The Oscar-winning movie Christopher Nolan refused to watch: “It falls apart on me”
You might assume that every filmmaker is clued up on what their contemporaries are doing, but the truth is, cinema is a competitive industry laden with pressure, because for many directors, like Christopher Nolan, it’s hard to watch other movies that are being released while he is working on his own films, especially if they fall into the same genre.
So, when the Oscar-winning British director was making his own sci-fi film, something he’d longed to do since being obsessed with space movies like Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey as a kid, he knew that he couldn’t watch a certain new movie that might have him questioning his own ideas.
He released Interstellar in 2014, a well-received vision of outer space which sees a group of astronauts searching for a new place for humanity to live following Earth’s deteriorating condition, and with Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway leading the film, it successfully grossed a whopping $773.8million.
Interstellar quickly became a hit with critics, too, winning ‘Best Visual Effects’ at the Academy Awards. Nolan’s hard work had officially paid off. Yet, to get there, he really had to stay away from watching other movies that might affect his approach, and in particular, he refused to watch 2013’s Gravity.
Talking to Time Out, Nolan revealed, “I sheepishly admitted to Alfonso [Cuarón] when I had dinner with him during the awards season last year that I was probably the only person on the planet who hadn’t seen it,” and while admitting that it might affect his own creative process, he continued, “I said to him, ‘I can’t watch another great sci-fi film while I’m trying to do my own thing.’”
He added, “I’m looking forward to seeing it in a month or two… To me, I’m still making this film, and getting it out there is the last stage, I go through a fallow period when I’m working… I can’t watch new films when I’m working, all I see is process.”
Nolan has to be totally focused on his own work and nothing else, ignoring his periphery so that the ideas of others don’t accidentally seep into his films. It’s easy to accidentally absorb other people’s art without realising, so it’s understandable that Nolan would avoid something like Gravity, which was considered one of the greatest sci-fi films in a long time when it was released.
The film won seven Oscars, including ‘Best Director’ for Cuarón, with many critics calling it the best film of the year. It was going to be tricky releasing a movie with similar subject matter so soon after Gravity’s Academy Award sweep, but luckily Nolan pulled it off – even if it didn’t have the same success at the Oscars.
“It falls apart on me,” Nolan added. “I’m OK watching old movies, but still, everything becomes a bit mechanical. It’s very hard to enjoy a film when you’re constructing one. So I’m very much looking forward to getting back out there and catching up what with what I’ve missed”.
When he’s in the process of making a film, suddenly all that Nolan can see when he consumes other people’s work is the skeletal make-up of a movie laid out in front of him. The joy is slightly sucked out of watching a film until he can get his mind off his own movie, which must be challenging for a self-professed cinephile.
