This new blog series, Learning From the Greats, focuses on five things we can learn from some of the best filmmakers in history. Our first profile for this series focuses on the writer and director Christopher Nolan, who this year won Best Director at the Oscars for Oppenheimer. Known for his complex and cerebral movies that have grossed over $6 billion, here are five key elements of Nolan’s approach to filmmaking.
One defining trait of Christopher Nolan is his mild-mannered and measured personality. We can see these characteristics in how he has built out his career, one step at a time. With his first feature, The Following, he spent every weekend for a year shooting sections of his film for just $3000, building his film one weekend at a time until he eventually completed his feature. His patience and tenacity got him to a place to be able to make films like The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception, and Oppenheimer. It took Nolan seven years to eventually crack the concept of Inception, from first envisioning it as a horror film to it becoming a heist movie. It’s a good reminder that a film is made by one brick at a time.
Nolan’s father worked in a commercial agency and, understanding the industry, he encouraged his son to pursue a degree other than film to expand his horizons in filmmaking. Nolan did his undergraduate degree in English Literature at University College London (UCL) and chose that university because of its film facilities. Examining his films, you can see how this literary background has been a big influence on the movies he’s written. His intellectual and creative curiosity in arts, film, and science has made it possible for him to tell a breadth of different stories.
After making The Dark Knight and seeing its huge success, Nolan was in a unique position to be able to make pretty much any film he chose to. He also realized that so many filmmakers are desperate to have that opportunity, and that it was his obligation to take it. Before The Dark Knight, he never dared to pitch a concept like Inception to a studio — and now he could.
In the film industry, it’s very important to have an understanding about all the opportunities you have and make the most out of them. And if those opportunities don't exist, it’s important to build that capital — from showing studios that you can handle low-budget films, to slowly building out a career.
Nolan has said that he likes to know how everything is done, so if someone doesn’t show up on set, he knows that he can do that role himself. His sense of self-sufficiency came from his job as an industrial and corporate filmmaker, which allowed him to learn the craft of filmmaking in a time-restrained and limited budget environment, where he had to learn to make things happen pragmatically.
If you are a filmmaker starting out, be grateful that you have to do a lot of things on your own, and use that to become self-sufficient. Learning what everyone does, you are able to talk their language and be better at communicating your vision to them. If anything, there should be at least three positions in filmmaking you are able to handle on your own, whether it’s editing, producing, writing, or cinematography. Learning these aspects also allows you to be a better storyteller.
Nolan is a very efficient and economical filmmaker. With his most recent film, Oppenheimer, despite being a $100 million movie, it still was a very tight budget for what Nolan wanted to achieve — and so had to be very efficient in the way he shot the film. He relied heavily on his independent filmmaking days to make sure the film came under budget. When constructing the set for Los Alamos, they only constructed just enough of the set according to what would be shot. That’s similar to how the old Walt Disney films were shot — only building what the camera would see.
Regardless of the epic vision that Nolan has, he has always been very practical about the types of film he shoots and making sure that studios putting money into it will get their money back, and not spending more than what is necessary in shooting the film. As filmmakers it’s very easy to be caught up in our vision and forget about the financial side of filmmaking, which is an important skill to have in order to have longevity in this business.
A bonus lesson from Christopher Nolan is that we should have fun when making films. Though he may seem measured and serious, he does still have a good time making movies.
In behind-the-scenes footage from Batman Begins, you can see him put on the League of Shadow’s chest plate and slide down a slope to get a feel for the scene when Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne has to save Liam Neeson’s Ra’s al Ghul from falling off a cliff. He gets his kids to create fake titles for his scripts when he needs them out to studios and actors. And in Dunkirk, he talks about how fun it was to be in the cockpit of a spitfire to film the IMAX scenes.
Though it’s hard work making a film, remember to have fun along the way. It’s one of the best jobs in the world!
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