“The experience is the thing”: the 1968 movie Christopher Nolan demands every seven-year-old should see
The movies we watch as children often shape our tastes as adults. But much of what we consume before we properly understand cinema as an art form is chosen by our parents, so in many ways, it all comes down to chance.
You might have been lucky enough to have relaxed parents who didn’t mind you watching films you were probably too young for, helping shape your taste for more mature themes early on. But what if your parents were stricter, banning anything they thought might corrupt or negatively influence you? Or perhaps they stopped you from watching certain films because they believed you were too young to understand them, meaning you missed out on some formative cinematic experiences.
Christopher Nolan doesn’t believe in banning your kids from watching certain movies, because getting to experience other worlds and perspectives through the medium of cinema is one of the most enriching things you can do when you’re young. And there’s one rather unexpected movie that he thinks is essential viewing for kids, even those as young as three years old.
The British filmmaker believes that all children should watch 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, a classic that changed Nolan’s life when he first saw it as a seven-year-old. Obsessed with space and science fiction from a young age, his interest ultimately came to inspire one of his most popular films, Interstellar, which he made decades on from his first incendiary viewing of Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece.
You might be thinking, how is a child going to understand Space Odyssey, but Nolan thinks that people get too caught up in the idea of understanding, when really, what we should be prioritising is the experience.
Children love sensory play after all, and you can’t deny the visual stimulation on offer in Kubrick’s film for kids to feast their eyes upon. The hallucinatory light tunnel sequence alone is enough to have children glued to the screen, wrapped up in all of the splendour and colours.
Revealing to the Los Angeles Times that he showed his children the film when they were just three or four years old, he explained, “I think they’re able to absorb it on the most important level at a young age. That’s what happened to me. I saw it when I was seven years old, and that’s the level I think it works the best, pure cinematic spectacle. I was extremely baffled by it, but excited by it.”
He emphasised the importance of soaking up the visuals and the sounds, as well as gauging an emotional response, rather than an intellectual understanding, adding, “When people talk about the age of people watching a film, part of what they’re asking is, ‘How does a seven-year-old parse the content?’ And if you look at 2001 and you think about it, you can’t parse it anyway as an adult. The experience is the thing.”
Having seen the film in the wake of Star Wars mania as a kid, Nolan knows how life-changing it can be to watch something so mind-blowing so young. Explaining that he went to see Space Odyssey with a group of friends when they were hardly old enough to understand what a film even was, he said, “We all had the same response, ‘We don’t know what the hell that means, but it’s exciting’”.
