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Christopher Nolan

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27
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2023-07-25
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2023-07-25
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  1. “Getting the film made. I'm going to keep going no matter what, and I make sure that my team knows it. And then I think the starting and ending point with Christopher Nolan is the same. It all comes back to his original obsession of cinema itself. The way he talks about movies is very similar to me. I described the way Enzo Ferrari would describe his products is the way you would describe your lover. Christopher Nolan has a bit of that. And this is an example. Directing is a job where you have to know a bit of everything. Jack of all trades and master of none. I know that I've never had the dedication or the talent to be a musician, but I'm musically inclined and I know how to use that in my work. I could write a screenplay, but I don't think I could write a novel. I can draw a picture, but not well enough to be a storyboard artist. I'm a passionate fan of other filmmakers and a great believer in the job of directing. I think it's a great job. The thing that makes films completely unique is the combination of subjectivity, the visceral experience with shared experience and empathy with the rest of the audience. It's a borderline.”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And because Nolan has this insistence that he wants to film as much as possible out in the real world, he constantly has to deal with the unpredictability of weather. Now, this was a fascinating paragraph because it talks when you read in the book and you also hear people that work with him describe him, they talk about his intolerance to fatigue. He seems completely indifferent to extreme temperatures, whether it's cold or heat. And this is what he says about that. I'm known in the film business for having good luck with the weather. That's inaccurate. I often have terrible luck with the weather. But my philosophy is to just shoot no matter what the weather is. I'm always shooting no matter what the weather is. Just keep going. Just keep going. Letting everybody on the crew and cast know that we're really serious about doing that no matter what the conditions are so they're not looking out the window first thing and going oh well we won't we will or we will not shoot today this doesn't just apply to weather but i think it's a great metaphor for his entire approach to get”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Them to be proud of me. That like pushes me forward, that keeps me working harder, keeps me trying to improve, keeps me trying to make something completely focused on making something that makes somebody else's life better because I want to see my life through their eyes. That's an incredible, incredible quote from Hans Zimmer. Once your children are born, you can never look at yourself through your own eyes anymore. You always look at yourself through their eyes. And I think we would all make better decisions if we analyze the decision we're about to make as if our children see the result of that decision that we're making.”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Girl, and this is why he talks about this. I very much related to the dilemma of somebody who's having to go off and do this thing, leaving his kids whom he dearly wants to be with, but he really wants to go and do this thing. My job is something that I absolutely love. I consider myself unbelievably lucky to do it, but there's a lot of guilt involved in doing that, a lot of guilt. I have a daughter who's the same age as the character. He's talking about the comparison between his own life and then obviously what Matthew McConagay is doing in that movie. And then they're having a discussion because he's got this close friendship and creative partnership with Hans Zimmer. And Hans said something that's excellent. And Hans kids, I think, are like 15 or 16 at the time. He says this. He says, once your children are born, you can never look at yourself through your own eyes anymore. You always look at yourself through their eyes. And I love that. Looking at yourself through your kids' eyes, I think in large part what drives me is I want my kids. I want to do something that I can point to and I want.”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Hold it in his hands to touch it, to be able to turn that idea into this three dimensional object. And so you see these drawings and you see these diagrams that Christopher Nolan has throughout the book. And the way he talks about this is really a unique idea where he's like, well, that's the way storytelling. You take storytelling, right? And you turn it into a three-dimensional exercise, like a sculpture. And so he's doing that with films. And Henry Royce did that with parts that eventually went into Rolls-Royce cars. It's the same idea in two different domains. I thought it was fascinating. And so as the author and Christopher Nolan are going through, so they work his way, they talk about it like his early life, then they go through every single movie he's ever made. He talks about the influences he had, why he made that decision, which I thought was fascinating. But this idea of, hey, I want to live in the real world and I don't want to be dependent upon all these technologies was something that comes up over and over again. There's a great metaphor. He talks about it. It's a metaphor for his filmmaking, but I think it's a metaphor for any.”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And find things that are hidden from you while you're living your life or being in the world. I think that's what films do for us. They're very dreamlike experiences. And one of the influences that Christopher Nolan brings up over and over again in the book is the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. Christopher Nolan has lost count on how many of Jorge's books that he bought and gave out its gifts, but he makes this really important point why he speaks so much about his influences. It's the fact that stories can add to your own thinking, but you need your own foundation to add them to first. And so some of Jorge's work is influencing inception, but he makes the point that as you're reading these short stories, you have to have something rattling inside of you that already connects with what you're reading or what you're watching. But if you're not already predisposed to that, it just comes to you as a story and it doesn't necessarily spark anything. I think that's true with books, obviously. It's also true with podcasts. Like the stories can add to your own thinking, but you need your own foundation to add them to first.”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And suddenly, I'm realizing, oh, I'm going to get the last word. Every filmmaker would give their teeth for that. So finally, you've got it. What are you going to do with it for the first time? I was able to step back and say, okay, what do I want to do now? And I've always wanted to do inception. So what does he mean? What do you mean you always want to do inception? Remember, he's 16 years old. He's laying there in the dark. He's got this idea, like the kernel of idea for inception. I skipped over this part of the book, but five years previous, he had sat down and started writing Inception. He thought he was going to do Inception after he did insomnia. And he gets like three quarters of the way through the script. And he's like, I can't nail the ending. I think it was like 80 pages into the script and he had to abandon it. He's like, I can't figure out how to do it. And I love the fact that he asked himself, like, what do I want to do most right now? What am I willing to obsess about over the next few years? I think it's a great idea to like pause and ask yourself that.”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “This is a guy that wants to live and work in an analog world. You could tell that because he doesn't use email. He doesn't carry his cell phone, right? And so he says, the prestige was the first film where we were expected by the studio to digitize the negative and edit electronically. We had a lot of arguments with the post-production team at Disney, but we carried on. From the prestige on to this day, we have never converted to the other workflow used by most of the industry. We continue to shoot on film, edit electronically, then take the frame numbers and cut the film by hand, and that is what goes out. And I love that section for many reasons. One is because you see that he has very strong points of view as how he wants to work, and he's adamant about not relenting.”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Give him the control and the involvement that he desires. So he says you are encouraged in a big movie to very rapidly hire an enormous amount of people. Then you have to feed the beast. And so you're in a situation where you go, I need a robot for this science fiction film. Figure me out a robot. And then you go away a while and they do whatever they feel like. And then they come back with a robot, which didn't suit my way of working at all. And so the way he's operating, he's like, well, it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And so he says, once they were finished, Nolan invited the executives of Warner Bros. to his home to view their work. They were not happy about it, but Warner Brothers had a lot of trouble with scripts leaking. So this idea that he wants to constantly maintain control, that he's working, he finds ways to work within the studio, like the large movie studio system, without somehow giving into the demands is something that pops up over and over again. This is a movie that he does back in 2006, so the movie after Batman begins. It's called The Prestige. And I want to bring this to your attention because, like I said at the beginning,”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I get my power from spending less and moving faster, not giving anybody a reason to come visit me or to interfere or to complain. I made that decision very early in my career. If I can work a little bit faster than people expect, if I can work a little bit cheaper than people expect, then they'll have other problems to deal with and they'll let me do my thing.”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Was critically acclaimed, but for over a year they couldn't find a distributor. They eventually find distribution. But I do want to point out, I want to bring to your attention the fact that he feels that the screening of memento was the turning point in his life. He is 30 years old when this is taking place. Memento is being screened at the Venice Film Festival. There's going to be 1,500 people in the venue. It was impossible to predict the audience's reaction at that scale because before he was just doing like these small personal screenings of like 20 other like 20 people. And so he talks about the fact that when the film finishes, he was completely terrified because for a few seconds, everybody was completely silent. And so in that few seconds window, he's like, oh my God, they hate it. And then all at once, there was this enormous standing ovation. And he says, everything from that moment in his life changed. That was the turning point of his life. So at this point, he's already made two films.”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Anything next. He already had the idea for memento. This is his second film. This is the thing that causes his career to go vertical. Listen to this description of what he was doing at 27 years old rather than him being discouraged by his rejection from film school. He was hot on a new idea for a movie, the story of a guy who loses his short-term memory and tries to solve the murder of his wife by tattooing clues on his body, like little mementos. It sounded complicated. Chris also wanted to tell the story backward. That was very important, he said. I couldn't quite see it, but when you're around someone who does, you start to believe it. And so they finished the following. It is extremely well received, gets written about in all the major papers in San Francisco.”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Money to make more films, and it was during his time in the film society that he learned how to make movies with minimal resources. This is going to be a main theme of Christopher Nolan's career. He's constantly, he's relentlessly resourceful, and he's doing that because he wants to spend as little money as possible so he can maintain as much control over the project as possible. So to this day, his wife is his partner. She works on all of his films. And she is going to help him make his very first movie. This movie is going to be called Following Now the Crazy Thing is He actually tries to apply to a bunch of other like film schools after graduating from his undergrad and he winds up getting turned down. So he gets a job. His first job outside of college is he's making videos for large corporations like training videos and such. And he only does that to get money to make a movie. He makes his, this is incredible. This is like one of the things I hate me up the most is the fact that, you know, this guy's one of the greatest filmmakers ever lived. And he makes his first movie on the weekends while he...”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “A great quote about this time in his life. He says, I learned a huge amount about the craft of putting films together. It was a great education. Another fascinating thing, right? Because you've already seen insight into Nolan's way he approaches work. He says, listen, when I'm on a film, I borrow into it. I do it obsessively. There's a lot of stress on my personal life. There's just a lot of stress on my physical mental fatigue. I'll get to this later too. Like the only solution I have for people like this that want both a relationship and have this deep desire and love for they're working on is to make it a family business. This is what Christopher Nolan did. On the very first day of college, he winds up meeting his future wife. Her name is Emma, and this is what he says about her. I remember seeing her on the very first evening of my first day. Emma has such a profound impact on my life, my work, and how I go about things. We've collected on everything I've done. We spent three years in college making short films, running the film society, and then raising.”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “A film school education without ever meeting a professor. Now, Christopher Nolan does something similar inside of the actual university. So he winds up becoming the president of the film and TV society. It is not at all clear to me how much time he spent actually attending his normal curriculum. He created, just like James Cameron, he winds up creating his own curriculum. They talk about the fact that he had keys to, since he was the president, he had keys to the film and TV society. It's like this basement underground. He's going to spend almost all of his time there. They said it was like his office. And so the separate curriculum that he set up for himself is essentially learning how to operate cameras, how to edit, how to cut film by hand, how to sync sound. So the way I think about this is the fact that he just spent his college time practicing and learning the job that he already knew he wanted. Because when he was 13, he's like, no, I know I'm going to be a director. And so he's”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It was during one of his storytelling sessions after Lights Out. So, this is when he's in the dark, just thinking, right? That the idea for inception first took place. The idea of sharing a dream, that was the jumping off point, and the use of music or playing music outside someone dreaming. And the idea that if you played music to somebody who was asleep, that it would translate in some interesting way. I really did come up with a couple ideas that went into inception when I was about 16. That film was a very long time in coming. It was just something I was thinking about for a very long time. So when Christopher Nolan and James Cameron are around college age, they both want to go to film school, right? They want to learn, they already know what they want to do. Christopher Nolan grew up like upper middle class. So he went to university college London. James Cameron didn't have any money. One of my favorite stories ever of like what a high HSE person is is the fact that Cameron wanted to go to film school, didn't have any money, goes and photocopies all the graduate level theses of all the film students and then teaches himself so she gives him”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Like the scores of other movies because they leave space for your imagination. It gives you room to actually sit and think. And so he talks about while he's doing this, his eyes are closed, he's listening to the film scores, this is where he's coming up. He's starting to use imagination. He's starting to get ideas for films. He's starting to get ideas for certain themes in a story. And he said this act was very important for the development, the future development that comes down the line of him starting to make movies. And so there's a lot of detail in the book at his time at this boarding school. But one thing I thought was fascinating because I think it gives you insight into just the level of discipline that Nolan has that is constantly described that the people that work with him. And the boarding school is trying to drill into these young adults the importance of discipline, of punctuality, of a certain tolerance of pain. It is described as a Darwinian environment. And some of the kids can't take it.”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Their house could be like egg boxes or cardboard. They would use the fellow kids in the neighborhood. And so from the age of eight to 13, Nolan's watching movies, he's trying to make little movies. But it's not till he realizes what a director is. He's like, oh, wait, that's the job that I want. So he would go back through and watch a bunch of his favorite movies. And two of his favorite movies were Blade Runner and then Alien. And then one day he realizes, wait a minute, that's the same director. What is the director doing? And he realized the director was the connection between everything else. Like both movies had there was completely different stories, completely different people that wrote the screenplay, different, they had different actors. It was different, everything. The only thing that was the same, the only thing that tied all those together was Ridley Scott. And so at 13, he says, I can remember saying, oh my God, I want that job. One of the most interesting parts of Christopher Nolan's early life is the fact that his parents sent him to boarding school outside of London.”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Elementary school age kid. And then once his dad sees how obsessed he is with movies, his dad does something really smart. He takes him to another showing, a re-release of a movie that came out half a decade earlier. And this was actually Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey. Now, what is fascinating is that movie is the same movie Cameron saw where he's like, oh, I don't want to just be interested in watching films. I want to be able to make them. And a young Christopher Nolan had the same response. He said he credits that movie with realizing, oh, movies can be anything and I can make my own. And when I was reading about Christopher Nolan's childhood, it reminded me very much. I read a biography of Stephen Spielberg all the way back on episode 209. And it's the same thing. He starts making movies when it's like seven, eight, nine years old. I think they were making movies on the same kind of camera. He's like super eight cameras that would let you record for maybe like two and a half or three minutes long. Both Spielberg and Nolan would figure out how to make crude movie sets out of whatever's around.”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And that you sorry bastards would still be here. And Cameron never did return. So that's the exact same studio that Christopher Nolan's touring when he might be six, seven, maybe 10 years old. And so one of the most influential movies that Nolan ever saw when he was a kid was Star Wars, which came out in 1977. And his response to seeing Star Wars is not this normal response that you would see with a seven-year-old. I think that true interest is revealed early. Like, I had watched movies when I was a kid. I was like, oh, that's a great movie. Christopher Nolan watches movies, right? And then he becomes obsessed with knowing how the movies that he loves are made. And so he would watch Star Wars over and over and over again. And then he'd find out, he'd find trade magazines. He's a little kid for God's sake. This is something he does for his whole life. Like if he's interested in something, he reads about it obsessively. So he winds up finding trade magazines that go into detail about how Lucas's company, Industrial Light Magic, were able to make the special effects and how the shots and everything else. That is not normal behavior from like an”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Is released, and so he'd go watch it again and again and again. And so to this day, Christopher Nolan can tell you stories about being six years old and going to see movies with his dad. In fact, his parents actually, there was a connection to James Cameron here. His parents, after they realized their young son was interested in movies, they actually took him to do like a tour and a visit of Pinewood Studios. Pinewood Studios was that studio in London that James Cameron hated. Cameron's had the crew that worked at Pinewood were actually lazy, insolent, and arrogant, and he does this hilarious. He was like obsessed with what he was working on. He said they were like lifers. They were just like kind of punching the clock. They weren't really into it. And so when he finally raps on the last day, he couldn't wait to get out of there. He actually gets in front of the entire crew and Cameron has a hilarious parting shot at them. He says, this has been a long and difficult shoot fraught by many problems. But the one thing that kept me going through it all was a certain knowledge that one day I would drive out of the gate of Pinewood and never come back.”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yes, know, or speak. And speak meant come see me. So where did this obsession for the craft come from? Nolan has memories of loving cinema and loving movies for as long as he's had memories. And so one of the funny things is his younger brother writes a ton of the screenplays. They write a ton of the screenplays together. And Nolan has a British accent and his brother has an American accent. So Nolan's dad was a British ad executive. His mom was a flight attendant and then later a teacher. And the family couldn't decide where they wanted to live permanently. So depending on when you were born in the family, you either grow up most of your time in England or most of your time in America. And this actually becomes really important later on because the movies would come out in America first. So if he happened to be living in America at the time, he would see movies like Star Wars, for example, and then six months later, he might be in England when Star Wars”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “And for Nolan, the first part of the craft, he just loves screenplays. And so he insists on writing all our part of every single screenplay that he's going to turn into a movie. And he says the best screenplays are completely stripped down. They're very, very simple documents. The more you can strip them down, the better. And that's something he has common with some of the greatest leaders in history. If you go back and look at some of how the greatest leaders in histories communicated inside of their organization, they write short memos. They're really to the point. There's no wasted words. Churchill may be the best example of this because he even has this great quote I love. He says it's slothful not to compress your thoughts. But I love this story that I found in one of David Oglebeet's books because Ogilvy's boss was a partial inspiration for Ian Fleming when he was writing James Bond. And what was fascinating and something that Ogovi tried to copy when he was building his own organization is that when you would send a memo to Ogovi's boss, it'd be returned to you with one of three responses.”

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  24. “Got to be something that I love. And that last line, something that I love, that is his North Star, his North Star that you'll see him use throughout his career. It's like, do I love what I made? And this idea of his that if you love what you made, one, it's easier to go out and sell it to other people. And two, it's easier to withstand the inevitable criticism that anything that you create and put onto the world is going to receive. And so this idea of being in love with you and then being obsessive about what you're making, he says in the book, he's like, listen, I don't feel people describe him as an artist. He's like, I don't feel like I'm an artist. I feel like I'm a craftsman. Like five years ago, I read this incredible biography of George Lucas. It's called George Lucas. I think the life or A Life. It's written by Brian J. Jones.”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Communicate with them? Like, why is it hard? Because Christopher Nolan does not have an email account and he doesn't use a cell phone. You are usually scheduling things to his assistant and then he'll either call you or he'll just show up. It'll be like, okay, we're going to meet in a physical location at this time and date. And so he's something he talks about with not only his kids, but younger generations is the fact that they're overstimulated by technology. And as a result, they're not giving their imagination room to actually work. And I actually think that Nolan's desire to live and work in an analog world is his version of mute the world and then build your own. We're only in the first chapter of this book and I've already used the word obsessive and focused and of singular mind multiple times. And this, I think, is why. Like he puts all time and effort into what he's doing. I find filming very difficult. I find it totally engaging, but it's an arduous process. There's a lot of strain on family, on personal relationships. It takes a lot of physical strength. So it's got to be great.”

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  26. “For years, genuinely obsessed with it. So it doesn't strike me as weird. We put a lot into these films. Every film, this is so good. 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 were people making films who weren't trying to make the best film that ever was. Why would you otherwise? That's a perfect insight into Nolan's mindset. 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. I absolutely love that. So I already mentioned James Cameron one time since him, Peter Jackson, and Nolan are really the only group of directors operating at that level that are also writing the.”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Christopher Nolan's second film, Memento, had a long, anxious year spent trying to secure distribution. Nolan had been turned down by every distributor in town, with some variation of This is great, we love it, we really want to work with you, and this is not for us. The 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 him. Nolan made it because he had to. What happens when you make a film is you burrow into it, you dig in, so you kind of can't see it anymore. You're immersed in it. 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. Two years to the day after that disastrous screening for distributors, memento earned two Oscar nominations. Nolan's ascent since has been near vertical.”

    2023-07-25 · Founders · #313 Christopher Nolan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source