The Quay Brothers: The disturbing directing duo that influenced Christopher Nolan
As a lifelong student of cinema, Christopher Nolan has been influenced and inspired by many filmmakers and countless all-time greats, but stop-motion doesn’t immediately jump out as something that would have a massive impact on him.
The director’s list of personal favourite films is as expansive, eclectic, and all-encompassing as one might expect from somebody who’s cultivated such an inimitable style of their own, but he holds a special place in his heart for Stephen and Timothy Quay, identical twin stop-motion artists who Nolan first discovered in the early 1990s.
The duo’s nightmarish short films made such a mark that not only did the Dark Knight trilogy and Inception architect curate an exhibition of Quay Brothers shorts that played on 35mm as part of a roadshow that touched down in multiple different cities, but he even made his own short in celebration of their accomplishments.
Nolan produced, directed, edited, composed the score, and served as cinematographer on the eight-minute film Quay that followed the brothers in their studio and played as part of the collection that introduced a new generation of audiences to 1986’s Street of Crocodiles, 1991’s The Comb, and 2000’s In Absentia.
“What I love about these three films, and the reason I chose these three in particular out of all of your work, is that they have a particular organic quality,” he said during a Q&A session with Stephen and Timothy. “They don’t feel accidental, but they feel like they were informed by accident.”
The Quay Brothers have been defined by their esoteric stop-motion filmography, which largely feature puppets constructed of various doll parts and materials, dripping in a rich and intense atmosphere. Dialogue rarely features, either, with music an integral part of creating the unique soundscapes that complement the stark, haunting, dreamlike, and surreal visuals that place intimacy and mood at the forefront, all laced with recurring shades of folklore and nightmares.
Their films aren’t meticulously laid out on the page, though, with Stephen explaining to The Guardian that their imaginations don’t easily translate to pitch meetings. “We don’t really have a script. If we wrote something like, ‘the screws start spinning out of the wood’, a producer might ask: ‘Why?,’” he said. “What we have instead of a script, is an intelligent bluff, just enough to get the money before we then throw it all away.”
Nolan curated the roadshow in an effort to shine a light on the incredible level of detail and craftsmanship that goes into every Quay Brothers production, as well as using his own name value and recognition to introduce viewers who may have never heard of them before to experience their stark, experimental, unnerving, and challenging for themselves and see if they’ll fall in love with the back catalogue in the same way that he did.
