The two movies that changed everything for Christopher Nolan: “It just fired our imaginations”
Few directors in the modern era have toed the line between thought-provoking cinema and crowd-pleasing entertainment better than Christopher Nolan, who’s built his career on continually keeping one foot planted in each world.
There have always been filmmakers who prefer the smaller, more intimate, and intellectual side of the medium, just as there have always been those who want nothing more than to excite an audience. Of course, countless auteurs have deftly managed to achieve both, but there aren’t many who’ve done it to the same level as Nolan.
To illustrate that point, only six directors in history have seen their filmographies earn more at the box office. One of them is Michael Bay, who definitely doesn’t make movies for the brain. Joe and Anthony Russo are up there, too, and that’s based entirely on their frequent forays into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
David Yates owes his spot to Harry Potter and its prequels, and Peter Jackson’s lengthy association with Middle-Earth drove almost all of his earning power. That leaves only Steven Spielberg and James Cameron as directors who’ve accrued a diverse portfolio of blockbuster epics and awards season favourites, making them Nolan’s closest contemporaries when it comes to balancing the creative with the commercial.
Nothing sums up Nolan’s approach to hitting the sweet spot between thematic resonance and eye-popping spectacle better than the two pictures that inspired him the most. Even though they’re both technically part of the same genre, they couldn’t be more different. They each had a monumental impact on cinema as well, albeit for contrasting reasons.
“Anybody our age, our generation, that’s the movie,” he told Film Threat of Star Wars. “You might want to deny it in later years and come up with something more sophisticated, but it absolutely changed everything. What’s amusing to me to realise, because I was a little bit embarrassed about Star Wars, you know, because it’s such an obvious movie to fix on. But then I remember that when I was a little kid, they also re-released 2001 the same year, and all of my friends and I went to see it when we were seven years old and loved it.”
By his own admission, Nolan “didn’t give a shit about the fact we couldn’t understand the ending; it just fired our imaginations.” The director confessed that he “wasn’t some precocious little kid,” with his desire to see Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece coming entirely “off the back of Star Wars when it was re-released, and I loved it.”
Seven-year-old Nolan’s mind was thoroughly blown by George Lucas’ game-changing cosmic adventure and then blown again in a vastly different way by Kubrick’s seminal sci-fi. From that point on, he knew what he wanted to do with his life, and he never looked back.
