From 1998's Virgo "Following" to the recently released new work "Creed", Christopher Nolan has directed a total of 11 film works in his 22-year creative career. Many people know him perhaps from "Inception", or earlier "Memory Fragments" that many people can't understand but still don't understand, or the shell of a science fiction film that tells a "Interstellar" that loves to protect its beloved through time and space. Perhaps each story has a different subject matter, but Nolan's films are labeled as extremely recognizable and personal. When you see Nolan's name in the movie poster, you can't help but think of the keywords of brain burning, time, and multi-line narrative. At the same time, his work is often equated with a good film. If someone really stood up and said that one of Nolan's movies was a completely bad movie, he would probably be considered the kind of person who everyone was drunk and woke up, and the whole world was centered on himself. Indeed, Nolan has this magic.
Some people say that the first person a baby sees after birth will look more like this person. Let's not care if this statement makes sense or not. But for a director, or an artist, when we look back at his work, we will find that some of the spirit and values hidden in it will indeed be traced in some of the cultures he came into contact with when he grew up.
Nolan was born in 1970, and his father was a British advertiser, which gave Nolan the opportunity to shoot stop-motion animation with a Super 8 camera at the age of 7. His mother was an American flight attendant, so as a child, Nolan often traveled back and forth between Britain and the United States. At that time, the American film industry was in the period of the "New Hollywood" movement, and under the background of the comprehensive reform of the film shooting, production and distribution system, a large number of masterpieces with a very anti-traditional spirit such as "2001: A Space Odyssey", "Graduates", and "Male and Female Thieves" were born. While living in Chicago, Nolan, under the influence of his uncle, was inspired to become a film creator. But he did not go to film school, but studied English literature in London.
During his studies, Nolan and like-minded friends co-founded the film society "16 mm", which derives its name from the width of a film. During his time at the school, Nolan made two short films, namely "Theft" in 1996 and "Ant Ridge" in 1997. The latter spends 3 minutes telling the story of a man chasing himself the size of a "bug" with a slipper, and when he shoots the bug to death, a face of his own suddenly appears behind him, and the hunter himself is the prey, a fatalistic setting that has appeared many times in Nolan's later works.
In 1998, Nolan spent two years and $6,000 to finally shoot his silver screen debut "Follow", an ultra-low-budget film inspired by a past theft when he lived in a solitary apartment. At that time, the entire crew was part-time, so the shooting time left for Nolan was only every weekend. From the lighting to the set to the composition and narrative structure of the film, after the premiere of "Following" at the Toronto Film Festival in 1999, Western critics hailed him as another Hitchcock.
With this film, Nolan gained favor with Newmarket Films. Unlike the first film, which took two years, Nolan spent only 25 days shooting his second work. It was released in 2000 and is based on Nolan's younger brother Jonathan Nolan's short story "Symbol of Death". In this work, which is known as Nolan's most brain-burning work, he plays the narrative trajectory to the extreme, the black and white picture is the correct sequence of the story, the color picture is the flashback of the story, when the two lines meet, the audience suddenly realizes that the original story itself is not so complicated, and everything is confused because of the director's careful arrangement. At first, Nolan's box office expectations for the film were four or five million dollars, but "Fragments of Memory" eventually earned $39.72 million at the global box office and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Screenplay.
Two consecutive works sensationalized the film industry, so that Nolan began to receive the attention of Hollywood factories, the first to throw an olive branch was the wealthy Warner Bros. The latter invited Nolan to direct the film Insomnia, a remake of the 1997 Norwegian film of the same name and the only film in which Nolan was not unscheduled. Under the box office call of three Academy Award winners, Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Roger Albert, Insomnia, which invested $46 million, grossed $113 million worldwide. Since this is nolan's first collaboration with Hollywood on one-way narrative work, he has been hampered throughout the filming process, which also makes "Insomnia" the most non-Norlan film.
If "Insomnia" is Nolan's first entry into Hollywood, then in 2005, Nolan, who lost the opportunity to direct the biographical film "The Aviator", based on the true story of Howard Hughes, ushered in a milestone in his directorial career with another work, which is the prequel to the Batman series" "The Mystery of the Shadow". As early as 2003, when Warner and Nolan communicated to restart the story of "Batman", Nolan said that to bring the superhero theme to a new height, good and evil are no longer a simple dividing line, behind the IP of Batman, it is not popcorn-style Hollywood special effects, but the exploration of human nature and society. In the end, with a $150 million investment in Batman: The Mystery of the Shadow, which grossed $374 million worldwide, Nolan finally fulfilled one of his childhood dreams - to make a blockbuster movie. At this time, there are still three years before the release of "Batman: The Dark Knight" in which he really fought.
During the release of the two Batman films, Nolan also collaborated with Bell on another classic, Deadly Magic based on Christopher Piriester's novel of the same name. Nolan uses a clever combination of flashbacks, interludes and flashbacks to tell the audience the story of the tearing of the two magicians. While adapting the original author's novel, Nolan called in his brother Jonathan to help, who spent a full 18 months on the screen to stage such a well-structured play for the audience. As precise as a mechanical watch, it is actually another major feature of Nolan's films.
In 2008, three years later, Nolai came to meet with the audience with the second part of Batman's Dark Trilogy, The Dark Knight, the first Hollywood film to be shot entirely in IMAX format, breaking multiple U.S. records in a single week of release and eventually grossing $1.082 billion worldwide. It is said that when George W. Bush visited China, the first question he asked was whether you watched "The Dark Knight", which shows its influence. The story revolves around the Joker who constantly does bad things and Batman who constantly intervenes to stop him, and Nolan discusses the question of where the boundaries of violence are throughout the character modeling. In addition to the box office success, "The Dark Knight" once dominated the IMDB list, and under it, it is "The Godfather" and "The Shawshank Redemption" and other film history classics. Since then, Nolan has been a god in Hollywood, and then, in collaboration with Leonardo, he joined forces in 2010 to present his "Inception" that he had quietly prepared for a decade.
Perhaps this film is the first film that many Chinese audiences have come into contact with Nolan, multiple dreams, visual spectacle, Nolan as far as possible to retain the watchability of the film, while leaving blank at the end, triggering the reverie of countless audiences. And when it comes to this movie, we have to mention the classic fight in the hotel corridor clip, the whole scene is nolan with real scenes to create, including the more than 3,000 acres of cornfield in "Interstellar", Nolan has always believed that only real shooting can really make the audience feel the oppression of the scene. But regarding the corridor segment and the movie "Inception", some people say that Nolan copied the Japanese director Toshi Imamoto's "Red Hot Chili Peppers", and we will talk to you slowly in the following video about the story of Imatoshi on this topic.
After Inception grossed $825 million worldwide, Nolan brought the end of the Dark Trilogy two years later, Batman: The Dark Knight Rises. The film eventually grossed 1.08 billion, becoming the 13th film in film history to gross more than 1 billion, and Nolan debuted in Hollywood for just over a decade, relying on two superhero films to complete the achievement of breaking $1 billion, which made him undoubtedly the most eye-catching director in Hollywood after the millennium.
In 2014, Nolan set his sights on space, teaming up with actor Matthew McConaughey to bring my own favorite Nolan movie, Interstellar. Although there are too many confusing words in the whole film, including wormholes, black holes, and five-dimensional space, the most important thing is that most people understand what kind of story this is when they watch the movie, whether you grow up under the Western or Eastern cultural system, you will be moved by this story. There is also a very wonderful place in this film, which is the collaborative soundtrack of Nolan and Hans Zimmer, how to use music to advance the story, about this, the subsequent "Dunkirk" shows more vividly. This film, released in 2018, is Nolan's tenth work, this time, he focused on the Dunkirk evacuation during World War II, but he did not use too many scenes to describe the war itself, but through the perspective of three main lines of sea, land and air, three soldiers, let the audience deeply appreciate the cruelty of war.
We have said that Nolan's films are intrinsic to a lot to do with the influence he was originally influenced by during the New Hollywood Movement. At that time, the United States was experiencing the Vietnam War and the Cold War, and in addition, more social issues were also put on the table, and people could not avoid it, so they used the ideology of film to express inner resistance. Looking back at Nolan's works, from "Memory Fragments" and "Inception" that can reshape himself by retrieving memories, to the peak batman trilogy of superhero works, to "Interstellar" and "Dunkirk" that love and fearlessness can cross the universe and through the bullets and bullets, Nolan perfectly combines the necessary elements of commercial films with his own narrative skills, bringing the audience an unparalleled audiovisual feeling again and again.
In Nolan's body, there is a very traditional Hollywood film aesthetic. We call it oldfashion, like sticking to the real scene
, loyal to film and supporting the screen. When Netflix vigorously promoted online streaming movies, Nolan also appealed through the Washington Post that everyone could go to the cinema more, and he insisted that the art of film belongs to the big screen. But after making so many popular commercial blockbusters, people also began to discuss when Nolan, who had been canonized, would win his Oscars and three European awards, and even some people criticized him for this, thinking that his films were just playing a trick on editing to fool the audience.
We can't judge a director, such as Kubrick and Hitchcock, who never won an Oscar, but no one can deny that they are well-deserved masters in the film industry. And what we can judge is that Nolan's work has both high box office and high reputation, the film itself is for the audience to see, perhaps now 50 years old Nolan can not make Spielberg's "Save Private Ryan" in a short period of time with a heavy sense of film, but it is undeniable that the Oscars are not a ladder of gods, the work is, at this point, Nolan may be the best Hollywood commercial film director so far in this century.