What was Christopher Nolan’s first movie?
Christopher Nolan is such a towering figure in Hollywood that it’s hard to believe he wasn’t always a world-famous director. From his early success with the gritty, nonlinear neo-noir Memento to remaking the superhero movie with the Batman trilogy and sweeping the Oscars with the atomic bomb biopic Oppenheimer, he has proven time and again to be a box office shoo-in, no matter how intricate his plots or lengthy the run-time.
Nolan started filmmaking while studying English Literature at University College London. Shortly after graduating, he completed his first short film, Larceny, in 1996, which revolved around an apartment burglary. Despite making several short films in the mid-1990s, Nolan found it difficult to transition to features. After several unsuccessful attempts, he wrote the script for what would become his first feature-length movie, 1998’s Following.
The film stars Jeremy Theobald as a young writer who follows strangers around London in the hope that it might provide material for his work, only to become entangled in a criminal underworld. With a micro-budget of $6,000 and a shoot scheduled around the jobs of the various members of the cast and crew, Following was a far cry from the productions Nolan is now accustomed to, but it was more than enough to convey the young director’s obvious talent. One critic even compared his work to Alfred Hitchcock’s.
Christopher Nolan’s obsession with nonlinear plots
Though Following was an infinitesimally small production compared to Nolan’s more recent work, it does feature one of his most consistent elements – a nonlinear narrative. Memento, Batman Begins, The Prestige, Dunkirk, and Oppenheimer all exhibit their own inventive deconstructions of time, while the nonlinear nature of Inception, Interstellar, and Tenet is not just a matter of re-ordering chronology for the sake of storytelling but of the actual realities within the worlds of each movie.
Inception takes place across multiple layers of dreams. Interstellar explores how time moves at different speeds depending on your proximity to black holes. And in Tenet, the characters can invert time.
Nolan has said that his use of nonlinear narratives is, at least in part, a reaction against television. In an interview on the YouTube channel HugoDécrypte, the director said, “I don’t see movies in terms of a balance between simplicity and complexity, I think it’s really about mystery. And our expectations of films, really my whole life, but really since the 1950s, they’ve been informed by television and the expectations of television. And sometimes that’s unfortunate.
“So I often use non-chronological structures, non-linear structures. That was something that was done a lot in the silent era, in early talkies, right up until television comes along. And then television sort of imposes a more linear, a more simple approach, because of the way in which we watched television from the 1950s onwards.”
One of Nolan’s most interesting uses of nonlinear storytelling is in the one movie that arguably doesn’t need it, Oppenheimer. There are many ways to structure a biopic, but Nolan opted to use, as he so often does, several timelines. Instead of simply cutting back and forth between the black-and-white drama of the congressional investigation of J Robert Oppenheimer and the earlier period when he was spearheading the development of the atomic bomb, it frames the entire story with a small interaction between Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein. The final scene in the movie, therefore, feels like the solution to a mystery rather than the predictable ending to a story that, as a well-known part of global history, many people already know. Ironically, his least successful use of nonlinear narratives is where the deconstruction of time is intrinsic to the plot, Tenet being the primary example.
