Time named Christopher Nolan one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2015, and in 2019 he was named an MBE for his services to film. After earning a bachelor’s degree in English Literature in 1993, Nolan has worked as a screenwriter, cameraman, and director for corporate video and industrial cinema. Nolan’s ultra-low-budget directorial debut in 1998 was created while working full-time using available light and accessible films. He then began work on a second Batman film, which he co-wrote with his brother Jonathan. Here is a compilation of Christopher Nolan Quotes.
Short Biography of Christopher Nolan
It’s unlikely that Christopher Nolan will be the only one to reinvent the modern superhero movie; thrillers, not action films, seemed to be his forte, and this was before young rookie directors were regularly getting billion-dollar franchises. But it was the blockbuster Batman Begins (2005), a retelling of a long-vanished film franchise, that catapulted Nolan to the highest level of Hollywood directors.
With its non-linear storytelling, a technique that Nolan would use in later films, Memento introduced a new talent that respected rigid traditions while breaking cinematic rules. The thriller noir won awards at numerous international film festivals before its release and won enough trust from Nolan to raise significant funds for his next film. Emmerich cut the budget to talk director Todd Phillips out of it and, when the director insisted, sold half of the film. The head of the Emmerich film studio was not a fan of the project; came to the defense of President of Global Marketing Blair Rich, who was recently expelled.
Top Christopher Nolan Quotes
“I try to be as efficient as possible because in my process, I think that actually helps the work. I like having the pressure of time and money and really trying to stick to the parameters we’ve been given.”
“Superheroes fill a gap in the pop culture psyche, similar to the role of Greek mythology. There isn’t really anything else that does the job in modern terms. For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously.”
“My most enjoyable movie going experiences have always been going to a movie theater, sitting there and the lights go down and a film comes on the screen that you don’t know everything about, and you don’t know every plot turn and every character movement that’s going to happen.”
“One of the things you do as a writer and as a filmmaker is grasp for resonant symbols and imagery without necessarily fully understanding it yourself.”
“Every great story deserves a great ending”
“A hero can be anyone, even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat on a young boy’s shoulders to let him know the world hadn’t ended.”
“I’ve been fascinated by dreams my whole life, since I was a kid, and I think the relationship between movies and dreams is something that’s always interested me.”
“I never considered myself a lucky person. I’m the most extraordinary pessimist. I truly am.”
“A camera is a camera, a shot is a shot, how you tell the story is the main thing.”
“I think audiences get too comfortable and familiar in today’s movies. They believe everything they’re hearing and seeing. I like to shake that up.”
“The best actors instinctively feel out what the other actors need, and they just accommodate it.”
“You musn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”
“I try to be as efficient as possible because in my process, I think that actually helps the work. I like having the pressure of time and money and really trying to stick to the parameters we’ve been given.”
“It’s not that often that you get to have a large commercial success and then have something that you want to do that you can excite people about.”
“People want to see something that shows them you can do what you say. That’s the trick.”
“I don’t actually tend to do a lot of research when I’m writing. I do know because I think a lot of what I find you want to do with research is just confirming things you want to do. If the research contradicts what you want to do, you tend to go ahead and do it anyway.”
“It’s certainly difficult to balance marketing a film and putting it out there to everybody with wanting to keep it fresh for the audience.”
“Revenge is a particularly interesting concept, especially the notion of whether or not it exists outside of just an abstract idea.”
“There are points where you worry that you might be putting too much in and alienating the audience. But, funnily enough, some of those fears aren’t correct.”
“I’m not a big dreamer. I never have been.The only thing I’ve sort of obviously extracted from the research of dreams is that I don’t think there’s a specific science you can put on dream psychology. I think that it’s up to, obviously, the individual. Obviously, we suppress things, emotions, things during the day – thoughts that we obviously haven’t thought through enough, and in that state of sleep when our subconscious or mind just sort of randomly fires off different surreal story structures, and when we wake up we should pay attention to these things.”
“Every film should have its own world, a logic and feel to it that expands beyond the exact image that the audience is seeing.”
“I think there are advantages to different scales of filmmaking. You wouldn’t want to do just one thing.”
“I’ve been interested in dreams since I as a kid and I’ve wanted to do a film about them for a long time.”
“We all wake up in the morning wanting to live our lives the way we know we should. But we usually don’t, in small ways. That’s what makes a character like Batman so fascinating. He plays out our conflicts on a much larger scale.”
“I think for me, what I’m doing on set is I’m watching things happen as an audience member and trying to just look at, what’s the image we’re photographing, how will that advance the story and what will the next image be.”
“I like films that continue to spin your head in all sorts of different directions after you’ve seen them.”
“Film is the best way to capture an image and project that image. It just is, hands down.”