“It was bloody irritating, actually”: the only time Christopher Nolan took a film class
Many of the industry’s most esteemed and acclaimed auteurs never went to film school, but Christopher Nolan might be one of the few who attended only one class before conquering the industry.
Quentin Tarantino famously said that he didn’t go to film school; he went to films, and he’s just one of the top-tier directors who never got an official education. Stanley Kubrick was originally a photographer by trade, Peter Jackson was self-taught, Akira Kurosawa was a painter, and Paul Thomas Anderson dropped out of film school after two days to pursue his dream.
Clearly, failing to gain a formal education didn’t do anything to prevent them from reaching the pinnacle, but based on how distinctly and studiously British he is, despite holding dual citizenship, you’d think Nolan would have used academia to learn as much as possible about the career he’d always dreamed of.
He did graduate with a degree in English literature from University College London, and he specifically chose to study there because of its filmmaking facilities, and he was even the president of the establishment’s film society during his tenure, but he wasn’t interested in actually studying the subject.
In the early 1990s, when Nolan was student, UCL’s film programme was overseen by Philip Horne, who remembered him hanging around a seminar about Martin Scorsese and Powell and Pressburger. When the aspiring filmmaker finally decided to cross the Rubicon and sit in for a class, he didn’t rate it.
Their paths crossed again over a decade later, with Horne interviewing Nolan about his third feature, Insomnia. If the former was expecting a rose-tinted trip down memory lane where he’d be credited for lighting the fuse that led the director to his current position as a two-time Academy Award winner and one of the industry’s most successful entities, he had another thing coming.
“Your film class is the only film class I’ve done in my life. It was bloody irritating, actually,” he said. “No fault of yours. In a good way, it put me off ever studying film in that way, because if you want to be a filmmaker, I couldn’t sit there; it’s much easier to do it with books. With films, I was already too conscious of the compromises you make every day on set.”
That was one of the reasons he chose to study English literature at the expense of his desired vocation, with Nolan explaining that “being forced to think more about how we read books, analyse books, was very useful,” and that he “learned a lot more than I would have done at film school” because he was still making amateur movies in his spare time.
Needless to say, he’s done alright for himself without it, and the evidence is stacked sky high that anyone who insists you need to have an education in film before trying to make it in the industry is talking bollocks.
