Christopher Nolan On TENET - The Full Interview

everyone i'm jeff keely and welcome to a very special event a conversation with christopher nolan chris uh great to have you with us today uh we are going to chat about tenet also your career you as a filmmaker and we've got questions uh from the internet from fans around the world who wanted to uh to chat with you today and get some insight from you so uh i think we should just dive right in let's talk again all right well um the first question comes uh we're gonna talk about tenant uh first of all here and this one comes from andy blackshaw and he wants to know a simple question but how did you select the title tenet and i'm curious sort of in the name but also in your creative process like the the name of a movie when does that come to you is it early or late i usually have an idea early on sometimes a long time before in the case of tennent i had the title very early i mean years ago and obviously the the the fact that it's a palindrome uh you know was the the sort of jumping-off point but it was also um what the word means it's the notion of of belief and for those who've seen the film haven't seen the film um and i try to be reasonably spoiler free but uh because a lot of people are just getting the opportunity to see the film now um but for me there's when you watch the film there's a sense in which we're addressing the idea that we're all sort of imprisoned in a way in our own views of the passage of time of what's going on in the world all the rest and so there is this kind of leap of faith to the idea of an objective reality um so there's there's the idea of belief or faith involved with what these characters choosing to invest in in terms of what's really going on uh in the story and that was always an intriguing idea to me and i wanted to be right you know upfront on screen all right there you go um next question comes from anna brushy and many others um it's a good one uh the protagonist john david washington's character a lot of people have been wondering um why he decided to hide or not go into um his background we know very little of his past what did he do before becoming a spy i know we're gonna get an answer to that but no no the point is to not answer that uh i i really wanted to tap into that kind of great tradition of the anonymous protagonist um i mean for me it dates back to uh you know the tv show the prisoner for example yeah um where he's known by number or the number he resists number six you know known as the prisoner um but also uh i was thinking a lot of sergio leone westerns like with clint eastwood as you know the man with no name and all the rest i think there's something for me there's something really compelling about jumping into a story and being told essentially to concentrate on the here and now to pass through this experience in the present tense ironically it's a film that deals with time but it's really important as you watch the film that you're just kind of looking over this guy's shoulder and going with him it's a very present tense uh presence in the film and and so deliberately not naming him not uh including any of the information about how we you know he might have arrived there i think hopefully draws attention to that that idea and keeps people really focused on the here and now uh obviously john david and and you know my discussions with john david you know we we had to you know have some sense he really needed to have a uh a sense of who this guy was and where he'd come from uh but we really didn't want that uh specified in the movie i see so you develop some of that you know kind of in your head and john does a little bit of that but you're not exposing it to the audience yeah we weren't massively pedantic about it we weren't going through you know who his parents were and where he was born and all the rest but we needed to have a sense he needed some guidance from me of you know what's this guy's background some of it is loosely indicated in the script yeah um you know the jumping off point for the film he's clearly you know working you know a secret service organization probably the cia you know that and so forth um but you know we want we talked about the fact that for example he clearly has a lot of military training and that that kind of thing and uh but we uh we didn't want to specify any of that for the audience but the actor needs to know the underlying truth of the character to make it a a consistent characterization and that sort of leads into this next question from uh majorca and uh she wants to know i i can feel the tender affection between the conversation attitude of protagonist and neil did you explain to john and robert the special relationship between the two characters um yeah i mean it it's i think a lot of it was there on the page for them actually um but then once you you cast the film uh because their relationship you know as you watch the film it becomes more and more important to the story i suppose you'd say um you know there are some ambiguities to a relationship and then and then there's a there's a camaraderie that develops it's very important um a lot of that was was indicated on the page but once you finish a script you then look around and say okay who can play these parts you put people together um and then you know you see the chemistry that develops and and these guys you know john david and rob pattinson um you know they just connected and it really really for me just just worked with what we were trying to do with the with the story it was really fun to watch these guys work together and it's i think it's really fun to watch the the characters interact in the movie oh it definitely shows on screen um this next question comes from twitter uh were there multiple endings you thought of using and had to decide from if so what were some of them i know you know often the ending for the film you'll think of pretty early in the process of kind of where you want to go but did you were there other scenes or you know not deleted scenes but sort of other concepts of the end of the film i mean no the simple answer is uh i don't go into a project without knowing the ending because i think the ending is uh it's the most important part of feature film i think um i think that's one of the the things that keeps feature films very distinct from television because in a feature film you know you can have a you know a four-hour movie and the last five minutes can let it down and then for the audience the whole experience gets thrown out the window um it's it's it's like the the end of an anecdote or the punchline to a joke like it it justifies everything you've seen so i always come up with the the ending early on and and hopefully it's something that uh you know it has to be something that emerges really specifically from the story situation that that you're examining so no i don't sort of look at a mixed bag of potential endings and then and then sift through them um the only time i've ever in my work i've ever had sort of had as it were multiple endings is when i made insomnia uh for warner brothers years ago they um they were very insistent that i shoot an alternative ending uh i don't want to give away the ending in the film because a lot of people won't have seen it and maybe they'll get to enjoy it but uh they wanted me to shoot shoot two different endings and i agreed to do that and uh fortunately because i'd shot this alternate ending they never asked to see it they knew it was in the care and then they let me you know test screen the ending we all we all loved and we went we went with that but uh that's really the only time i've been in a situation where there was possibly going to be an alternate ending that's not generally something i'm comfortable with at all um speaking of the ending another question from twitter uh did you make a casablanca reference in neil's last scene in that line well i don't want to have it i don't want to have any spoilers for people who haven't seen the film yes it's very much a cosplay reference in the last scene excellent um this next question comes from uh vishesh wants to know how do characters return to their original timelines after traveling backwards um there's obviously a lot going on with um you know characters moving in different timelines i assume the question is sort of um you know yeah how do they do they go back to their original timeline or do they stay on that timeline well the question slightly misunderstands the rules um their timeline is their timeline and through the rules of inversion it it can be inverted and they can move backwards through time they can then reinvert using a turn style and then stop moving forwards in time but they will continue to be uh on that timeline right so it's awesome it'll be easier to draw a diagram it's also one timeline it's one uh the best way to think of it and and this relates to the earlier question is if you look at john david's experience and you follow him through the entire story yeah that's a single timeline that you're following uh but that timeline can move both forwards and backwards and that's where i was interested in these this this rule set uh because it's quite distinct from time travel per se or time travel movies where multiple realities or something like that exactly and they refer to the possibility of multiple realities but the terms of the storytelling are pretty tight in that you follow this character and you're looking over shoulder the whole way and you're you're experiencing his timeline on how that can meander forwards and backwards yep okay great um now we talk a little bit more about some of the production pieces of tenant this one comes from johnny um you said that tenant brought things that you had been thinking about for at least 20 years what was the moment you realized that the script was ready to shoot well it was more a question of the moment i realized that the set of ideas was was ready to to commit to the page in screenplay form um i won't sit down to write something until i kind of know that i'm ready to and the the ideas are all in balance and and that can take a very long time um i'm not somebody who does a lot of multiple drafts over the years i tend to just take notes and draw diagrams and think about concepts and sort of think about okay how could you apply that to different forms of storytelling what might the screenplay be but once i've kind of focused in on on that set of ideas and i know i'm ready to to put it into screenplay form that's sort of the big leap for me and then the screenplay is a sort of jumping-off point for the execution of you know how you're actually going to go and make it so i remember reading at one point that you had sort of done i think the first two acts and then nathan you sort of talked about it and you were like then you're going to go into the third act like do you how do you sort of tend to write this the script you sort of go through one pass i go through linearly okay um and so i write the script you know from the first frame to the last frame and i tend to build up the drafts as i go so i tend to rewrite you know as i add a scene i'll very often go right back to the beginning of this script and re-write through and then add the next scene and sort of layer it that way every right is different everybody does it differently um that process works for me because i've done so much planning before i write the screenplay right so i i know you know where you're going i know where i'm where i'm going in in the sense of the narrative movements of the narrative ideas uh but yeah i sort of rewrite as i go um and every now and again and this is one of the only times i had to do you know i had to involve nathan at an early stage in a design set so i only had only got two thirds of the way through so i i made him read that which was a bit unfair uh and then you know carried on a month later or something i showed him the whole thing wow very cool um this question comes from sean uh about sound design your sound design is incredibly immersive it seems to me more distinct than other hollywood directors from score to sound effects to dialogue what is your focus when finalizing the complete sound design what is your goal watching tenant in theaters i felt transported is your aim to control the viewers senses and focus i mean yes i it's an excellent question because it it sort of answers itself um sound and the potential of of sound behind those big screens in in movie theaters uh just keeps getting better and better and better and so you have so many aspects to the audience experience that you could tap into using sound whether it's sound effects or music and the combination of of the two and it's it's one of my favorite parts of the process and one of the things i get most excited about and with each film we try to find ways to uh to bring something new to it to sort of challenge the audience with it to make them kind of feel something uh and i think i mean i've been inspired by a lot of great filmmakers in the past who similarly are interested in in sound uh you know i think you know david fincher and all the great things he's done with sound over the years right back to seven you know was a an incredible movie to watch in a movie theater and here the way he used backgrounds and a lot of intrusive sound that you wouldn't necessarily expect uh ridley scott has done incredible work sound over the years i mean there's so many filmmakers who who've done a lot with it um i mean in particular i had to experience a few years ago of striking a new print of kubrick's 2001 to take to the cannes film festival and we had to lay down the soundtrack on it so we went on a dub stage and just laid it down exactly as it had been recorded because we were the idea was to give the audience the experience of what would it have been like in 1968 to experience that movie um and the the sound mix was shocking i mean it was so bold and so i mean the moments in there that were just unbelievable uh you know extremely experimental you know for a studio filmmaker um so i've been inspired by all these these terrific filmmakers over the years and and you know we try to we try to use it for the tools that it can give us in terms of storytelling and try and enjoy it a bit speaking of of sound uh music let's talk a little bit about your collaboration with ludwig on this um one thing that i found interesting reading about this film is that you know very early on i think with a lot of your movies the the score and you know some of the sound you know comes in very early for you um it's not something where you show him the movie and then he goes and writes it i mean he's really part of the creative process from from the almost the beginning right of sort of just coming up with sort of like a theme or uh yeah i mean from from script stage or even earlier on some of my films yeah i mean i've worked with david julian and hans zimmer and jameson howard over the years and and with all of them uh and ludwig was no exception you know we talked early on and i said you've got to understand i want i don't like to use any temp music so i don't like to take music from another film while i'm editing and put it on so i need the composer to get involved at script stage and talk about the ideas and start writing pieces that aren't to picture because if you look at any film really but in particular my films they're very quick cut um there's a lot of stuff you know put in there and it's very difficult for a composer to write for a you know a 10 second scene or something um i want the composer to come on and ludwig did this very early on and just start exploring musical ideas that length so 10 minute pieces 20 minute pieces sometimes and then the technology that exists for us to edit that music to take it unpeel its layers edit it together in shorter form or to picture you know we can do that in the edit suite very easily from what the composer's been doing and then send it back to them and say okay how does this work you know you can develop the score from from both ends if you like it's a really fun process very dependent on uh modern technology but technology that that the modern composer whether it's hanzo or ludwig gorinson you know these guys are all over this stuff and and they'll give you you know a track they'll give you a queue that's divided into sometimes hundreds of tracks all the individual sounds and all the things that you can manipulate and play around with and reorder and and try them again to picture and then sit and with ludwig what we would do is you know we would take his demos and we would work with him in the week and then on friday we would put the film up we will sit there and watch the whole thing from beginning to end with whatever new experiments we'd done with the work he'd given us and then he would go off and write for the next week uh we'd do that for months and months so i mean all in i think ludwig um i think he worked on the school for over a year uh yeah it's a big big commitment and he did he did an incredible job i'm absolutely thrilled with it yeah no it's an incredible um score and soundtrack and speaking of that uh riva has a question wants to know about travis scott being featured in the movie um you don't normally have uh songs in your films she says and i know um you know that i seemed like that was maybe a somewhat late thing that that came in right uh with that song or was that always planned or how did that evolve no it wasn't always planned i've used songs on the ends of uh a few of my films uh there's a david bowie song at the end of momento for example uh there's a tom yorke song at the end of prestige sometimes that energy feels right to me um what happened in the case of tenet is ludwig was getting close to the end of the scoring um we keep watching the film and then we started taking cues of his and putting him on the end to get a feel for when the credits were applied like what's that what's that going to be like um and we had a couple things we were pretty happy with but he and this is his genius as a composer but also as a producer he sort of was able to step back from and say yeah okay there's something about as he put it there's something in the energy of the film that made you want something new at the end that built on or was built from things that you'd seen but wasn't a reprise often a reprise works really well in in this case he felt very strongly that it needed to be new and he suggested getting uh trump scott involved and you know uh familiarize me with travis scott's work and great videos he's done incredible songs and uh i i said to luke you're like you know it's a super exciting idea um what do we do how would we go about that and and ludovic invited him to a screening uh actually in this this very uh screening room and uh travis came and watched the film he was one of the first people uh really probably the very first person outside of our immediate team who saw the whole thing put together uh and immediately had a a really exciting and energetic response to it that really showed you know he really understood what it was we were trying to do with the the music and what luffy had had laid in there so ludwig sent him some of his tracks and he turned them around and changed them and and uh came up with this fantastic song that uh i then when i heard it we put it on the the end of the film it felt to me like we wanted to take some of his voice and layer it through the rest of the movie so right from the first frame of the film actually there's a little bit of travis scott you know in here and there so that by the time you get to the end you've sort of built up there's a sound in your ear of his voice that sort of pays off at the end and uh i think all of that uh it was a really fun collaboration and uh i mean travis was great to work with and it really speaks uh of of ludwig's ability to kind of you know he's this great genius who's kind of in his work but he can also step back as a sort of producer and look at it very objectively and say okay let's let's bring somebody else in and see what we can come up with it was a really really fun thing to be a part of yeah no super authentic and an incredible um song uh this next question comes from uh avon and yvonne wants to know can you talk more about your collaboration with jennifer lame uh the editor i think one of the best parts of the movie is the editing and i'm always fascinated since you edit on film yeah i mean it's the first film i've done with with jen and she did an incredible job i'd been working with lee smith for many years and he wasn't available for the film uh and so i i brought jen on and she hadn't done uh action films before she's done some incredible work on arielle's uh hereditary and so forth and noah bomback's films but i like the fact that she hadn't done anything like this um i warned her that particularly in the third act you know we're going to get into some of the some of the most complicated and difficult editing situations that she'd ever be faced with but uh i was really looking for her to bring something you know fresh to my process in terms of all aspects of the film uh and in particular the action and i think she did a really incredible job uh with the action uh we do finish the film on film but we've always uh edited on avid so we we shoot on film we print the film we project it for dailies and then it gets scanned into the computer we edit on the computer um we then conform as it's called you know we take the film and we cut that tape it together to match what we've done on the computer and then we project that and that's sort of the way it uh the way it gets finished um so yeah she was able to uh able to keep editing the way she learned you know on on the avid uh but it was uh it was a really fun experience uh you know working with somebody uh who hadn't done car chases and fights just brought a very fresh uh approach to it yeah and there is a lot of action in this film this next question um comes from anna and wants it talks about the large-scale action sequences including the opera sequence the 747 crash the highway scenes and the final battle um she wants to know which of these was the most difficult to film um they all had the distinct challenges which actually was great because they weren't none of them were the same right uh but they all had had huge challenges i mean actually starting from the what we call the vault fight you know some of the handheld combat we started with which was small scale but it was the first stuff we're trying to figure out how we were gonna shoot this stuff um all the techniques we're gonna use so that was a huge challenge for the first week um the car chase was shot in talon uh i mean i've done plenty of car chases before but this was you know shutting down a major route in the city for about three weeks very very challenging stuff forwards backwards you know various combinations i mean all of it was complicated i think in some ways i suppose you'd have to fix on the final battle uh as the most difficult in a sense because there was there's so many complexities to it we're trying through the film for the audience we're trying to build a level of understanding and complexity to how this rule set can how you can have fun with it essentially so every time you know we would come up with an idea for an earlier scene that didn't fit we'd say okay well let's save that let's let's see if we can explore that in the final action and uh so it became this kind of thing that balloon got bigger and bigger and bigger uh over the months of shooting all the other sequences and we we saved it for the end and everybody every department got to really pour all their energy into into that sequence so i in some ways i would say that was the most the most challenging um but in terms of sheer physical difficulty i think probably the uh the foils the the sailing scene on those uh foils that was a very very challenging thing to film no one had ever filmed anything like that before and even though it's a small in some ways a small scene just a little you know dialogue scene but it uh those uh craft i mean they're really incredible i mean they're like the sort of you know equivalent of formula one racing cars or something but of sailboats and uh yeah they're they're very challenging to work with and no one had ever done anything like this so it was all kind of new ground that was that was a very difficult sequence well um all right we got some more questions for you uh more about you as sort of a filmmaker and this one comes from dylan carver and dylan i think wants some advice um greetings what would be your advice to any small small-time independent filmmaker wanting to make the jump to celluloid uh to cellular in particular uh my advice would be to get on you know get on the internet and see you know what kind of camera you could get uh there's a lot of incredible equipment out there for very cheap if it's in good shape and it can be serviced and you can find someone to service it but there's a lot of great equipment out there a lot of great opportunities to to start shooting celluloid um you know and getting in touch with the folks at kodak uh you know they're they're very receptive to lower budget filmmakers filmmakers starting out they really want and continue to reach out to younger filmmakers uh because obviously that's the the future of celluloid is getting new filmmakers to to come in and try it out because i think inevitably find you know when a filmmaker finally gets the chance to try and shoot actual film uh they love it and they they wish they could you know always do it and and so having new filmmakers uh avail themselves that opportunity is very very important um so yeah my advice would be to get in touch with kodak and to get in touch with uh you know find a great deal on a camera get your own camera that would be the way to go i think these days absolutely um all right this next question comes from riley rucker since i'm involved i'm not surprised this question came up um would you ever want one of your films to be adapted into a video game and if so which one um we've we've looked at some of them over the years i think at one point there was we did we went fairly far down the road with it but but of course what you you realize is you know making films is complicated yeah it takes a long time making video games is even more complicated and takes even longer yeah uh and the way the video game industry works and you know far more about it than i do but uh it's it's really tough to you know you can't you don't want to just be doing a license game you don't want to just be tying in with something right and using the brand established by the film same way actually you don't when you do you know people do a video game adaptation to film from a video game you don't want it to just draft off the brand you want it to be something great in its own right and uh you know i think my time and energy uh i've just wound up devoting it all to film and just seeing how how difficult that is uh you know it's not something you'd ever take on lightly but it's uh definitely something i'm interested in it's a it's an amazing world all right fair fair response um this next one comes from carson oak and carson wants to know would you ever try and tackle a horror film the genre would be so interesting in your style of directing uh definitely um i the thing about horror is it's it's the most purely visceral of of genres and that is a type of filmmaking that i am you know if you watch i mean dunkirk in particular is one that you know it's all about the physicality of the the situation for the characters and the visceral response so now it's definitely a genre i'm i'm interested in it's very rare to to get a great scenario for a horror movie that really holds up and would really justify the time there are some incredible horror movies uh but not that many i suppose uh it's it's tough you know but it's definitely something i would be interested in exploring at some point uh i'm in no rush shook up time try different things but uh it's it's certainly on my mind yeah speaking of like genres like horror that video game question when you think of your career kind of moving forward are you intrigued by telling stories in like in other ways i think of you know games but even look at like bandersnatch and like interactive things like when you think of kind of the scripts and stories you want to tell explore other genres but are you interested in other forms of sort of you know telling stories i i am interested in other forms but i'm also the longer i work in film the more i'm sort of humbled by the sense of it as a medium that it can do anything and be anything and so in a way i feel like i'm just scratching the surface of what's possible in terms of what you could do with uh you know the theatrical film format itself uh so in in a way it's like i've got i've got plenty of room and it's a it's a plain big enough playground to to stay in in a way um and so i think yeah as i said the longer i work in film the more i realize that the screen itself the form of it and everything they're just jumping off points for infinite possibilities uh and so i i i think i want to carry on doing that nothing wrong with that we'll look forward to what's next um sovigya wants to know have there been times working on a script that you thought that you'd never be able to complete it you have that writer's block uh every day on the script uh yeah definitely i mean it's something any writer deals with a lot every problem always seems insurmountable the the cruel thing the cool trick that your mind plays on you when you when you're writing is you sort of go to bed at night thinking oh i've got the whole thing worked out and i can write it no problem tomorrow and then you sit down and you're like hang on it seemed so simple till i started writing it and you're often getting stuck i mean i think the longest i was stuck the longest i was stuck was on inception i i got to page 80 or so you know i had two acts of it and i was stuck for about i mean 10 years or so you know i mean i did other things as well i wasn't sitting with a typewriter all work and no play yeah it wasn't that but you know i was i was just jammed on it uh and then i had a breakthrough and the old cliche of if you're having trouble if there's something wrong with the third act it's actually wrong with the first and second act you know that's where you really need to do the work uh i have always found that to be true like if you if you're absolutely stuck you know on that third act it probably means that some of the groundwork you laid in the first two acts is flawed somehow and with inception that was definitely the case and i went back and with a new take on it and it uh it then got finished pretty rapidly you tend to have a few ideas that you're most passionate about kind of in parallel you're thinking about or do you singularly focus on one project i mean it's different at different points in my life really um you know there's been times when i've i've had to have multiple things on the go i mean certainly when we were doing the uh dark knight films um you know i was working on other things at the same time but those films were so big and kind of all-consuming um that you know along with my brother and david gore you know we sort of had to be kind of finishing one one film you know when i was uh finishing the prestige for example i already had nathan crowley on designing for the dark knight and so forth and i'm not generally comfortable with doing more than one thing at a time but there have been moments where you've sort of had to to think about more than one thing um what i like doing between films is exploring a range of different ideas you know a whole set of possibilities but there's always that moment for me at any rate i mean other filmmakers are different everybody's different but for me there has to be this moment where you commit you know mentally you commit you go okay i'm gonna fully concentrate on this for as long as it takes to get it done and do you when you before you get to that commit stage do you have like a few ideas that are sort of populating in your mind of different directions and you pick one or how like what's your kind of process of of kind of picking the next project i mean it's different it's just being different it's literally been different every time it it comes back to story simple as that you know if you get wrapped up in the story and you feel you know how to tell it then you get excited about you know all that focus and all that concentration and then you're creating creating a world that you're happy to live in for a couple years because um it takes a long time and it takes a lot of focus at least at least the way i work uh you know i'm not really able to do anything else want to make a film so uh you know you you really have to know that it's something you're still going to care about in a couple years yeah um this next question comes from bojack bojack wants to know in your formative years did you ever have a mentor who played a part in who you are as a filmmaker today um i mean so many great inspirational figures in in film but the wonderful thing about film and the era i've grown up in you know uh as as really the i suppose the first you know home video generation film set of filmmakers of my age you know so you know we got our first vhs player in the early 80s when i was you know 12 years old or something and and so i've been able to grow up with inspirational figures in my creative life who i i never met and i never you know had that particular mental relationship with i mean my parents were very encouraging of me and and you know lent me a super 8 camera you know super 8 film you know when i was a little kid who was seven eight years old um but i think i would point to being able to access all the film history through home video and so you know i was able to study the work of you know ridley scott and nicholas rogue and later on you know terence malik and kubrick and people like that um i then had the great fortune of being able to meet you know some of these people you know met uh the great terence malik who have met ridley scott uh you know and that that's a wonderful thing but but you can have that and for kids today it's even more so i mean everything is accessible so easily uh which is a great thing because you can you can really drill into okay what are the great filmmakers of the past what have they done and how have they done it and really sort of study that for yourself yeah um this next question is about imax uh jacob wants to know what is your favorite shot that you have captured with an imax camera hmm you know in some ways it'd be difficult to pick favorites uh but i'd probably have to go with the opening shot of the dark knight which was sequentially the first thing we we did on on imax or at least the first thing we showed you an audience in imax and every time we ever screened the film for an audience there was a gasp at that shot moving in on the building like that uh and and that was it was thrilling to see people kind of respond to just the format itself and the shot um it'd be a toss-up between that and the shot of uh heath ledger standing on the corner that comes right after it you know holding a mask in his hand i mean that there's something about that it was it was another filmmaker actually came up to me and talked about it was actually james cameron um because he had talked about shooting on imax for many years years ago and i'd first read about you know his idea about well you you shoot larger format negative and you extract the 35 mil portion yeah so that stuck in my head and that was eventually what we you know years later actually did uh you know on the dark knight and and you know he told me when he saw that shot he knew that it was going to work you know that the format and the formatting the way we've done it would would work there is some special relationship with that imax frame and that shot of he's standing there in the corner um so there's a couple um and then we've gone on to do so many uh things that i've just loved doing with the imax camera uh but there's something about those those first couple things as first well we didn't know if it would work that was the thing so to see that it worked that was a a unique thrill yeah an incredible sequence um this next question comes from ethan uh ethan wants to know what would you say was the most challenging film of yours to make and why hmm um i mean they've all been challenging in their own ways uh you know i find filmmaking incredibly fulfilling but i do find it hard um i think if you were to ask my crew i think dunkirk wrote pretty highly it's a difficult film um i actually didn't find it so i mean i don't mind the weather and all of those conditions and there was a real focus and a small core group of us you know around the camera on that film so i actually enjoyed that one um i think tenet was was very difficult because of the range of uh action set pieces we were trying to do and how much of the the world we were trying to cover the combination of that with the unique sort of um difficulty of visualizing uh how the timelines have worked or how the the opposing timelines would work with this concept of inversion um it was something that wasn't possible to intuit so however long i worked with the idea you could write it on the page you could analyze it and describe it but until you actually started seeing the footage you couldn't fully engage with it you couldn't fully understand it so every day on set we had a big group of people sitting talking about okay hang on does this happen with all this and all the rest um and the way we dealt with that in the end was to have the visual effects guys do what they call previous you know pre-visual visualization of um the scene but not from a camera perspective from a sort of it's like a top-down diorama yeah kind of top-down you could look at any angle and just look at the logic of that and so um you know bodhi on on set he worked for the visual effects department he would be my gut he would always have his laptop and he'd say okay tell me this does this happen before that is that you know whatever and he would every time he would start to answer and it said don't answer because you'll probably be wrong we always are when we try and intuit it go away and study it for 10 minutes then come back and tell me uh so that that was how that went down but that made it a very unique set of challenges particularly for me because i'm the one i'm the guy who has to have the answers on set you know because the actors or technicians whatever you're saying on how do you want this how do you want that and i had a good sense of things but one of the things i found really exciting about working on this movie is you had to shoot it you have to see it to understand it you you to know what it is it wouldn't it doesn't really work fully as a screenplay it couldn't be a novel it couldn't be a stage play or radio play like it has to be a movie because the camera itself sees time and can show us time in different ways and that's what the whole concept is based on it's okay let's look at time differently let's look at the action of a big action movie differently by approaching time differently you have to see it you have to experience the movie to kind of know what it's on about yeah i can't imagine the the continuity department on this trying to you know pull again did you ever did you ever trip yourself up at some point and say like oh wait no i you know we changed this or like you know there's so much so many things going on in so many levels you know it's interesting i made mistakes all the time um while i was writing the script i was pleased to find out as we started translating the script into previews and and answering all the questions that i hadn't made very many mistakes in the script that i was sort of pleased about i got into some kind of way of looking at it that actually seemed to work when you when you then looked at it objectively or kind of built the model of it um but every day on set uh i like everybody else you would you would you'd be thinking procedurally about what order things happened and you'd make one mistake early on in your thinking that everything else is cascading and we would all do it all the time and the problem with that kind of cascading set of assumptions or mistakes is that you because you don't know you've made an error in in the beginning of your thinking you are absolutely convinced you can you can see it you can just and and there was a it was interesting there was a level of humility that developed for everybody on on the set where we all sort of learned to not commit actually and to say i think it's this but let's talk it through uh which i should become a fun process in the end did you ever like did you have to reshoot something or did you catch it early enough or i'm curious how that like manifested itself we i think the only time we made an actual sort of a mistake was in the first week where we ran the camera the wrong way for the way we were staging the scene uh and that was the kind of mistake you know that we expected to make a lot but having having done it once you know in the first week uh we got pretty methodical about it like the camera guys you know had to uh film magazines for forwards film magazines for backwards and the backwards ones they had kind of black and white checkered tape all over and everything so they would never pick the wrong one um and we learned i think the reason we didn't make mistakes is we learned and film units are these guys are really good at doing this stuff this way or you just systematize it so you don't nothing's casual nothing's you know i mean if you watch a camera crew on a hollywood set the way they will pick up the camera the way everything is systematized they do it the same every time so they know exactly to not make mistakes uh and that got applied to our thinking in terms of how we would answer questions and how we would we would make plans as we would talk it through in a particular way and then sign off on it once we'd you know kind of kind of done that process the tricky thing is on a big film you actually have to be thinking about the next thing at the same time and the thing after that you kind of got to be two or three set ups as we call them two or three setups ahead to stay on schedule and that's where it got really tricky because you'd if you're talking about you know you're solving one problem and if i would start talking about the next one as part of that conversation which is what i'm used to doing to keep going it would throw everything and so we had to be a little more a little more linear wow um next question comes from duncan duncan watson did you watch any film for reference before you started to write tenet um no not really uh i well actually you know what for my own writing process i watched a lot of fritz lang movies uh fritz lang spies in particular i get a lot of inspiration from going back to the silent era because it's just a completely different set of conventions then and so you can be really inspired by it it's sort of going back to what i call first principles of filmmaking you know there's they're not dealing with any of the things that we're dealing with in in the modern world and so you you're getting a really fresh look at genre and i think fritz lange uh in his work uh he's this incredible way of looking at the fanciful the fanciful villains and so forth integrated into a recognizable world uh they're really inspiring from that point of view so i i did a bit of that but then when we actually came to to make the film we didn't watch a lot of other movies and you tend to do that sometimes we do we usually do screenings and we didn't on this one partly because it's a spy genre and that's such a well-established genre i felt like i didn't want to revisit those i know this film so well i know the bond film so well and the born movies also so it's kind of in there already and you don't really want to be looking at the specifics of it you kind of want to just go with the general inspiration from it all right and last question comes from twitter this is a thought-provoking one what has been the project that has impacted you the most chris tough one to answer really uh you know they all are experiences for me and for my family um you know you you go through things for for years um i suppose i would probably have to point to momento as the the single biggest impact because it was a a process of going through being a fully independent filmmaker where we're just you know literally shooting with friends and family and catches catch can and putting 16 mil films together and sort of spending other people's money uh and then the success of that film uh opened all kinds of possibilities uh you know for us in terms of how we would maybe get to tell bigger and bigger stories um but they've all they've all had you know an extraordinary impact on our lives one way or the other because they're just experiences that you go through for for years and i and i love to work with you know friends and family and so the kind of communal experiences for all of us that we go through yeah well this certainly has been a non-traditional release for for this film but for for those of you at home that uh have not experienced tenant uh it is available now on 4k ultra hd blu-ray and digital uh an incredible film from an incredible filmmaker christopher nolan thanks so much for uh for joining us and uh thank you we'll look forward to the next one thanks very much thanks chris

Channel: Cortex Videos

Views: 404,594

Keywords: christopher nolan, tenet, christopher nolan interview, christopher nolan tenet, christopher nolan tenet interview, tenet interview, tenet movie, tenet movie interview, chris nolan interview, christopher nolan full interview, interview christopher nolan, tenet christopher nolan, tenet christopher nolan interview, interview tenet, christopher nolan movies, tenet explained, tenet analysis, tenet film, chris nolan, nolan interview, tenet nolan, interview, cortex videos

Id: _Woppb0k_2M

Length: 45min 26sec (2726 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/theonlymexicanman]

“You see I gave up writing characters and just decided to name the Protagonist of Tenet, “The Protaganist” and gave him the most basic traits of a Protaganist. No one will really care because the action scenes are cool and you can’t hear half of the dialogue”

[u/yoinmcloin]

“Basically I write whatever I want in the dialogue bits, it won’t matter in the end because you won’t hear it over the sound of the ship horns”

[u/muavetruth]

For a movie that is supposedly all about exploring a cool concept - I didn't see one action scene or sequence or set piece that could be placed next to the greatest in Nolan's own career let alone in film history.

On a second viewing, it just feels even more like 250 000 000 dollar first draft. Like this could potentially have been interesting after another seven drafts. I wish someone could force him to work within the limitations of a small budget and/or force him to direct someone else's writing and I think this is what happens when an artist doesn't have to work around any limitations or explain himself to anyone.

Edit: Btw. The scene in the hotel room where the protagonist explains the concept to Patterson (that knows everything) had so much potential to be intriguing with a concept like this - and it just isn't explored at all.

[u/bumplummer]

I've never seen a more boring plane crash

[u/atomicnone]

Hahah I just want to say that elsewhere on the internet I’ve noticed quite a bit of Nolan worship and people saying how much credit he deserves for such a “masterpiece”...but I love that this sub is keeping it real. Movie was exhaustingly dull and full of plot robots

[u/dandyell]

I’m prob just lazy but I want to enjoy a movie without having to work so hard the entire time to keep my slipping grasp on what the fuck is going on.

[u/asande19]

Tenet had a horrible script though. Not sure if this is the movie to take notes from

[u/futurespacecadet]

I’m sorry, tenet is not some thing that is so incredibly smart that us plebeians ‘ just can’t understand it right now’. None of this Chris Nolan Fuckery Jedi mind tricks is happening here...... the acting was shit, I didn’t care about the protagonist, I didn’t care about the war at the end, Hell I didn’t even know what they were fighting. I didn’t understand the stakes because the characters sucked, the dialogue was awful, but the concept was novel. that’s it.

[u/Fiction47]

First i write the movie going forward, then i start at the end and head towards the middle, and then its done!