It was he who turned the movie into an IQ game

Author | Zhao Shuhe

"Probably not a translator would say no to Nolan."

On August 21, in the editorial office of Houlang Publishing Company in Beijing's Nafu Hutong, translator Li Sixue told Nanfeng Window reporter.

Li Sixue likes director Christopher Nolan, and she feels that there is a "chance" between herself and Nolan.

Li Sixue studied in London, next door to Nolan's alma mater, University College London (UCL), many equipment and classrooms are shared, and she has many opportunities to experience: "The physical space he once existed, what was it like." ”

University College London

On the other hand, Hou Lang's editor was looking for a translator for the Chinese Simplified edition of Nolan's Variations. Li Sixue, who graduated from the Department of Film Studies of Beijing Film Academy with a master's degree and studied film curatorship at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK, and loves Nolan, is undoubtedly an ideal candidate.

In this way, because of the "Nolan Variations", the two "Nobel fans" met, but then they had to face the real "big test".

Nolan Variations

The original author of the book is British film critic Tom Sean, who has been with Nolan for more than 20 years. After Dunkirk, they began a three-year interview totaling dozens of hours. During the interview, Sean's friendship with Nolan deepened, and in the end, Sean wrote this book with a unique and deep understanding, which is the only "biography" that Nolan currently recognizes and personally participates in - perhaps it is not so much like a biography.

Like Nolan's films, Sean uses a lot of metaphors in the book, including various film and book works, various theories and isms, and involves architecture, physics, music and other disciplines, in order to re-decode Nolan.

Li Sixue made a metaphor: "If Nolan's films are mazes, then this book is a flashlight that guides us through them." ”

Nolan is a very special director for Chinese fans, and in the director category of Douban.com, the number of his fans is off a cliff, and many fans are very precious to his works and are happy to interpret them.

On August 30, 2023, Christopher Nolan's first biopic and 12th feature film "Oppenheimer" was released in Chinese mainland. On August 22, Nolan came to China to start the publicity journey of "Oppenheimer" in Beijing and Shanghai.

"Oppenheimer" stills

On August 21, on the eve of Nolan's visit to China, Nanfeng Window reporters interviewed Li Sixue, the translator of the Chinese Simplified edition of Nolan Variations, and the responsible editor Chuanshan, at the Houlang editorial office, and we chatted with Nolan for nearly three hours. The main part of this article is based on the reporter's conversation with two interviewees and the content of the book "Nolan Variations".

01

"How do you explain left and right in words"

In 2001, when Tom Sean and Nolan first met at the Kanter restaurant in Los Angeles, when "Fragments of Memory" was a huge success at the Venice Film Festival shortly after the end, Sean found that, not coincidentally, the emerging director flipped through the menu from back to front, inexplicably intertextual with the structure of the film.

This inconspicuous detail reveals the uniqueness of Nolan's entire thinking system.

"Fragments of Memory" stills

When Sean began his interview with him, Nolan often gave him a little thought experiment, which lasted throughout their interview.

For example, Nolan would ask, how to explain left and right to others only in words when making a phone call? How to find your way without using GPS?

These interesting questions make Sean bypass the movie and start to understand Nolan Qi - what does he care about?

In the introduction to Nolan's Variations, Sean lays out a list of "things Nolan fascinated about" that Nolan claims to be "fascinating" during the conversation: the blurred head in Francis Bacon's paintings; Howard Hughes; Miniatures from 2001: A Space Odyssey; Einstein's experiment to "separate twins" ...

Nolan's fans will smile if they read this list: following the chronology of Nolan's work, we can find correspondence to these "fascinating things" in his films.

Also since "Fragments of Memory", the audience is also fascinated by these things like Nolan. There is even a mysterious, neurotic fan interpretation culture around Nolan's films, and when we open any Nolan movie entry on any film review website, we can see countless intricate plot discussions and questions.

But Nolan tends not to give an answer.

"Fragments of Memory" stills

Back to the era background of the birth of "Memory Fragments": from the 90s of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st century, Hollywood has appeared a series of films with complex plot structures and unreliable narrators, and audiences often have to watch them many times to sort out the logic, such as "Pulp Fiction", "Twelve Monkeys", "First Degree Fear", "Mulholland Drive", "Source Code", "Fatal ID". This kind of film does not have a complete beginning, development, and ending like classic Hollywood movies, nor is it obscure due to poetic image language like European literary films, but deliberately disrupts the plot, making the film itself a mystery, and the audience watches the film as if solving problems, and film scholar Thomas Elsese calls this type of film "mental game movies".

Turning movies into a quiz has become another Hollywood trick to keep audiences in front of the screen in the digital age in addition to visual effects, handsome men and beautiful women, car chases and explosive action scenes.

Nolan's film career began during this period, and like his contemporaries, he had a surprising fascination with playing with narrative and exploring film time.

From 1998 to 2002, Nolan made three film-noir-style feature films, "Follow", "Memory Fragments" and "Insomnia".

"Following" discusses what Nolan considers the essence of film noir, "instinctive fear." By this time, he was deeply fascinated by the order and reversal, and he used his father's typewriter to write the original script, and then shuffled the script.

"Follow" stills

By the time of "Fragments of Memory", he played this narrative magic more thoroughly, and every ten minutes, the protagonist's memory was erased. But it was here that Nolan discovered that audiences could easily grasp this new narrative — and they often underestimated their own abilities.

That being the case, Nolan began to play more complex tricks on movie time for the rest of his career.

In "Deadly Magic", Nolan organized a total of four timelines, "flashbacks set with flashbacks, stand-ins and stand-ins for stand-ins"; In "Inception", countless timelines are nested layer by layer, and the time flow speed in the dream is different from the real world, and the moment the van crashed, another world has changed; In "Interstellar", the daughter becomes old, but the father is still young, and the long childhood disappears in an instant; Creed is more thoroughly rebellious, and Nolan asks how the people in the story would meet if all the stories were rewinded...

"Deadly Magic" stills

At this time, when we look back, we will find that Nolan's narrative trickery has gone beyond the scope of "puzzles", and by playing unconventional narratives, he is exploring a way to make time visible. Nolan once wrote that he saw the film slowly piling up on the ground as the projector rotated—physical evidence of the passage of time.

Film directors perceive time differently from the audience, "the creative project that the director spent three or four years working on disappears within two hours in front of the audience", and the time they experience on the same story is not equal. So Nolan always tried his best to expand for two or a half hours. If you can't get the audience to sit down and spend the same amount of time as he has paid, create another flow rate.

From this point of view, Nolan has been exploring the potential of cinematic time, where audiences can experience life in two hours of physical time, far more than two hours.

Movies are magic in their own right, which is perhaps why so many people are fascinated by Nolan – he had hoped his films would have this effect.

The question is, what makes Nolan like this? Back in Nolan's childhood, you may be able to find clues.

02

A product of two cultures

Nolan's early upbringing has a "duality", a characteristic that is repeatedly reflected in his films.

Christopher Nolan was born in London, England in 1970. His father, Brendan, was an Englishman who worked for several major advertising agencies in his early years, so he traveled frequently and was able to work with many well-known directors, including Blade Runner director Ridley Scott. Nolan's mother, Christina, was an American flight attendant at United Airlines and met Brendan on a business trip to Chicago.

"Blade Runner" directed by Ridley Scott

Due to the nature of Nolan's parents' work and different nationalities, "flying" was a big part of Nolan's upbringing, "we always flew around". Throughout his childhood, he followed his parents and lived a life of running on both sides of the Atlantic.

The American film industry is one of the fastest and most cutting-edge in the world, allowing him to watch many of the latest blockbusters ahead of his British classmates while on vacation.

At a small theater in suburban Ohio, young Nolan saw the film that would affect his life, Star Wars. Obsessed with the special effects tricks, he returned home and went into the basement, where 8-year-old Nolan used his father's ultra-8mm camera to conduct initial film explorations with his friends, using egg boxes and toilet rolls to simulate Star Wars scenes, and sprinkling flour on a ping-pong table to simulate the explosion.

Star Wars stills

When Nolan was 11, his family moved to England because Brendan wanted his sons to receive the pre-Catholic education he had experienced. So Nolan attended a Catholic preparatory school in Weybridge, Surrey.

In boarding school, Nolan learned a lot of things, such as punctuality, and frost resistance - thanks to the ghost weather and lack of heating in Britain. These qualities later helped Nolan become a "skinny" filmmaker.

The Nolan we saw later always wore a similar trench coat and the same watch. Actor Michael Kane said that Nolan was "very reticent, very confident, very calm" and always had a thermos cup in his pocket, which was said to contain tea, "and he drank tea all day long, and this was his solution to the problem".

The dual life of Britain and the United States has had a great influence on Nolan's way of thinking.

In the dormitory of Haleibury, there are side-by-side iron framed beds, and the boys get their own positions according to the seniority of the grade, and each time they go to school, they will move their positions in a fixed order, and the strict class system dominates Nolan's boarding life; And when Nolan returned to his family in the United States on vacation, he came to the top floor of the Sears Building more than 400 meters high, and he could look at the scenery 80 kilometers away, which is an American emptiness, and 20 years later filmed "Batman: The Dark Knight", Nolan let Christian Bale stand on the roof of the building.

"Batman: The Dark Knight" stills

If you can establish this connection between high and low, dense and thin, horizontal and vertical through imagination, you can better understand Nolan's films.

The overlap of the two lives allows Nolan to always enter familiar things with a fresh perspective, and he does not feel a sense of belonging to a certain place, but takes pleasure in running and shuttling, so his films have always been fascinated by themes such as crossing, division, maze, runaway, and homecoming.

Architecture has influenced Nolan more than that.

Years ago, Nolan took the whole family on a tour of Angkor Wat, and they booked a tour group to enter from the rear of Angkor Wat, which is different from most people's choices and contrary to the original design of the builders of Angkor Wat. However, this unconventional journey inspired Nolan, and the order of the buildings is like a cinematic narrative: what if we break the frame-by-frame, continuous linear narrative of the early days of the film?

When Nolan started writing the script, he found that if we wrote the script on a computer, we could only see the cursor advancing from left to right on the screen, and we would fall into a linear world. But if you write (scribble) with pen and paper, you are free to make any connection between anything.

The obsession with unconventional narratives has long planted seeds.

"Insomnia" stills

In 1992, Nolan entered University College London (UCL) to study English Literature. He was good at math in middle school, but math made him feel a little bored, and he wanted to explore the humanities. In college, he read Borges and also studied Chandler's detective novels, which influenced his first three film noir-style feature films, "Follow," "Fragments of Memory," and "Insomnia."

At the same time, he also founded a film club at the university – one of the reasons he chose to study at UCL was because the film shooting equipment was better. In college, he also met his future wife, Emma Thomas, at an early age.

Nolan with his wife Emma Thomas

Until the age of 18, Nolan was reminded by his parents to decide whether he should be British or American; At the age of 18, the policy change made Nolan no longer have to face such a choice, and he could have dual citizenship. It may not be a coincidence that many years later, when people enter the world of Nolan's films, many people find that we can't choose between Nolan's films, black and white? Good versus evil? There is no answer. The uncertainty of a double life gives Nolan's creation a consistently important quality: ambiguity.

03

Live-action maniacs

When it comes to Nolan, a paragraph that can't be bypassed is the cornfield of "Interstellar".

Before the filming of "Interstellar", Nolan asked the behind-the-scenes team to open up 500 acres of corn fields in northern Canada, and after the filming of the movie, the corn fields even created a good harvest, making the movie a small profit.

"Interstellar" stills

Planting corn is just a routine operation of Nolan's real scene. In this film, the production team also built life-size spaceships. Even in superhero movies like "Batman" that are often sold with special effects, Nolan insists on shooting rooftop chases and explosion scenes. Most recently, in Creed, Nolan blew up a real Boeing 747.

In 1926, when the film was still in his childhood, Buster Keaton once let a real train fall off a cliff in "The General". Nolan also continued this classicist tradition, preferring tangible landscapes to CGI, miniatures, masks, and creating "a duel between what we think we see and what we actually see" between optical illusion and reality.

Nolan's obsession with live-action shooting has almost become a gimmick, and we'd better figure out what his obsession is. This involves the first misconception about Nolan – is he a director who pursues spectacle of scenes?

There is naturally no shortage of spectacle in Nolan's films. Nolan once said that if he didn't make films, his most likely career would be as an architect, and architecture helped him create countless powerful scenes in movies.

In "Inception", the architectural mysterious meaning of the Penrose Steps and fractal space was used by Nolan to construct cascading dreams, which is also the process of a movie being built layer by layer; In "The Dark Knight", the visual contrast between skyscrapers and slums greatly helped Nolan to extend the depth of discussion of superhero movies; "Creed" is set in the former Soviet architecture of Eastern Europe, and Nolan is attracted to Soviet brutalism, and the whole film is like "a high-key concrete poem".

"Creed" stills

But Nolan is not just a director who relies on concept, technology, and picture to win.

The time goes back to Nolan's debut film "Follow", in which the house where the writer lives is the actor's own house, and was used in the film in its original appearance.

Even though Nolan later had more resources and money, he was still pursuing the original effect. Real environment, real architecture, only in this way can the actors generate real reactions in it, and the audience can get real touches.

In Interstellar, we see Matthew McConaughey running past, the resistance of the cornfield forming a real wind around him, blowing through the corners of his clothes, and the leaves brushing his face, casting real light and shadow.

When this cornfield is burned to the ground, the audience can experience the real "determination", because we know it is real, and in the face of the dilemma in the movie, the protagonist has to burn it.

In "Dunkirk," Nolan says he wants to tell audiences how tough it is to be in close air combat in reality. To this end, he strapped the camera to the hull of the destroyer in the scene where the destroyer overturned, and the water poured in from the side, penetrating the screen, and quickly suffocating the audience's perception. "The advantage of shooting in real situations is that you can present them in a concrete way that the audience can believe it."

Working photo of Dunkirk

Nolan said he doesn't like looking at the viewfinder, instead having his gaze parallel to the camera and looking directly at the actors.

He is certainly a director of technical flow, but he is also concerned about the existence of "people" in film.

In addition to live-action shooting, Nolan has other "classical" insistences, such as insisting on film and refusing to embrace streaming.

Because of a conflict with Warner Bros. about the streaming of "Creed", Nolan left Warner, and "Oppenheimer" was the first film he turned to work with Universal. Universal provided Nolan with the utmost sincerity, met Nolan's budget and production requirements, and promised to leave a 100-day theatrical exclusivity for the release of "Oppenheimer".

"Oppenheimer" stills

The experience of watching movies as a child has always influenced Nolan, sitting at the front of the theater, he can see the grains of film on the big screen, an experience that Nolan calls "larger-than-life", and he tries to bring this experience to everyone who expects him.

In addition, although Nolan's scenes in each movie are not small, the circle of his cooperation is relatively small and fixed. The core team of Nolan's films has some "family workshops", and actors often use them to become "royal". This may also be the "duality" of his creation, using small radius of connections to complete cosmic-level fantasies. In the movie, he often asks the protagonists to return to the original, to childhood, to their hometown, to their loved ones, and act under such a fundamental will, even if they cross the galaxy, the landing point is a corner of people's hearts.

Chuanshan also told me a little interesting corner gossip, such as the baby who played Bourdain's daughter in "Deadly Magic", which is Nolan's third son. Daughter Flora Nolan starred in "Oppenheimer" this time as a disfigured girl, Nolan used this to hope to understand the feelings of nuclear victims more deeply.

And he still works with his own hair, Rocco Berridge, who told Nolan after watching the trailer for Interstellar, "Those shots are almost the same as when we were kids."

04

Variations

Some people think that Nolan is a very "visual" director – that's true, of course, but he's just as obsessed with music.

Nolan's father liked classical music, so Nolan loved music since he was a child.

"Nolan Variations" mentions a detail that every night in boarding school, Nolan would listen to the soundtrack of "Star Wars" and "2001: A Space Odyssey" in bed with a Walkman, and after lights out, in the dark, he put the Walkman's battery on the heater, trying to squeeze out the last bit of power.

In movies, Nolan often pursues the power formed by the close integration of music and pictures, just like he once experienced the shock of an entire movie in the soundtrack on a dark iron bed.

Music is not only Nolan's hobby, but also affects Nolan's thinking structure when planning for films. Li Sixue and Chuanshan, Nolan and Sean's conversation, a large number of musical terms appeared, and Hans Zimmer became a name that appeared very frequently throughout the book.

Hans Zimmer

In "Insomnia", the police detective played by Al Pacino has a murder on his back, and the long insomnia under the extreme day makes him mentally trance, in order to show this, Nolan did not distort his vision, but amplified his hearing, the sound of the police officer biting the pen, the sound of the fan turning, the sound of closing the drawer, the sound of the stapler... All trivial everyday sounds are beyond the limits of human endurance, like a hammer hitting the nerves of the protagonist.

In 2018, "Dunkirk" was nominated for the Oscar for Best Sound Remix, Best Sound Editing, and Best Original Score. The whole film is covered with music and sound effects, allowing us to "watch" this war film while also "listening" to the maximum experience of the cruelty of war, in the place where Jack Loudden's Collins was rescued, the voice vacated for a beat, took a breath, and then started again.

As early as the production of "Deadly Magic", Nolan was interested in Shepard tones. This is a scale processing that repeats the same scale with different ranges, and a spiral travels on top of each other, creating the auditory illusion of rising pitch.

Nolan wrote the script of "Dunkirk" in the same way, intertwining three timelines with different flow rates to form a continuous, superimposed tension, and even suspense.

A still from "Dunkirk"

Li Sixue refers to composer Edward Elgar's Variations on Riddles, which has fourteen variations, which Elgar dedicated to fourteen of his friends and claimed to have a theme hidden in it. For hundreds of years, many music lovers have been obsessed with solving the mystery of this piece.

Is there a hint of familiarity? Almost all of Nolan's films are organized this way.

Provide a theme and then constantly change it. It can be five or four degrees lower, you can accelerate or slow down, you can skip a few notes, you can pause - but in the end, you will find that behind the complex space-time narrative, it has always been Nolan's concern.

The author Sean and Nolan have known each other for more than ten years, and it took three years to complete the interview for this book, and the deep understanding of Nolan's ideas made Sean choose to organize the book in a similar way, and after the introduction, Sean summarized the motifs of Nolan's films: structure, direction, time, perception, space, fantasy, chaos, dreams, revolution, emotion, survival, knowing.

We should have expected that Nolan would not like the "biographical life" interpretation, and this "variation" writing is exactly an echo of Nolan's films.

"Interstellar" stills

The Variations on the Riddle was also important to Nolan himself, who was very fond of the ninth variety, Nimrod, and used it directly in the soundtrack of Dunkirk. When Nolan's father died, the piece "Ninglu" was played at the funeral.

Nolan considers " Dunkirk " to be the best combination of sound , music and graphics of all his films. The director made a profound exploration in the direction of combining sight and hearing, so one year, he made an interesting statement. At first, Nolan told the media that he liked "La La Land" and watched it many times. Some people ask, would you also want to make a song and dance film? Nolan said: "Every one of my films is a song and dance film. ”

05

A truly contemporary director

The culture of "interpretation" of movies did not start from Nolan, but it did become popular and popular because of Nolan's films. On the Internet, Nolan's films have become a kind of topic full of various discussions, debates, and analyses.

At the age of 16, on the iron bed of Haleighbury, after lights out, Nolan came up with the concept of "sharing the same dream", which was the starting point. 20 years later, he figured these ideas through, and then came up with Inception. For 20 years, he repeated these ideas on and off, "It took me almost 20 years to figure out this movie."

"Inception" stills

The young man who had a lot of beautiful ideas at the beginning, in the first decade of the new century, conquered audiences all over the world, and the spinning top that did not know whether to stop or not stopped, made countless fans scratch their ears and scratch their cheeks, and did not forget for ten years.

In "Nolan Variations", Nolan has a wonderful response to fans interpreting his work, saying that he is also fascinated by these films, fascinated by years, even decades, he has put a lot of effort and effort into them, and it is normal for audiences to be so fascinated by the same thing.

Film condenses both ends of creation.

At the same time, discussions about whether Nolan is a master have been brought up frequently in the second half of his more than 20-year career.

On Douban.com, in response to this question, I saw an interesting response: "He has been in the industry for nearly 20 years, and he has not made a movie that has failed both commercially and word-of-mouth, indicating that this person is still far from the master." (The review was published in 2017)

Nolan took working photos of "Interstellar" 

This statement is very interesting, and we might as well use it for a "Nolan-like" discussion.

For the fan, Nolan's steady, sustained success on both the commercial and public levels proves that he lacks the avant-garde and artistry of a master. On the other hand, we have to wonder: why can there be such a director, who has been in the industry for more than 20 years, and he has never failed in the box office and word of mouth?

Li Sixue mentioned a discussion related to Dunkirk. At the time, Nolan's wife, Emma Thomas, said that it was an art film packaged as a mainstream film, and Nolan felt that it could also be a mainstream film packaged as an art film.

Perhaps for Nolan, the distinction between art and business is not so important, and the fundamental reason why he can continue to win likes may be that he never uses the rules of business and art to limit himself.

It is worth noting that in the context of super-British films where commercial attributes are supreme, Nolan has received more positive evaluations, and his three films for the "Batman" IP "Mystery of the Shadow", "The Dark Knight" and "The Dark Knight Rises" are generally considered to have reached the level that ordinary superhero movies do not have in terms of artistry and depth of thought.

Working photo of Batman: The Dark Knight 

Nolan's Variations states that Nolan sees himself more like a craftsman than an artist, "Perhaps the difference between the two is that you use film to express something purely personal, heartfelt, and unpleasant; Or are you trying to talk to the audience, to communicate with them, to connect their expectations and experiences?"

This is a typical "Nolan answer", and his self-recognition is precisely the criticism of him by others, which tends to focus on his excessive focus on filmmaking practices and the resulting artistic shriveling.

Sean thinks neither of these perceptions is true.

To crudely and simply classify Nolan and his work into an established category is biased, and all labels aside, he is a special and truly contemporary director of our time. He is an absolute classicist in filmmaking, but he has been using seemingly archaic techniques to explore the most pioneering potential of cinema.

And he is not a director without depth in art and humanities, Nolan cares about people, about their place in the world and their changes in the times, and about their future.

On August 24, 2023, Japan discharged nuclear water into the sea. A week later, Nolan's first biopic, Oppenheimer, was released in Chinese mainland. Oppenheimer has always been a figure of interest to Nolan and even had a profound influence on Nolan on an intellectual level.

"Oppenheimer" stills

Li Sixue, who has seen the movie, introduced to me that this movie is like the scene of two ships in parallel in "The Dark Knight", everyone holds the explosion button on the other ship, and no one knows who will press it first. "The movie is actually saying that when a person has passed the return point, he can never look back, and what you know can never become something you don't know."

This has touched on the fundamental question of the fate of humanity in the 20th century, and we now find that it concerns our present and future.

The fascinating thing about Nolan's films is the complexity of our time. Our times are in a place where various trends collide, the latest information revolution only took a fraction of the time of an industrial revolution, completed a span that several industrial revolutions could not achieve, our earth rushed forward, towards space, the deep sea, the microscopic world, the subconscious, the fourth dimension and other coordinates to explore new knowledge, and these dream-like experiments, are asking the same question, where do we come from and where we are going.

"Oppenheimer" stills

Nolan was one of those curious about these issues in this era, and he happened to make movies.

We were just like him, so we became his audience.

This is probably the most interesting relationship movies have ever created for us.

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