Christopher Nolan: from superheroes to Dunkirk’s small tales of heroism | the Observer profile | Film

Christopher Nolan: from superheroes to Dunkirk’s small tales of heroism | the Observer profile | Film

When initial details emerged about the new film Dunkirk, attention focused disproportionately on the news of the acting debut of Harry Styles, of One Direction fame. Creditable as the pop star’s performance may be, he isn’t the main reason for the excitement now surrounding the movie.

That’s all due to Christopher Nolan, who already has a place on the distinguished roll-call of celebrity film-makers, alongside Cecil B DeMille, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Spielberg and James Cameron. Or, for that matter, his friend Quentin Tarantino, who has spoken of Nolan’s “old film-making craft”, arguing that he would be “just as potent a film-maker as he is if he was making movies in 1975. Or, if he was making movies in 1965. I’d like to see Chris Nolan’s version of The Battle of Bulge [sic]. That would be fucking awesome.”

Well, now we can. Dunkirk is a film that brings together the director’s finest qualities. In his reconstruction of the events of May 1940, when hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers were evacuated from Dunkirk after being trapped by the Germans, he stages some daredevil action sequences. As this is a study of survival, as opposed to combat, there is also an immersive level of detail underpinning the set-pieces. Finally â€" and this is arguably the most Nolan-esque touch of all â€" the action unspools in three interlaced strands that, we come to realise, are not happening simultaneously. The cumulative effect is to bend our perception of time. To mess with our heads.

Nolan’s admirers, who have risked dizziness and delirium trying to unpick the knotted twists and time structures of films such as Memento and The Prestige, would surely be disappointed if he didn’t. He is a skilful, stylish storyteller, capable of combining the spectacle of Spielberg with the intellectual intricacy of Nicolas Roeg or Alain Resnais and no less fanatically adored in his own way than any boy-band member.

That is only to be expected for the man who turned the moribund Batman franchise into the Dark Knight trilogy, one of the most respected and lucrative properties in Hollywood, while inventing the concept of the cinematic reboot. “I don’t even know who was first banging around the term ‘reboot’ or whatever,” Nolan said in 2014, “but it was after Batman Begins, so we didn’t have any reference for that idea of kind of resetting a franchise.” Alongside those pictures there is Inception, which takes place in its characters’ dreams, and the time-warping Interstellar; these are either tantalising cinematic enigmas or mega-budget Magic Eye puzzles, depending on your point of view.

With this body of work, both commercially successful and critically admired, Nolan has dictated the sombre, thoughtful tenor of the modern blockbuster. If you want to see the Nolan effect in action, look at the gritty, and, yes, rebooted Planet of the Apes series, which might easily have been retitled Bonobo Begins.

How Nolan arrived at this influential position looks now like a strategy that would be admired by any military commander. Practically born with a Super 8 camera in his hand, he made shorts when still in shorts. He was educated at Haileybury, the English boarding school, and knew from the age of 11 that he wanted to direct movies. He studied English literature at University College London, where he met his future wife and producer, Emma Thomas. They have been married for 17 years and have four children; she has produced all his work to date.

Nolan’s entry into film-making came in a series of careful increments, making small budgetary steps each time until he had proved his mettle and gained the industry’s trust. He made a small splash with his low-budget but characteristically slippery 1998 noir thriller Following, which was shot piecemeal over the course of a year, and a bigger one with its fiendishly smart 2000 follow-up, Memento, based on a story by his brother, Jonathan (who also co-wrote four of his other films).

The genius of that fragmented, backwards-moving thriller about a man (Guy Pearce) with no short-term memory is that it never allows the audience to know more than the protagonist. When he finds himself running through a car park, he cannot be sure whether he is chasing someone or being chased and neither can we. The film keeps its cards close to its chest, much like as its director does. “I don’t want people to know anything about me,” he once said. “The more you know about somebody who makes the films, the less you can just watch the movies.”

Nolan in Dunkirk last Sunday with his wife and producer, Emma Thomas. Photograph: VILLARD/SIPA/REX/Shutterstock

He does, though, have what might be called a persona: the dapper, diffident gent. He drinks tea from a flask on set. “He’ll drink it all day,” said Michael Caine. “He’s made all these millions of dollars but he lives exactly the same way. He still has the same watch he always had, still wears the same clothes.” And he is always spiffily dressed. Making Memento, he never removed his trademark blazer, even in the scorching Californian heat. This, he said, was “out of respect for the crew”.

From Memento, Nolan took another small but significant step up, to make the thriller Insomnia, with 10 times the budget and a formidable cast (Al Pacino, Hilary Swank and, in a rare sinister role, Robin Williams). It’s not a personal film (it’s a remake and remains the only film of his that he didn’t write), but it is craftsmanlike. And it was vital in beginning a relationship between Nolan and Warner Bros that has been maintained with patience and care.

The director has attracted favourable comparisons to Kubrick since his earliest movies, largely owing to his technical expertise and clinical, controlled tone. In his bond with the studio there are echoes, too, of the devotion Warner Bros showed to Kubrick from the mid-60s onwards.

Like that director, Nolan has been accused of coldness. Any warmth and sympathy in his work, his detractors claim, tends to come solely from his actors, especially Pearce in Memento, Hugh Jackman in The Prestige as a magician who knows he will never be as good as his rival, or Heath Ledger’s posthumously Oscar-winning turn as the compellingly damaged Joker in The Dark Knight.

While this overlooks Nolan’s part in coaxing and shaping those performances, it is true that there can be a distant quality to his work, as though some human component is not quite getting through.

We know he can be passionate: it’s there in his campaign to keep celluloid alive (he shot Dunkirk on Imax cameras and a lot of money is going into making sure it is shown as much as possible in 70mm). But the emotional content of his movies can be as muffled as Tom Hardy’s notoriously garbled voice in The Dark Knight Rises. Look at Inception, with its antiseptic, business-class dreams that feel too clean to have been torn from anyone’s subconscious. Or Interstellar, where astronauts settle down for an eight-month hibernation without so much as a “sleep tight”.

I’ve had intimate direction from great directors but I’ve never had the sort of intimacy [that] I get from Chris

Michael Caine

“We first met when I was 18 and he was 19 and obviously I don’t think that he is cold,” Thomas has said. “But people think his films are going to be complicated, a little demanding of the audience, maybe too dense.” Caine says Nolan is anything but icy on set: “I’ve had intimate direction from great directors but I’ve never had the sort of intimacy [that] I get from Chris.”

Perhaps the insularity of the worlds Nolan creates is mistaken for coldness. A university lecturer recently bemoaned to me the viewing habits of applicants for undergraduate film courses: “The only directors they know are Christopher Nolan and Wes Anderson. Why aren’t they curious about anything else?”

The answer may lie in the seductive but airlessly self-contained visions of those directors. Spielberg at his greatest views reality through a magical prism; Nolan seems to prefer not to engage with it at all.

Until now. Dunkirk marks an exception to that rule, as well as being one of the anomalies of the summer blockbuster season, being neither a sequel nor an adaptation. There has been talk of Nolan directing a Bond film or returning to the superhero universe. In shaking off those more obvious choices and making this fine-grained film, he proves he is his own man. Superhero diehards may see it as a retreat but it has turned out to be a victory. Not unlike the events at Dunkirk, in fact.

THE NOLAN FILE

Born Christopher Edward Nolan in London, 30 July 1970. His British father was an advertising executive, his American mother variously an English teacher and a flight attendant.

Best of times His Dark Knight trilogy (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises) had a combined worldwide gross of $2.5bn, confirming that Nolan, always a critical darling, was also a commercial force .

Worst of times His older brother, Matthew, was suspected of kidnapping and torturing the American accountant Robert Cohen, whose body was found near Costa Rica in 2005. He is now free, but the Costa Rican authorities said in 2014 that the investigation remained “active”.

What he says “As a film-maker, you know, no matter how positive things seem, you always notice the bad reviews, you always notice that the things people love are the same things other people hate, so you can’t react to that. To me, it’s all about doing what you believe in.”

What they say “Chris consistently manages to raise the bar. He is a true professional who doesn’t leave a stone unturned or dismiss an opportunity. He’s always in control but he is not inflexible. He’s generous, sensitive, funny and incredibly intelligent.”
Tom Hardy

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