Christopher Nolan Quotes
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I've never read Joseph Campbell, and I don't know all that much about story archetypes.
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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.
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But 'Memento' was so successful, such a huge cult hit, almost on the scale of a large film. If that had happened, with all the acclaim, before the next job, I'd have found it very difficult to figure out what to do next.
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Yeah, it's odd when you look back at your own work. Some filmmakers don't look back at their work at all. I look at my work a lot, actually. I feel like I learned something while looking at stuff I've done in terms of what I'm going to do in the future, mistakes I've made and things at work or what have you.
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I made 'Batman' the way I made every other film, and I've done it to my own satisfaction - because the film, truly, is exactly the way I wanted it to be.
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The term 'genre' eventually becomes pejorative because you're referring to something that's so codified and ritualised that it ceases to have the power and meaning it had when it first started.
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The ultimate embodiment of Bruce Wayne. He has exactly the balance of darkness and light that we were looking for.
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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.
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Batman and Superman are very different characters but they're both iconic and elemental. Finding the right story for them both is the key.
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When you think of the visual style, when you think of the visual language of a film there tends to be a natural separation of the visual style and the narrative elements, but with the great, whether it is Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick or Hitchcock what you're seeing is inseparable, a vital relationship between the images and the story he's telling.
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As soon as television became the only secondary way in which films were watched, films had to adhere to a pretty linear system, whereby you can drift off for ten minutes and go and answer the phone and not really lose your place.
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But, in each case, as a filmmaker who's been given sizable budgets with which to work, I feel a responsibility to the audience to be shooting with the absolute highest quality technology that I can and make the film in a way that I want.
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When you play a videogame, you could be a completely different person than you are in the real world, certain aspects of the way your brain works can be leveraged for something you could never do in the real world.
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I sometimes think how strange it is that I've got to do exactly what I want, and that is difficult to cope with. You have to remind yourself every few weeks: I'm making this film and this is exactly what I want to do. And suddenly you're happy again.
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I have been interested in dreams, really since I was a kid. I have always been fascinated by the idea that your mind, when you are asleep, can create a world in a dream and you are perceiving it as though it really existed.
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My approach with actors is to try and give them whatever it is they need from me. Direction to me is about listening and responding and realizing how much they need to know from me and how much they have figured out for themselves, really.
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In Hollywood there's a great openness, almost a voracious appetite for new people. In England there's a great suspicion of the new. In cultural terms, that can be a good thing, but when you're trying to break into the film industry, it's definitely a bad thing.
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The only job that was ever of interest to me other than filmmaking is architecture.
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The best actors instinctively feel out what the other actors need, and they just accommodate it.
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The problem with big films is they snowball very rapidly and you can never pull back. It's a pipeline that needs to be fed.
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For the last 10 years, I've felt increasing pressure to stop shooting film and start shooting video, but I've never understood why. It's cheaper to work on film, it's far better looking, it's the technology that's been known and understood for a hundred years, and it's extremely reliable.
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But I have been interested in dreams, really since I was a kid. I have always been fascinated by the idea that your mind, when you are asleep, can create a world in a dream and you are perceiving it as though it really existed.
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By the time I was 10 or 11, I knew I wanted to make films.
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I think there are advantages to different scales of filmmaking. You wouldn't want to do just one thing.