The worst Christopher Nolan movie wasn’t directed by Christopher Nolan: “It was really up to me”
If you’ve never made an omelette before, the chances are the omelette you make probably won’t be as good as Gordon Ramsay’s. Similarly, if you’ve never written a song before, whatever you produce is unlikely to match anything by Neil Young. And if you’ve not directed a film in your life, then the chances of it being comparable to a Christopher Nolan film are slim, even if you have the man himself keeping a watchful eye over things.
That was basically the deal with Wally Pfister’s first-time effort as a director, 2014’s Transcendence. However, we should qualify things a little up front by saying Pfister was a very well-established cinematographer, an Oscar-winning one no less. The film he won the Academy Award for was Christopher Nolan’s jaw-dropping 2010 effort Inception, a movie that took cinema visuals to a hitherto unseen place.
So it wasn’t exactly seen as a gamble to hand Pfister the reins to Transcendence, a movie about a scientist who uploads his mind to a computer in order to protect his plans for an AI project from a group that wants to steal it. Along with a star-packed cast including Johnny Depp in the lead role, Cilian Murphy, Morgan Freeman and Rebecca Hall, Nolan himself signed on as an executive producer and was heavily involved in the early stages.
Talking to SFX, Pfister said at the time: “Chris is a great friend, a mentor, a collaborator, and we’ve worked together so closely for 15 years… But it’s not a Christopher Nolan film. I hope I’m making my own film, and I’m certain he feels the same way. Chris helped me develop the film early on but then it was really up to me.”
The problem was that Transcendence was not exactly an independent movie with a sensible budget – Warner Bros handed over between $100-150million to the makers of the film, meaning there was always a high chance of it struggling to make anything like what was needed in order for it to be a success.
And that’s exactly what transpired when the film was released, although it did make $100million at the box office and some of the performances were praised by critics, as was, perhaps predictably, the cinematography.
One interesting outcome from the film, certainly viewed with hindsight and more than a decade later, is that some of the elements of the AI involved and the thoughts around them have proved to be pretty bang on now that generative AI is a thing.
The idea of mind uploading was also the central premise of Amazon’s hit sci-fi series Upload which ran for four seasons, and the celebrated 2016 Black Mirror episode San Junipero. Pfister hasn’t directed another film since Transcendence, although he has done some TV and commercials. He also retired from cinematography.
Nolan, of course, has gone on to be possibly the most feted director working in the industry, producing the likes of Dunkirk, Oppenheimer and Interstellar. His next movie is The Odyssey, starring a host of A-listers including Matt Damon, Robert Pattinson and Anne Hathaway. A sprawling, mega-budget adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek epic, tickets for IMAX screenings of the fantasy film sold out more than a year in advance when they went on sale a few months ago, ending up exchanging hands for hundreds above the asking price. It hits cinemas on July 17th 2026.
