By Rohan Prabhu (V)
If you’ve watched the movie Inception, you probably thought it was either a masterpiece or a complete waste of three hours. How can a movie that has absolutely nothing to do with our reality be so polarizing?
If nothing else, this is representative of the beauty and effectiveness of Christopher Nolan’s film-making. Since the very beginning of his career as a filmmaker, Nolan has taken seemingly uninteresting concepts and made them intriguing. In 1999, Nolan directed his first major film, Following, about a man who follows others with the intent of using their lives as inspiration for his novel. This film showcases the nuances of his filmmaking, and many even regard it as his best work.
Nolan’s originality and creativity in the art of filmmaking has followed him in each of his movies. He modernized Batman, a character that typically remained relatively unchanged. He adapted a Danish film to U.S. and British audiences, titled Insomnia, which follows a police officer into Alaska to investigate the murder of a teenage girl.
Although Nolan certainly likes to switch it up in his films, he retains several constants that contribute to his success. For one, he still uses 16mm film to shoot all of his movies. Nolan explained his love of film cameras: “For the last 10 years, I’ve felt increasing pressure to stop shooting film and start shooting video, but I’ve never understood why. It’s cheaper to work on film, it’s far better looking, it’s the technology that’s been known and understood for a hundred years, and it’s extremely reliable.”
Nolan also uses many of the same actors in his movies, including Cilian Murphy, Michael Cane, Tom Hardy, and Christian Bale. Additionally, he does most of the effects in his movie practically. For Inception, he created a set that spun on an axis for a scene in which Joseph Gordon-Levite’s character fights the subconscious of another person’s dream. The set simulated a zero-gravity effect. In Tenet, Nolan’s latest film, which is based on the inversion of the entropy of certain objects, Nolan’s actors had to speak backwards with accents that they didn’t have in real life. Stuntmen also had to learn how to do regular maneuvers backwards.
Undoubtedly, Christopher Nolan’s filmmaking style is unique, but his most important skill is his ability to make the viewer think. He not only achieves this through his inherently distinctive screenplays but through his storytelling ability. Where most directors structure their story around a series of three major plot points, Nolan often adds a fourth. Like other writers and directors, such as Martin Scorsese or Ridley Scott, Nolan uses his third major plot point as a resolution to their stories. However, he takes it one step further and introduces another miniscule plot point that creates a figurative “fork in the road” and plants a seed of doubt in his audience’s minds.
In Inception, Nolan’s main character, Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo Dicaprio), is wrongly charged with the murder of his wife and forced to become a fugitive. He retreats to Europe with a team of dream workers, hoping that he would be able to see his children again. When he receives an offer to break up the empire of a business giant through inception, or dreams within dreams, to regain his freedom, he reluctantly takes it.
Viewers see Cobb succeed in his endeavor, and when Nolan portrays him embracing his children, he zooms in on a shot of a spinning top. This top, introduced earlier in the movie, is a token to tell Cobb if he’s still dreaming. If the top eventually stops spinning, Cobb knows that he’s in his own reality, and if not, he knows that he’s dreaming. Nolan ends the movie just as the top looks like it is going to stop spinning, but viewers never really know if it does. This is the seed of doubt that Nolan likes to plant.
He explains in a commencement speech at Princeton University, “I feel that, over time, we started to view reality as the poor cousin to our dreams, in a sense… I want to make the case to you that our dreams, our virtual realities, these abstractions that we enjoy and surround ourselves with, they are subsets of reality.”
So what makes Nolan’s movies so polarizing? It’s his desire to make his movies subjective to interpretation, and this quality is what makes him the best director of his era.