Christopher Nolan

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Christopher Nolan does not own a smartphone, and he has no email address. He hand-delivers his scripts to the actors he wants, and his wife handles the rest of the outreach. This is a filmmaker whose movies have earned over $6 billion worldwide, placing him seventh among the highest-grossing directors of all time. He guards a strange kind of distance from his own success. He once said he does not want people to have him in mind at all when they are watching his films. So how did a boy with his father's Super 8 camera become a knighted figure of 21st-century Hollywood? How does someone make a movie about dreams, a movie about a man who cannot form new memories, and a movie about the atom bomb, and win an audience of millions each time? The answers run through clay sets built from egg boxes, a debut shot for around 3,000 pounds, and a deal that handed him almost total control of a studio's money.

• 2. Egg Boxes And Super 8

  ›

  Christopher Edward Nolan was born on the 30th of July 1970 in Westminster, London. His father, Brendan James Nolan, was a British advertising executive of Irish descent who worked as a creative director. His mother, Christina Jensen, was a former American flight attendant from Evanston, Illinois, who also taught English. The three Nolan brothers were raised Catholic in Highgate and spent their summers in Evanston, and the family also lived for a time in Chicago.

  The science fiction films 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars gripped him early, along with the work of Sir Ridley Scott. He watched Star Wars over and over and dug into how it was made. At the age of seven, he borrowed his father's Super 8 camera and started shooting short films with his action figures. One was a stop motion homage to Star Wars called Space Wars. He cast his younger brother Jonathan and built sets from what he described as clay, flour, egg boxes and toilet rolls.

  His uncle had worked at NASA building guidance systems for the Apollo rockets, and he sent the boy some launch footage. Nolan later admitted, "I re-filmed them off the screen and cut them in, thinking no-one would notice." From the age of 11 he wanted to be a professional filmmaker. In his teenage years he made films with Adrien and Roko Belic, and he co-directed a surreal 8 mm short called Tarantella with Roko in 1989. That film aired on an independent showcase on the Public Broadcasting Service. Decades later, in 2021, after a fan posted a copy online, his production company filed a copyright claim to have it taken down.

• 3. A Degree In Something Unrelated

  ›

  Nolan chose to study English literature at University College London rather than attend a traditional film school. His father had suggested that a degree in something unrelated gives a different take on things. But the choice was not romantic. He picked UCL specifically because of its filmmaking facilities, which included a Steenbeck editing suite and 16 mm film cameras.

  Emma Thomas met Nolan on his first day at Ramsay Halls. She studied history at UCL and was active in the same Film Society, where Nolan served as president of the Union's branch. The two of them screened feature films in 35mm during the school year. They used the money earned to produce their own 16 mm films over the summers. She would become his wife and his producer, working on all of his films since 1997.

  Nolan graduated in 1993 with a bachelor's degree in English literature. He and Thomas have kept strong ties to the university ever since. He was named an Honorary Fellow of UCL in 2006, and Thomas received the same honour in 2013. In 2017 he was given an honorary doctorate in literature, one of many threads still binding him to the place where he first picked up a 16 mm camera.

• 4. Three Thousand Pounds

  ›

  Following was made on a budget of around 3,000 pounds. Nolan wrote it, directed it, photographed it and edited it himself. The film follows an unemployed young writer, played by Jeremy Theobald, who trails strangers through London hoping for material for his first novel, then gets pulled into a criminal underworld. The idea grew from Nolan's own life, after his London apartment was burgled. He noticed that following a stranger and committing a burglary share one thing: both cross social boundaries.

  Most of the cast and crew were friends of Nolan, and shooting happened on weekends across a full year. To conserve film stock, every scene was rehearsed heavily so the first or second take could be used in the final edit. Before this, he and Thomas had tried and scrapped a feature called Larry Mahoney. Nolan was blunt about the difficulty of starting out, calling the British funding world a very clubby kind of place and saying he never had any support whatsoever from the British film industry.

  Memento followed in 2000 and became his breakthrough. His brother Jonathan pitched the idea, about a man with anterograde amnesia who uses notes and tattoos to track his wife's murderer, and worked it into a short story called "Memento Mori". Nolan built a screenplay that told the story in reverse. A Newmarket Films executive, Aaron Ryder, called it perhaps the most innovative script he had ever seen. Studios rejected it, fearing a small audience, so Newmarket distributed it. On a budget of $4.5 million, with Guy Pearce and Carrie-Anne Moss starring, it earned $40 million after screenings in 500 theatres. It brought Nolan nominations for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Best Screenplay. He and Thomas founded their production company, Syncopy Inc., in 2001.

• 5. Inside The Studio System

  ›

  Steven Soderbergh recommended Nolan to Warner Bros. to direct Insomnia, even though the studio wanted a more seasoned hand. A remake of a 1997 Norwegian thriller, it is often called the outlier of his filmography for lacking his usual unconventionality. Starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank, it follows two Los Angeles detectives sent to a northern Alaskan town to investigate a teenager's murder. It earned $113 million against a $46 million budget. Roger Ebert praised it as a re-examination rather than a pale retread.

  Batman Begins arrived in 2005 after Nolan approached Warner Bros. about a new Batman grounded in a realistic world rather than comic-book fantasy. He had been forced out of directing Troy when its producer, Wolfgang Petersen, decided to direct it himself, and the studio offered Batman to reconcile. Nolan leaned on traditional stunts and miniature effects with minimal CGI. Christian Bale played Bruce Wayne, alongside Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman and Liam Neeson. It revived the franchise and became 2005's ninth-highest-grossing film. Film author Ian Nathan noted that within five years Nolan went from unknown to indie darling to controlling one of the biggest properties in Hollywood.

  The Prestige, an adaptation of a Christopher Priest novel about two rival 19th-century magicians, came from an intermittent five-year collaboration between Nolan and his brother Jonathan. Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale led it. Despite a negative box-office prognosis, it earned over $109 million against a $40 million budget. Ebert called it atmospheric, obsessive, almost satanic. After Insomnia, Nolan had also written a Howard Hughes biopic, but tabled it after learning Martin Scorsese was making The Aviator. In April 2003, at a Hollywood party, filmmaker David O. Russell put Nolan in a headlock over the casting of Jude Law.

• 6. The Dark Knight Rule

  ›

  The Dark Knight was the first major motion picture to use high-resolution IMAX cameras. Nolan agreed to the sequel only after Warner Bros. repeatedly insisted, then set out to broaden it into a story of the city, taking on the police, the justice system, the vigilante and the criminals. The film earned over $1 billion worldwide and set many box-office records. At the 81st Academy Awards it won two of its eight nominations: Best Sound Editing for Richard King, and a posthumous Best Supporting Actor for Heath Ledger as the Joker.

  The film's failure to earn a Best Picture nomination drew media criticism. Beginning in 2010, the Academy expanded its Best Picture field from five nominees to ten, a change nicknamed "The Dark Knight Rule". That same year, Nolan released Inception, a film he described as a contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind. He had carried the idea for around nine years. Led by Leonardo DiCaprio, it grossed over $836 million worldwide and won four Oscars from its eight nominations. Critic Mark Kermode named it the best film of 2010, calling it proof that blockbusters and art can be the same thing.

  The Dark Knight Rises closed the trilogy in 2012 and became the thirteenth film to gross $1 billion. During a midnight showing in Aurora, Colorado, a gunman opened fire inside the theatre, killing 12 people and injuring 58 others. Nolan issued a statement of condolence, describing it as a senseless tragedy. He went on to produce Man of Steel in 2013, hiring Zack Snyder after admiring his work on 300 and Watchmen. Henry Cavill starred as Clark Kent, and the film grossed more than $660 million against a $220 million budget.

• 7. Celluloid Loyalist

  ›

  Interstellar was built on the scientific theories of theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. Jonathan Nolan wrote the first drafts, and Steven Spielberg was originally meant to direct. The 2014 film follows astronauts through a wormhole in search of a new home for humanity. Starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain, it grossed $773 million worldwide. Its scientific accuracy was praised so highly that it led to two academic papers, and the American Journal of Physics called for it to be shown in school science lessons.

  Nolan has campaigned for the survival of the analogue medium. With visual artist Tacita Dean he convened an informal summit called Reframing the Future of Film at the Getty Museum in March 2015, with later events at Tate Modern, Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and Tata Theatre in Mumbai. He directed a documentary short, Quay, in 2015, to spotlight the animation of the Brothers Quay. In April 2015 he joined the board of The Film Foundation and was appointed, alongside Martin Scorsese, to the National Film Preservation Board. In 2018 he supervised a new 70 mm print of 2001: A Space Odyssey from the original camera negative and presented it at Cannes.

  Dunkirk in 2017 was his own original screenplay, set during the World War II evacuation of Allied soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk, France in 1940. He aimed for a sensory, almost experimental movie with minimal dialogue. Spielberg advised him to put imagination in second position to research. It grossed over $526 million, becoming the highest-grossing World War II film of all time, and earned Nolan his first Oscar nomination for Best Director. Tenet, in 2020, was the first Hollywood tent-pole to open after the pandemic shutdown. It grossed $363 million against a $200 million budget, his first film to underperform, and the most polarising of his career.

• 8. Total Creative Control

  ›

  Oppenheimer was financed and distributed by Universal Pictures, the first Nolan feature since Memento not made for Warner Bros. He left after disagreeing with the studio's plan to release films in theatres and on HBO Max at the same time. The terms he secured at Universal were extraordinary: a production budget of around $100 million with an equal marketing budget, total creative control, 20% of first-dollar gross, a 100-day theatrical window, and a blackout period keeping any other studio film three weeks clear on either side of the release.

  The 2023 biopic starred Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer and traced his role in developing the atom bomb. It was Nolan's first R-rated film since Insomnia. It grossed over $975 million worldwide, the third-highest-grossing film of 2023, and won Nolan the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture. In 2024 he was knighted for his contributions to film, and his wife Emma Thomas was honoured with a damehood. He had been appointed a CBE in 2019.

  In 2025 Nolan was elected president of the Directors Guild of America, a labour organisation representing more than 19,500 members. His next film is The Odyssey, an adaptation of Homer's epic, scheduled for July 2026. Matt Damon plays Odysseus, the Greek king of Ithaca, journeying home after the Trojan War past the cyclops Polyphemus, the Sirens and the witch goddess Circe. With an estimated budget of $250 million, it is set to be the most expensive film of his career, and the first mainstream blockbuster shot entirely on IMAX film.