Nolan’s Run

To continue my recent run of stating the obvious: I know I’m not alone in considering Christopher Nolan to be the most interesting director of the past ten years. In just over a decade, he’s gone from Memento to Inception, with The Dark Knight as one big step along the way, which ranks with Powell and Pressburger’s golden period as one of the most impressive runs in the history of movies. And his excellent interview with Wired last week, timed to coincide with Inception’s release on DVD, serves as a reminder that Nolan’s example is valuable for reasons that go far beyond his intelligence, skill, and massive popular success.

Nolan’s artistic trajectory has been a fascinating one. While most artists start with passion and gradually work their way toward craft, Nolan has always been a consummate craftsman, and is just now starting to piece together the emotional side of the equation. He’s been accused of being overly cold and cerebral, a criticism that has some basis in fact. But his careful, deliberate efforts to invest his work with greater emotion—and humor—have been equally instructive. As he says to Wired:

The problem was that I started [Inception] with a heist film structure. At the time, that seemed the best way of getting all the exposition into the beginning of the movie—heist is the one genre where exposition is very much part of the entertainment. But I eventually realized that heist films are usually unemotional. They tend to be glamorous and deliberately superficial. I wanted to deal with the world of dreams, and I realized that I really had to offer the audience a more emotional narrative, something that represents the emotional world of somebody’s mind. So both the hero’s story and the heist itself had to be based on emotional concepts. That took years to figure out. [Italics mine.]

Nolan’s masterstroke, of course, was to make the ghost that haunts Inception—originally that of a dead business partner—the main character’s wife. He also made strategic choices about where to keep things simple, in order to pump up the complexity elsewhere: the supporting cast is clearly and simply drawn, as is the movie’s look, which gives necessary breathing room to the story’s multiple layers. For a writer, the lesson is obvious: if you’re going to tell a complicated story, keep an eye out for ways to ease up on the reader in other respects.

In the case of Inception, the result is a film that is both intellectually dense and emotionally involving, and which famously rewards multiple viewings. In that light, this exchange is especially interesting:

Wired: I know that you’re not going to tell me [what the ending means], but I would have guessed that really, because the audience fills in the gaps, you yourself would say, “I don’t have an answer.”

Nolan: Oh no, I’ve got an answer.

Wired: You do?!

Nolan: Oh yeah. I’ve always believed that if you make a film with ambiguity, it needs to be based on a sincere interpretation. If it’s not, then it will contradict itself, or it will be somehow insubstantial and end up making the audience feel cheated. I think the only way to make ambiguity satisfying is to base it on a very solid point of view of what you think is going on, and then allow the ambiguity to come from the inability of the character to know, and the alignment of the audience with that character.

Wired: Oh. That’s a terrible tease.

Well, yes. But it’ll be interesting to see where Nolan goes from here. After Inception and The Dark Knight, he has as much power as any director in Hollywood. (Worldwide, Inception is the fourth highest-grossing movie in history based on an original screenplay, behind only Avatar, Titanic, and Finding Nemo.) He continues to grow in ambition and skill with every film. He seems determined to test the limits of narrative complexity in movies intended for a mass audience.

And he’s still only forty years old.