The performance Christopher Nolan called “one of the most underrated in film history”
Even though he isn’t a director renowned for wringing awards-worthy performances out of his actors on a regular basis, Christopher Nolan still has an impressive track record in that respect.
The filmmaker has overseen four performances that have been nominated for Academy Awards, and three of them won. Heath Ledger’s ‘Best Supporting Actor’ gong for The Dark Knight, Robert Downey Jr.’s victory in the same category for Oppenheimer, and Cillian Murphy’s ‘Best Actor’ prize for the epic biographical drama have all taken top honours, which sadly leaves Emily Blunt as the sole outlier.
While Nolan’s back catalogue has been defined by stellar central turns – ranging from Memento‘s Guy Pearce to Interstellar‘s Matthew McConaughey by way of the two-hander between Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige – very rarely are the performances the main talking point of the picture or the images burned on to the retinas of his audience.
Instead, the conversation typically tends to focus on Nolan’s immaculate artistry and technical wizardry, with the lion’s share of the plaudits falling on the many cogs he’s used to craft his intricate and well-oiled machines as opposed to individual moments of standout brilliance, with the odd exception as mentioned.
Much the same can be said of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the members of the cast tend to fall by the wayside when discussing the many merits of the existential sci-fi classic. As a huge fan of both the film and its director, Nolan refused to stand idly by and let Keir Dullea’s tour-de-force as David Bowman go overlooked, and he echoed many of the same sentiments.
“Clearly the, performance has always been overshadowed by the magnitude of everything else surrounding the film,” he said, per Film Comment. “I mean, it may be one of the most underrated performances in film history. His work is layered and complex, within these extremely tight confined dialogues.”
Referring to the screenplay as being comprised of what he dubbed “bureaucratic dialogue,” Nolan pointed to Dullea being able to make the most of the words on the page, which were never “about anything other than the exact specific technical situation they’re discussion.” And yet, for his money, “the character comes through that.”
To Nolan, Bowman is “a present tense character” who doesn’t exist either before or after the narrative, not that it’s a bad thing. Instead, “he’s just in the moment,” which is a difficult thing for any actor to pull off when they’ve barely had the gaps in their character filled in, never mind in a feast for the senses where the human protagonists are rarely presented as being the most important element in any given frame.
People celebrate 2001 all the time and have done for decades, but Nolan wants to make sure that Dullea gets his flowers for his contributions, which hasn’t always been the case.
