Filmmakers don't get much bigger than Christopher Nolan these days.
He helped make superhero movies cool again and raised the bar for what a film using a comic book as source material could be with his Dark Knight trilogy. Inception completely messed with our minds when it hit theaters nearly five years ago, and we haven't been the same since. His most recent film Interstellar showed us the magic that happens when art and science come together.
There are few contemporary filmmakers that have been as critically and commercially successful as Nolan. So when he sat down with fellow acclaimed director Bennett Miller (a two-time Academy Award nominee for directing 2005's Capote and 2014's Foxcatcher) at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival Monday night, it wasn't really a conversation but more of a master class in filmmaking. I hope you brought your notebooks and pencils, boys and girls, because you're going to want to take notes on all of this.
Nolan seemed to tell Miller pretty much everything you would ever want to know about the British auteur and his career, from his early film influences to how he wrote the script to 2000's Memento to his secret to commercial success. Well, almost everything. If you had any hope of finding out what really happens at the end of Inception, you're not going to find out here. Nolan is unfortunately still not telling on that one, and I suspect he never will. But, you know, he's Christopher Nolan, so he can do that sort of thing.
T-Lounge attended the full hour of Nolan and Miller's talk at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival, and here are the seven most fascinating parts of the conversation that will make you anticipate Nolan's next feature film even more than you already were.
1. The first Star Wars movie was an early influence: "The second I saw Star Wars, everything was spaceships and science fiction, you know, trying to do that. I would make these, imaginative in title, [films] called Space Wars. I actually showed them to my kids recently when I got them transferred to DVD, and I was a little disappointed in how bad they were."
2. Why he will probably never write a script like Memento again: "It's a classic example of something interesting that can go wrong when you don't know what you're doing. You think, 'Well, why are there these rules? Why do people take screenwriting courses? Why can't we just sit down and write the movie as it appears on the screen?' You do it, and for whatever reason, it works. If I tried to do that again, I'd probably be a horrible failure. That instinct about when you're starting out, I think, is a wonderful thing to be cherished. And then as you learn more and more, it becomes harder to forget the rules, push them aside. It's something you have to keep striving to do. I think it gets harder as you get more experienced."
3. On his biggest fears as a filmmaker: "My biggest fear is getting involved with a project that you lose faith in or you fall out of love with. I've done everything to support that in my career, because for me, I mean all filmmaking is different, but for me, I'm sure this is the same for you [Miller] because you take your time with films, so there's a huge investment of time and your life and your energy. For me, the great fear is you get halfway through and think, 'No this isn't something I really care about anymore.'"
4. This is why he thinks his films have been consistently profitable: "I think there's an enormous amount of luck involved, truthfully. When you make a film, it's very long term. You're making it years in the future, so the idea that you can gauge what the audience is going to be interested in or what the market can sell is completely untrue."
5. One of his favorite young filmmakers is Damien Chazelle, the writer and director of Whiplash: I really loved Whiplash last year. I thought that was an incredible piece of work. And that was the kind of film where as a filmmaker you see it, and it's very precisely put together, and you're very jealous of that."
6. The opening scene of The Dark Knight Rises is one of his favorite sequences to shoot of all time: "It took us about two days in Scotland. And it was an incredible sort of coming together of months and months of planning by a lot of different members of the team who worked for months rehearsing these parachute jumps and wind walking, all these different things... The visual effects work in the sequence is very minimal... I was really amazed by what the team we had put together had achieved using very sort of old-fashioned methods, in a way. I was very proud of the way that came together."
7. He gave the perfect burn to an audience member's question regarding theories about Inception's ambiguous ending: "I'm certainly not going to answer that, or it would have been in the film."
Want to know what else went down at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival? Check out our coverage of George Lucas' talk with Stephen Colbert and the tech highlights from this year's festival.
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