see different layers in it… My job as a filmmaker is to make sure that the first time you see the movie, you are entertained and you are gripped and that, you can’t lose sight of.” Nolan is a man who deeply cherishes the very notion of cinema and, therefore, is desperate for his own vision to be seen in the grandest sense and accepted as such.
Several sci-fi masterpieces have deeply affected Christopher Nolan over the course of his life. He has always maintained that watching Stanley Kubrick’s magnum opus 2001: A Space Odyssey on a big screen changed his life and opened his eyes to the magic of cinema. However, the one film he has watched countless times is Ridley Scott’s neo-noir gem Blade Runner.
While discussing the impact of Blade Runner on his journey into the world of cinema, Nolan recalled: “For me, the next really seminal film was Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. I first watched it on VHS, I was too young to go in the cinema… Even on that small screen, something about the immersion of that world and the creation of that world really spoke to me and I watched that film hundreds of times – literally hundreds of times.”
The filmmaker revealed: “From a pragmatic point of view, Blade Runner is actually one of the most successful films of all time in terms of constructing that reality using sets. On Batman Begins, unlike The Dark Knight, we found ourselves having to build the streets of Gotham in large part. So I immediately gravitated toward the visual treatment that Ridley Scott had come up with, in terms of how you shoot these massive sets to make them feel real and not like impressive sets.”
Scott’s film is a flawed masterpiece because, for the most part, it is obsessed with the spectacle of Dick’s imagination rather than the depth of his philosophical concerns. The brilliant production design is an essential part of Blade Runner’s moody atmosphere, which proves to be conducive to the multiplicity of interpretations in the minds of the audience, something that stands alongside Nolan’s own vision for science fiction.
Within that aesthetic framework, we are forced to confront our historical as well as future tendencies to annihilate the Other. If replicants are the next step in the evolutionary ladder, humanity has to accept its looming obsolescence but it chooses to create unnecessary distinctions like “empathy tests” to preserve the status quo. If empathy is the key to being human, a lot of human beings would not qualify.
These are the philosophical quandaries that Nolan ensures all his movies ask of their audiences. It is not enough to simply be entertained by movies, with popcorn falling from our mouths as our minds wander into the Technicolor abyss. Nolan wants his films to challenge the audience and make them connect with a part of their mind that was perhaps dormant until the opening credits began. It’s something he most certainly learned from Ridley Scott.
