The driving force behind Christopher Nolan’s success? His wife
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This piece first ran on February 19, and has been republished following the news that Christopher Nolan will receive a knighthood and Emma Thomas a damehood
When Oppenheimer won Best Film at the 2024 Bafta awards, viewers might have expected Christopher Nolan to say a few words, just as he had a few minutes earlier after being named Best Director. Instead, after being called up a second time, he hung back – and Emma Thomas, his producing partner and wife of 27 years, took centre stage. ‘One speech each’ was almost certainly agreed between the couple beforehand, and neatly sums up the extremely even-handed working relationship which has made them one of cinema’s most formidable power couples.
Thomas, 52, produces her husband’s films; Nolan, 53, directs his wife’s. Together, these films have taken almost £5 billion worldwide, so clearly the partnership works.
But why? Longevity is certainly a factor: the two grew into their respective roles in parallel, with each partner’s strengths complementing the other’s. As Thomas noted in her touching words of thanks on stage – which also included a loving shout-out to the couple’s four children, Flora, Magnus, Oliver and Rory – the two met at University College London: they shared a hall of residence there, and first bumped into one another at a party on the evening of the day they matriculated.
Thomas was studying ancient history, with a view to following her father into the civil service. But she and her new boyfriend ended up running the film society together, and making short films in their spare time, in which the Nolan house obsession with time and tiered realities was already being honed. One, called Doodlebug, was a dark three-minute farce in which a paranoid man tries to kill an insect in his squalid bedsit: the creature is revealed to be his tiny doppelgänger, time-shifted slightly into the future, and it ends with the man being squashed in turn by a larger version of himself.
Another, titled Larceny, was inspired in part by a break-in at their first flat together, a one-bed basement in Camden Town in north London. Ideas in that film then developed into their first feature together, 1998’s Following, a low-budget crime thriller about a burglar called Cobb who derives a thrill from the act of rummaging through strangers’ private things.
Even back then, they were like two lobes of a single brain: Nolan firing out ideas, Thomas working out how to shepherd them into the world. After graduating she found a job as a production coordinator at Working Title, and learned there how to drum up finance for independent films.
The two’s keen awareness of the importance of money in the movies – and the strings that tend to come attached to it – might be the cornerstone of their extraordinary success.
“We’ve always put a lot of planning and care into figuring out what we need,” Nolan told the Telegraph last year. “Our chosen method for getting the best version of the film we’re trying to make is to go to the studio with a number we know we can make it for, and tell them, ‘If you give us this, that’s the most it will ever cost.’
“And then in honouring our side of the bargain, we are afforded a degree of creative freedom that we wouldn’t be if we were going cap in hand every time we wanted to increase the budget.
“Making any large-scale film entails an enormous degree of uncertainty – about how it’s going to be received; about how it’s going to do in the marketplace. So our approach has always been to take those other uncertainties off the table.”
Eliminating uncertainty is a Thomas speciality, as Nolan knows all too well. During the making of 2006’s The Prestige (based on Christopher Priest’s novel, and starring Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale as rival magicians in Victorian London), she gave birth to the couple’s third child, and intended at that point to take a less active role in her husband’s work. But Nolan found he couldn’t wrangle the production without her, so she stepped back in with baby Oliver on her hip, and brought in the spirallingly complex project on time and on budget.
When making Dunkirk, Thomas was particularly determined that the budget shouldn’t creep a penny above £100m – less than half the cost of a typical summer blockbuster, but a sum that would allow her husband the necessary creative control to insist on its peculiar time-warping structure. Not that she allows him free rein, however. As Nolan himself revealed in the introduction to the published screenplay of Dunkirk, when he suggested to her that he envisaged making the film with no formal script at all, she told him: “You are being an idiot.”
While Nolan’s films can be conceptually and structurally slippery, Thomas is known to be the force pushing for clarity behind the scenes. When making their breakthrough 2000 psychological thriller Memento, she was also instrumental in making sure that film’s screenplay – which famously unfolds in reverse – added up. In Tom Shone’s The Nolan Variations, the director reminisces about Thomas leafing through if for the first time, “and every now and then she would stop reading, turn back a few pages to check something with a frustrated sigh, and then start reading again. She did that many, many times before she got to the end.”
But her fine-tooth comb approach paid off. It was Thomas who ended up pitching the script to the production company Newmarket Films in terms financiers could understand, and thereby successfully secured its $4.5 million budget.
That family is at the heart of the Nolan filmmaking operation should come as no surprise to anyone who watches his output. Memento, Insomnia, Inception, The Prestige and The Dark Knight all centre on men driven to despair by the prospect of never seeing their partners again; Inception and Interstellar are both fundamentally about busy dads missing their kids. In fact, the father-child material in the former was partly inspired by Nolan’s gruelling schedule during the making of The Dark Knight, which kept him apart from his wife and children for long stretches of time.
As artistic fixations go, this feels like an unusually healthy one, even if it means the recurring loss-of-a-partner motif in Nolan’s films renders the survival rate for wives and lovers in his work hair-raisingly slim.
Nor can his sincerity in this area be doubted: just look at his 140-watt wife-guy glow when Thomas described him as “inspired and inspiring, brilliant, often infuriating, always right” on the stage of the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday night. What she left unsaid, of course, was the extent to which he owes those qualities to his better half.
