The only Christopher Nolan film you’ll never see: “We never released it on anything”
Thanks to archiving, restoration, digitisation, YouTube, social media, and much more, the age of the ‘lost film’ may be drawing to a close. However, nobody will ever be able to call themselves a true Christopher Nolan completionist because there’s always going to be one thing he doesn’t want you to see.
These days, all it takes to watch the earliest works from any filmmaker is a click of a button. Head online and you can read Quentin Tarantino’s name in the credits of a Dolph Lundgren workout video, revisit Martin Scorsese’s 1960s shorts, or dive into David Fincher’s music videos or commercials.
21st-century auteurs don’t come much bigger than Nolan, and like anyone else who started their career when video was already prevalent, it’s easy to see almost everything he’s ever made, the keyword being ‘almost’. Doodlebug? Yep, it’s online. Tarantella? It took a while, and someone quickly filed a copyright claim on his behalf, but it’s still there if anyone looks hard enough. Larceny? No chance.
Shot over a weekend in 1996, the eight-minute black-and-white short was cobbled together on a shoestring budget using equipment, as well as a cast and crew, from the University College London’s film society. The plot finds a pickpocket trying to escape from the woods from the people he’s been pickpocketing, but details beyond that remain exceedingly thin on the ground.
Larceny played at the Cambridge Film Festival that year before vanishing into the ether. For whatever reason, Nolan has no interest in sharing it with the world, and it turns out that the guy who starred in it doesn’t even have a copy, even though he went on to lead the director’s feature-length debut, Following.
“I used to have a videotape of it,” Jeremy Theobald told Darren Mooney. “And I keep meaning to find out from Ivan [Cornell] or from Chris or from Emma [Thomas] if they have a digital copy, because I don’t have it any more.” The pair have remained friends, with the actor appearing in Batman Begins and Tenet, but he still doesn’t have his own Larceny.
“It’s strange, because it seems to be not as readily available as Doodlebug,” he explained. “We never released it on anything. I think Chris thought it was too similar to Following, that people would think that it was a test bed for Following. Which it was in a certain way, in that it was testing that we could work as a group together with that particular equipment and get a usable product that had integrity.”
Theobald is of the belief that Nolan’s mantra of “everything that you make should stand on its own two feet” is the reason behind Larceny‘s mythical status, adding that because of its perceived similarities to Following, there’s no point in showing it anyone when “it shouldn’t be a calling card for something else, or a test, or a preview of what’s to come.”
If Nolan wanted people to see it, then he’d have let them see it by now. Since he hasn’t, it seems fair to assume that he never will.
