#426 How Obsession Built Christopher Nolan

**David Senra** (0:00)
Christopher Nolan had just spent a long anxious year trying to secure distribution. He had been turned down by every distributor in town with the same variation of, this is great, we love it, we really want to work with you, but this is not for us.
This film was personal to him. Memento was born into the world on the back of obsession. Failure to find expression would have been almost inconceivable to Christopher Nolan. Nolan made the movie because he had to.
What happens when you make a film is you burrow into it. You dig in so deep, so you can't see it anymore. You're fully immersed in it, he said. The only thing you can do is trust your initial instincts. You just have to say, this is what I'm making, this is what I'm doing. It's going to work, just trust it. Memento would go on to earn two Oscar nominations, nearly two years to the day after that disaster screening for distributors. Nolan's ascent since that movie has been near vertical. In the space of two decades, Christopher Nolan has gone from eking out micro-budgeted three-minute shorts to making billion-dollar blockbusters. Nolan's films have earned over $5 billion at the box office. To the studios, he is as close to a sure thing as a director gets. One of the few filmmakers who can walk into a studio with an original script idea and walk out with the $200 million necessary to make it. Like Spielberg and George Lucas before him, he has become a franchise unto himself.
And unusual for a director working at this level, he has either written or had a hand in writing all 11 of his movies to date, granting him entry into a very exclusive club of directors.
Among his collaborators, he is known for his punctuality, discipline, and secrecy. Of the more than 600 people who worked on Dunkirk, only 20 were allowed to read the script.
Copies of the script, which were kept on set, were watermarked with the actor's names so that any missing copies could be traced back to their negligent owners.
Nolan came, and this is hilarious when he is trying to recruit people to be in his movie. They're like, great, send over the script, I'll read it. Well, he's coming in with the script. So he says, Nolan came to the actor's house with a copy of the script.
Nolan insisted on staying with him, drinking tea in the actor's living room until he had finished the script and then took it away with him.
He refuses to use a second unit, preferring to shoot every frame himself. Minds don't wander on a Chris Nolan set, said Matthew McConaughey. Nolan is known by his crews for shooting fast starting at 7 a.m. and finishing at 7 p.m. with a single break for lunch.
He has the kind of passionate following one associates with a cult director. Critics have received death threats when they give his films a bad review.
He has the mystique of a magician who takes his applause below the stage having just disappeared through it. People will say to me, there are people online who are obsessed with Inception or obsessed with Mento. They're asking me to comment on that as if I thought it was weird or something. And I'm like, well, I was obsessed with it for years, genuinely obsessed with it, so it doesn't strike me as weird. Every film I do, I have to believe that I'm making the best film that's ever been made. Films are really hard to make. They are all consuming. So it had never occurred to me that there are people doing it who weren't trying to make the best film that ever was. Why would you do this otherwise? Even if it's not going to be the best film that's ever been made, you have to believe that it could be. You just pour yourself into it. And when it affects someone that way, that is a huge thrill for me. It is a huge thrill. I feel like I've managed to wrap them up in it the way I try to wrap myself up in it. That is an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is The Nolan Variations, The Movies, Mysteries and Marvels of Christopher Nolan, and it was written by Tom Shone. One of my favorite books I've ever read. I think the first time I read it was about three years ago.
And with Christopher Nolan's new movie coming back out, I've just been thinking about, especially his idea that he wants to live in an analog world. So there's like a handful of ideas. There's probably like six ideas that we'll repeat over and over again. Because we're going to move through the book in Chronological Order, which also covers his filmography in Chronological Order. But I'd say he has a handful of ideas that he just repeats over and over again. And one of them that's been on my mind is his desire to live in this analog world. So we're going to go right into that. That's something that will reappear throughout our conversation today. And it goes into the fact that Nolan does not have an email account or a smartphone. He has like a flip phone. So the basis of this book was a series of interviews done over many years with Christopher Nolan and Tom Shone. And so if Tom wants to get in touch with Chris, he's got to go through his assistant. And eventually, Chris will say, OK, I'll meet you here in this physical location at this time in this day. And so he wants to, he talks about over and over again about making sure that we're using technology and that technology is not using us, and that he wants to live in an analog world. In fact, it sounds very similar if you listen to a few weeks ago when I did the episode on the founder of Honda. He talked about that. He's like, we are building technology to serve man, not the other way around. Make sure that you are using the machines and the machines are not using you is what the Honda founder says. So then he just goes into the fact that, hey, I would say the main idea of the book is the fact that obsession is the engine for his entire career and he's going to give a lot of his life energy into his craft, into his work. He considers himself a craftsman. And if I'm going to be giving over my limited life energies, the only finite resource I have, I will run out of time one day, then what we're making has to be great. It has to be the best. And I love what he said. Listen, I'm going to this with every movie assuming that I'm going to make the best movie there ever was. Now, he knows that's not going to be the outcome, but he acts as if that is going to be the outcome. I love that. So he says, I find filming very difficult. I find it totally engaging, but it's an arduous process. There's a lot of strain on the family, a lot of strain on my personal relationships. It takes a lot of physical strength. So the movie's got to be great. It's got to be something that I love. And then he talks about the fact that he likes to do the work. I will get into the, even though he's known now, you know, he's made billions and billions of dollars in the box office, he's had this multi-decade partnership with a major movie studio. He likes being involved in all aspects of the movie. And like I said, in the very beginning, he either wrote the entire script or had a hand in writing the script of every single one of his movies. And he talks about this. He goes, I'm not really looking for a script to come fully formed and land on my desk. No project that I've ever been involved with has been like that. He doesn't like that. He wants to have complete control. Then he talks about how, the fact that he enjoys screenwriting and then how he does it. I enjoy writing screenplays because they are very stripped down simple documents. And the more stripped down they are, the better they are. So it's interesting. I went back and looked at some of my old highlights for this book. This is a different, I had the hardcover cover before. Now this is the paperback.