The complete list of Christopher Nolan’s favourite movies
No director explodes onto the scene with their style fully formed, although it was clear as early as the 1998 movie Following that Christopher Nolan‘s career was destined to achieve great things.
After breaking out with Memento and carrying that momentum through to Insomnia, Batman Begins signalled a turning point that eventually snowballed into Nolan becoming one of the very few filmmakers in the industry who can open a movie based entirely on their name alone.
Combining blockbuster resources with inventiveness, originality, and a sense of grandeur rarely seen on the broadest of Hollywood canvases, Nolan is firmly entrenched as an elite-level director with the ability to make whatever he wants however he sees fit at any cost he requires to execute that vision.
He’s one-of-a-kind without a doubt, but the following extensive rundown into Nolan’s favourite movies offers insight into how the lifelong cinephile rose to the very top of the directorial pile.
Christopher Nolan’s favourite movies:
Christopher Nolan’s 10 favourite movies
Asking somebody to name their favourite movies of all time will inevitably throw up an array of different answers depending on when the person in question is pressed for an answer, but Nolan nonetheless outlined his personal top ten to Criterion, which offers a typically eclectic view of his tastes.
There’s drama, thrills, war, documentary, and many more mediums contained therein, offering a snapshot into just how wide-ranging a student of cinema the filmmaker is. Each of them are phenomenal in their own right, but combined, they comprise the ten titles that Nolan deems as the very best of the best.
- The Hit (Stephen Frears, 1984)
- 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957)
- The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998)
- The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1933)
- Bad Timing (Nicolas Roeg, 1980)
- Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (Nagisa Oshima, 1983)
- For All Mankind (Al Reinert, 1989)
- Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982)
- The Complete Mr. Arkadin (Orson Welles, 1955)
- Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924)
Christopher Nolan’s favourite modern movies
Although he’s displayed a keen knowledge and familiarity with cinema dating right back to its earliest years, Nolan has never been one to shy away from singing the praises of some modern greats. In fact, there’s a wide-ranging array of 21st-century titles he singled out for praise.
Hailing from a range of distinctly original auteurs, Nolan has picked out a selection of recent favourites that stuck with him long after the credits rolled, even if they all occupy disparate genres and tell markedly different stories designed to generate a vastly varying set of emotions from the audience.
- Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022)
- First Man (Damien Chazelle, 2018)
- The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino, 2015)
- The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
Christopher Nolan’s favourite British movies
Although he holds dual citizenship for both the United Kingdom and the United States while residing in Los Angeles with his wife and children, Nolan’s sensibilities are distinctly British, well beyond the fact he wears nothing but a crisp suit while on set and loves a good cup of tea.
As a result, British cinema has cast a wide-ranging influence on his work despite his status as one of Hollywood’s marquee directorial names. Like the majority of his favourites, though, the ones he holds dearest run the gamut of style, tone, genre, and story.
- Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981)
- The Hit (Stephen Frears, 1984)
- Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)
- Ryan’s Daughter (David Lean, 1970)
- Street of Crocodiles (Brothers Quay, 1986)
Christopher Nolan’s favourite action movies
There’s nobody in the industry who stages old-fashioned practical action sequences on a scale comparable to Nolan, but his love for the genre extends far past his famous and lifelong adoration of the James Bond franchise.
Of course, there are inevitably a couple of globetrotting 007 adventures among his favourites, but a classic crime thriller that directly inspired The Dark Knight and an unexpected Tony Scott vehicle made the cut to be deemed as the cream of the explosive crop.
- On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Peter R. Hunt, 1969)
- Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)
- Baby Driver (Edgar Wright, 2017)
- Speed (Jan De Bont, 1994)
- Unstoppable (Tony Scott, 2010)
- The Spy Who Loved Me (Lewis Gilbert, 1977)
- Superman: The Movie (Richard Donner, 1978)
Christopher Nolan’s favourite sci-fi movies
Nolan tackled sci-fi through the existential lens of Interstellar, which was more indebted to the genre’s more thought-provoking classics than its bombastic back catalogue.
As a result, when listing the trio of sci-fi movies he held in particularly high regard, it shouldn’t come as a shock to discover that Nolan named three examples comfortably held up as among the greatest cinema has ever had to offer, while he also shared how Ridley Scott’s Alien “just blew me away,” and listed Close Encounters of the Third Kind an inspiration for Interstellar, with Star Wars turning his earliest Super 8 homemade films into “spaceships and science-fiction” from that point on.
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977)
- Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
- Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1984)
- Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
- Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)
The wartime movies that inspired Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk
Although Dunkirk is very much its own beast, utilising a three-pronged narrative structure to split its narrative between land, sea, and air, Nolan was indebted to several of the finest war stories ever told on film when he was developing his own unique approach to the titular evacuation.
He even curated a season of screenings for the British Film Institute to share his touchstones with a wider audience, which offers a greater insight into how the filmmaker conspired to create a completely unique war epic from his inspirations that ended up as the highest-grossing World War II movie ever made. Ironically, that was a record taken from Saving Private Ryan, which he’d previously praised for saying how “the film has lost none of its power.”
- All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930)
- The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
- Foreign Correspondent (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)
- Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998)
The movies Christopher Nolan called “extraordinary and inspiring”
They may be entirely unrelated and separated by almost half a century, but Nolan put Sunrise and Ryan’s Daughter on the same pedestal as the aforementioned Greed, for the way “the relationship of geographical spectacle to narrative and thematic drive in these works is extraordinary and inspiring.”
There’s a romantic connection between the two from a storytelling perspective, but F.W. Murnau and David Lean’s films are the clearly distinguishable works of two legendary auteurs, leading Nolan to brand both as “pure cinema.”
- Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
- Ryan’s Daughter (David Lean, 1970)
Christopher Nolan’s favourite stop-motion movies
Stop-motion and Nolan seem like they’d be odd bedfellows, but the filmmaker curated three films by Stephen and Timothy Quay for a 35mm roadshow tour in 2015, with 1986’s Street of Crocodiles singled out for particular praise.
“As soon as you see an image from that film you can’t take your eyes away,” he said. “It has some of the most extraordinary things that have ever been photographed.” Among the deepest cuts from his catalogue of personal favourites, Nolan even directed, produced, edited, composed the music, and served as the cinematographer on the accompanying nine-minute short Quay.
- Street of Crocodiles (Stephen and Timothy Quay, 1986)
- The Comb (Stephen and Timothy Quay, 1991)
- In Absentia (Stephen and Timothy Quay, 2000)
Christopher Nolan’s favourite guilty pleasure movies
He might be renowned for crafting complex, intelligent, and thought-provoking blockbusters on a massive scale, but Nolan has embraced and voiced his enthusiasm for plenty of cinematic silliness along the way.
Writing in Film Comment, the multi-time Academy Award nominee listed heist comedy Topkapi, Disney’s surprisingly dark fantasy The Black Hole, and Rutger Hauer’s B-movie favourite The Hitcher as fulfilling the criteria.
Beyond that, he’s also been known to quote MacGruber on set and wrote a glowing letter to the production team when the sequel series was announced, named Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby as his “remote drop” movie of choice, and has gone on record several times over espousing his love for the Fast & Furious franchise.
Calling it “a tremendous action franchise,” Nolan said he has “no guilt over being a fan,” although he did recommend starting with Tokyo Drift.
- Topkapi (Jules Dassin, 1964)
- The Black Hole (Gary Nelson, 1979)
- The Hitcher (Robert Harmon, 1986)
- MacGruber (Jorma Taccone, 2010)
- Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (Adam McKay, 2006)
- The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (Justin Lin, 2006)
