Christopher Nolan: 25 Things You Didn’t Know about Him

August 1, 2022

Last Updated Date: August 1, 2022

Christopher Nolan is getting ready to make his next movie, Oppenheimer, which is already one of the most anticipated movies of 2023.

The high hopes for his next project, which will star the talented Cillian Murphy, are well-founded. And it’s because Nolan has become one of the most proactive directors of his generation over the course of his career.

Whether it’s because of the big ideas in his stories or the great technical skills he has behind the camera, his movies are always talked about. Because of this, and because he’s turning another year old on July 30, we’re going to tell you some things about him that you might not have known, but that helped make his films so great.

Nolan was born in Westminster, a neighborhood in central London, to an English father and an American mother. When he was 7, he used his father’s Super 8 camera and his toys as actors to make his first movie.

- He went to University College London to study English literature while also making a number of short films at a film school.
- Nolan grew up in London, England, but he went to Chicago at least four or five times when he was a child and teen. However, it wasn’t until she went to college that she started to visit the United States more often.
- In 1989, his short film Tarantella was shown on Image Union, a PBS show about independent films. This was his first work.
- Following, his first full-length movie, was made for only £6,000 and took about a year to make because most of the actors and crew had full-time jobs.
- Stanley Kubrick and Ridley Scott are the people he looks up to the most.
  His editing style was influenced by the movies of Nicolas Roeg and, later, Terrence Malick, especially The Thin Red Line ( 1998 ).

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- His ten favorite movies are: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), The Black Hole (1979), Blade Runner (1982), Chinatown (1974), The Hitcher (1986), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), Star Wars (1977), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), and Topkapi (1964), as well as any film by Stanley Kubrick.
- He likes the IMAX format because, as he says, it’s “virtual reality without glasses.”
- He has made it very clear that he wants to make full-length movies that are shown in theaters. He has no plans to ever work for Netflix, and he has bad things to say about how the streaming giant gets its content to people.
- After he made Insomnia in 2002, he was going to make a movie about Howard Hughes with Jim Carrey in the lead role. Nolan had written the script, but when he heard that Martin Scorsese was making his own biopic of Hughes, The Aviator (2004), he put off writing the script for Scorsese and started working on Batman Begins instead ( 2005 ).
- He first made Batman movies so that he could get money and help for his bigger films. Inception was the one he had been planning for years ( 2010 ).
- He doesn’t like computer graphics in movies, so he left them out of Batman Begins on purpose ( 2005 ).
- Richard Donner’s Superman movies helped him come up with the idea for the Batman trilogy.
- Even though his Batman trilogy was dark and serious, he says he loves Tim Burton’s Batman a lot.
- Nolan has said that he doesn’t make a story outline before starting to write a screenplay, but he does make a lot of notes about events, characters, and ideas.

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Most of Christopher Nolan’s movies have one thing in common: the main character has some kind of mental problem that plays a big role in the plot ( Memento , Insomnia , The Dark Knight trilogy , The Prestige , and Inception ).
Even though he has made many movies that critics and audiences liked, Dunkirk is the only one for which he has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director ( 2017 ).
The Dark Knight (2008) was called “Rory’s First Kiss,” Inception (2010) was called “Oliver’s Arrow,” The Dark Knight Rises (2012) was called “Magnus Rex,” and Interstellar (2014) was called “Floral’s Letter.”
Christian Bale, Kenneth Branagh, Michael Caine, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Cillian Murphy, Gary Oldman, Josh Stewart, and Jeremy Theobald are among the actors who work with him regularly.
He was the director of The Dark Knight, the first comic book movie to make $1 billion at the box office ( 2008 ).
He is a good friend of Zack Snyder’s and helped bring the Snyder Cut of The Justice League to life.
In the 2019 Queen’s New Year Honors List, he was given the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for his work in movies.
He likes the rock band Radiohead a lot.
He takes breaks during his shoots to drink Earl Gray tea.