The strange spin-off Christopher Nolan calls a guilty pleasure
It’s not unusual for the greatest movie directors of all time to celebrate the same classic films. Seminal releases like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas are regularly praised, but every filmmaker also has their guilty pleasure, even Christopher Nolan, a bastion of classic cinema and the beauty of old-school celluloid.
Along with the likes of James Cameron and Denis Villeneuve, Nolan is dedicated to bringing spectacular cinematic visions to the contemporary industry, having made the greatest Batman adaptations of all time in the form of his Dark Knight trilogy. Elsewhere, Nolan recently released Oppenheimer, a marvellous movie that has recently become the highest-grossing biopic of all time.
As a result, you’d think that Nolan’s list of favourites would include only the most spectacular movies of all time, yet there’s one peculiar guilty pleasure in his collection that sits beside the likes of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.
The revelation from Nolan came whilst Anne Hathaway, who starred in 2012’s Dark Knight Rises, took to Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. Speaking about the first time she met the director, she stated, “The first few times I met [Christopher Nolan] I couldn’t even really look him in the eye…I was so intimidated. But you spend some time on set, and you learn to like read how the days go…if he starts making jokes, you’re like ‘Oh my god, this day is so good.’ And if he starts quoting MacGruber, you’re just like this film will win an Oscar”.
Released in 2010, MacGruber is a comedy flick based on a sketch from the iconic American show Saturday Night Live. A spoof of the action-adventure television series MacGyver, the film, directed by Jorma Taccone of The Lonely Island, tells the story of a special operative who is tasked with taking down a maniacal villain planning on nuclear destruction and stars the likes of Kristen Wiig, Will Forte and Val Kilmer.
Thrilled that the great Christopher Nolan had been so public in his support of the SNL spin-off, director Jorma Taccone told Vanity Fair that he approached the Dark Knight filmmaker on the cheeky off chance that he might want to helm a sequel.
“I was like, ‘Holy shit. That’s incredible,’” he stated. “The closer to that story is that my wife [Marielle Heller] and I were at our first DGA dinner. And she’s like, ‘Christopher Nolan is there. You’ve got to go say hi to him.’ So I went up to him and I said, ‘My name is Jorma. I directed this movie called MacGruber.’ I said, ‘We’re going to do a sequel eventually”.
Adding: “What do you think of this: When the director card comes up it just says, ‘Directed by Christopher Nolan’ with an asterisk, and then at the end of the movie there’s another asterisk that says who actually directed it.’ And he said, ‘Let me talk to my wife about it’”.
Take a look at the goofy action flick Nolan calls a guilty pleasure below.
