Christopher Nolan: 'I’m a pain in the a--e to everybody on set'

It’s arguably something of a blind spot for the festival: none of Christopher Nolan’s films have ever screened at Cannes. But this year the director of The Dark Knight and Dunkirk has brought along someone else’s. Specifically, it’s the so-called “unrestored version” of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a meticulous, proudly un-digitised replica of the original 70mm release print of Stanley Kubrick’s revolutionary 1968 science fiction epic.

Before the print is unveiled at  on Sunday evening, Nolan held a two-hour masterclass at the Palais des Festivals where he delved into his influences and shared some of the secrets of his directorial technique. Here’s what we learned.

He’s a self-confessed “pain in the a--e to everybody” on set

“I think it was Stanley Kubrick who said that the best way to learn how to make a film is to make a film, and I’ve certainly found that to be the case. I didn’t go to film school” – he says he intended to go after graduating from University College London with an English literature degree, but “couldn’t get in” – “and when you’re making films with friends on a shoestring, you have to be able to do all the jobs yourself. When we made Following we were shooting on Saturdays because we all had jobs during the week, and sometimes people wouldn’t turn up. So on the larger films, I knew enough about every job on the set to be a pain in the a--e to everybody – just enough, not to say ‘I can do your job,’ but to give the idea that I’m paying attention to what they’re doing and asking for a particular approach.”

The English degree actually came in handy

As I studied English lit at UCL, it greatly informed my creative process because I became more at ease with the literary concepts that underpin film criticism in particular. As a young male I struggled with the idea that if an artist hadn’t placed a concept into a work themselves, then it must mean that seeing it in there was invalid. But I started to grasp that storytellers turn to evocative images for a reason – these things are evocative because they have layers that filmgoers can pick up and interpret in their own own way. And that was something I very much needed to learn and get on board with.”

Even on the beaches of Dunkirk or in the depths of Interstellar’s wormhole, there’s no escaping the influence of film noir on his work

“With with my first film, Following, I started off in film noir, and that’s a genre in which you define character through action. People can talk about their motivation, but you don’t trust them – you wait to see what they do, and what they do to each other. And I think that’s the strongest form of characterisation, so that’s why in every film I’ve done, even in science fiction like Interstellar or action like the Dark Knight films, there’s always an underlying film noir dynamic: let’s judge the characters on what they do rather than what they say.”

The noir mindset is, let’s say, very him

“At a base level noir draws on and extrapolates our own fears and desires – the figure of the femme fatale, the revenge fantasy, these are all exaggerations of our everyday concerns. So I supposed it’s logical that I’m so fixated on having people around me I can trust on set – clearly I’m somebody who’s incredibly fearful of betrayal – and that comes through in the work. I’ve mercifully had a relatively untroubled life, so I’m not making films about my own experience, but using what I find in life and making it more melodramatic. The word melodrama has negative connotations in English, but it’s the best word to explain that process of exaggerating our everyday fears and desires.” 

And speaking of those people he can trust…

“I love working with family and friends and people you’ve worked with a long time. Emma [Thomas, Nolan’s wife, and a producer on all of his films] is my longest and closest collaborator, and has produced all of the films that I’ve done. It’s great to be able to work with people who don’t have any agenda other than helping you make the best film that you can – and it’s surprising how difficult it can be to be to forge those relationships in a business context. There’s an ease of communication and a trust, so that when people are around you who only want the best for the film, and they tell you you’re wrong, or being stupid, or should lower the tone of your voice, you tend to pay attention.”

The secret of his Batman trilogy’s success? Don’t treat “superhero movie” as a genre

“To me, each of the Dark Knight films is a different genre, and they tend to be defined by the villain. The first film is the origin story, the hero’s journey, so the villain, Ra’s al Ghul, is a mentor turned enemy. The Dark Knight was always a crime drama in the mould of a Michael Mann film like Heat, so the Joker was the ideal adversary – essentially a terrorist, an agent of chaos set loose in the playground of this large environment. And for The Dark Knight Rises, we choose the realm of the historical epic, the war film, with Bane as a militaristic foe. 

“In the three successive films we scaled up the genre, until in Rises we had a cast of thousands and a very long time scale. When we did Batman Begins we didn’t know if we would get to make another one, but you have to have somewhere to go, something related to what you’ve done before but which will also advance it. Shifting the genre and shifting the nature of the antagonist felt like the right way to do it, and tell the audience something different about Bruce Wayne.”

How did you maintain your interest in a single lead character, Bruce Wayne, over the course of three films?

“I think it’s that primal aspect of the character – his origin, which hadn’t previously been addressed in the films, is very much a noir story. Yes it’s a superhero film, but it’s based on these ideas of guilt and fear – these very strong impulse the characters have. The thing about Bruce Wayne is he doesn’t have superpowers other than his extraordinary wealth. Really, he’s just someone who does a lot of push-ups. And in that sense, he’s very relatable and very human. I’ve gravitated towards Batman because these are stories that are operatic, and appealing in their larger than life nature, but they’re based on very relatable human beings, and there’s a very fascinating, very primal figure at their heart.”