TENET - when Christopher Nolan makes a cult classic

think about your favorite movies and how they've impacted your life what was that first viewing like what makes them stick with you our favorite movies are a very personal thing that usually stems from fond memories of say parents taking us to the cinema or friends bonding over shared interests they often bring about the purest form of human emotions in all of us leaving us in this state of wonderment with the belief that anything is possible if you're christopher nolan you keep this mantra very near and dear to your heart and use it to drive your creativity you see what people often forget is nolan is as much a fan of movies as he is making them and his journey as a storyteller filmmaker and innovator has all been in pursuit of delivering the same impressionable movie-going experiences to audiences he received at a young age it's like a giddy parent eager to share their passions and interests with their kids you so deeply want them to share in the emotionality of what you've loved for so long and even if they don't take to it the way you hoped it still even if for a brief moment brings you back to a childlike state of wonder with tenet christopher nolan leaned into those passions loves interests and explorations as a film fan and storyteller to finally deliver the epitome of a christopher nolan movie his spontaneity and excitement to share this experience with a global audience shaped his own experience making the film and trickled down into the experiences of the characters and audiences solidifying tenet as nolan's ideal movie and if we're going to be talking about nolan's ideal movie then we're going to need an ideal sponsor and this video is brought to you by expressvpn expressvpn protects your data from the spying eyes of all the government intelligence agencies and big brother companies on the web and most importantly allows you to watch movies unavailable on you as streaming services such as nolan's the prestige and inception which are available on the uk netflix and for our international subscribers this means that you can watch all of the pierce brosnan and daniel craig bond movies a staple i might add in the nolan household on the us netflix and none of this would be possible unless you have express vpn but being able to watch your favorite movies is only the beginning there are a ton of internet pitfalls you might be falling victim to like being charged more for airline tickets because of where you live and a vpn could guard you against that so take back your privacy and indulge guilt-free in the films of christopher nolan and check out expressvpn just click the link in the description or visit www.expressvpn.com to find out how you can get three months free can you swim there's arguably no genre that's had the impact and influence on christopher nolan than the spy genre we know this he's never shied away from it and even if he never spoke a word about it the hallmarks of the genre permeate throughout most if not all of his filmography in some capacity even more than that his experiences watching the james bond films especially not only shaped his filmmaking sensibilities but the kind of storyteller he aspires to be as the filmmaker himself cheekily puts it anyone who's seen my other films knows how shamelessly i've ripped those films off over the years so from the tender age of seven the bond movies especially the spy who loved me left nolan with a remarkable sense of wonder scale and escapism that still felt tangible he spoke of this in an interview with total film stating what i remember and what i've tried to retain from that experience it's the feeling of possibility that you could jump through the screen and go anywhere in the world and see the most amazing things it had such scale and such possibilities really it was pure escapism and had an excellent sort of fantasy component to it as well you know with the car that turns into a submarine and all that stuff but really great it was the first time nolan truly experienced cinema it provided a memory a feeling that would go on to inspire the writer director's own filmmaking journey and as evidenced by the trajectory of his filmography it's an element that's only become more important to him over time from the moment he knew he wanted to make movies the idea of making a spy movie was something of extreme interest to nolan there are key images and concepts that stem from those impressionable childhood experiences that nolan's been mulling over perfecting and filing away in his head for years that's why in many ways tenet is a culmination of nolan's own emotional journey as a storyteller i think i've spent a lot of my career trying to get back to that feeling and trying to give that experience to audiences to take you back to that sense of wonderment about possibilities of what movies can do and where they can take you however there's an innate challenge in achieving that and it's something that few filmmakers and studios have a firm grasp on but they aren't christopher nolan nostalgia is a hot commodity these days and the way in which it inspires filmmakers and wows audiences is often rooted in specific vapid visual cues from works they admire true inspiration is actually incredibly rare to come by these days and it's something nolan actually addressed 10 years ago in a little film called inception let's revisit the scene where cobb and arthur explained the concept of inception to sato here's me planting an idea in your head i say to you don't think about elephants what are you thinking about elephants right but it's not your idea because you know i gave it to you the subject's mind can always trace the genesis of the idea true inspiration is impossible to fake when you ask someone to think of an idea the subject usually subconsciously responds with an answer that's been inspired or affected by outside sources statements references etc true inspiration has to come from within and even nolan himself acknowledges it's incredibly difficult to do however if we fast forward a bit in the film nolan appears to have the answer to that as well when eems cobb arthur ariadne and the rest of the team are brainstorming the best way to plant a complicated idea into fisher's mind they deduce that in order for it to stick they have to boil it down to its purest form that being the emotion's heavy personal relationship with his father if you look across nolan's filmography you'll notice that when he approaches genre he boils it down to its purest form a simplified and singular concept or idea which conveys as raw unbridled emotion to continue the metaphor when you boil something down it becomes flavorless which is bland to some but precisely where nolan likes it so he can inject it with his own personal flavor he studies everything until he gets to the core so he can reinvent it it's a very calculated and intellectual approach to storytelling one he's been building towards since he arrived onto the scene with momento yet it's a proven formula that's yielded some of the most awe-inspiring original blockbuster cinema for the past 20 years now i know what you're all thinking that's all well and good great thanks for the information but what the hell does that have to do with tenet well with tenet it wasn't intellectual it was emotional what do you get when you boil down the spy genre romance action intrigue charm spectacle the key elemental ingredients he wasn't thinking about things he was feeling things which brings us to an important mandate christopher nolan implemented during the making of tenant usually in preparation for filming nolan will screen prints of works that inform the team's overall vision of the project and grasp the specifics as it pertains to the genre he screened the wages of fear among many others for dunkirk 2001 a space odyssey for interstellar heat for the dark knight and so on and so forth tenet is the only film he's made where he didn't do any screenings the reason being i actually wanted to work from a memory and a feeling of that genre rather than the specifics as we've established nolan's a bondaholic with his knowledge love and passion for the franchise it would have been too easy for him to just ape the series for his own project you know cheap superficial nostalgia ploys that seem to be very much in these days and people seem seem to like it but you see nolan didn't want to simply recreate james bond he wanted to create a film that embodied the excitement and grand scale entertainment he felt from those movies as a kid james bond is totally in my bones i don't need to reference the movies and look at them again it's about trying to re-engage with your childhood connection with those movies with the feeling of what it's like to go someplace new someplace fresh memories shape us change us evolve over time and become compartmentalized for many of us it's difficult to recall an event or experience exactly how it happened but we're able to discern the broad strokes the fine details however are in a constant state of flux becoming a product of instinct and emotion rather than hard fact even if the details are muddied you're still able to achieve the same nirvana you did when the memory first occurred you succeeded that's exactly what nolan strived for with tenet and it's a lesson he picked up from an unlikely source i have no idea whether this is true but i sort of have this idea that if you look at sergio leone when he made once upon a time in the west or a fist full of dollars or the good the bad and the ugly there's a slight feeling of i'm not sure he watched any westerns while he was making it it expresses his love for the genre that's grown over years and years and years and there's something so fabulously heightened about the way he then engages with that genre it's the distillation of all of these things in his past and his impressions of the genre i wanted the crew to dive into this film in a very unique way and to not really be influenced by things in a conscious sense but to just let our love for the genre and our love for movies in general feed into the way in which we express things this is precisely why you can't pinpoint a specific reference while watching tenet yes there are moments that feel like the spy who loved me or goldfinger or really any bond film but you can't quite make a one-to-one comparison tenet itself is a spy movie concoction it has the exotic globe trotting and romance of a bond movie the exhilarating set pieces of north by northwest the grit of the cold war neo-noir films of the 50s felt through the fight sequences and climactic set pieces yet they've all been tampered with by the mind and memory of christopher nolan and presented in a distinct new fashion the trajectory of nolan's career has always pointed towards visceral immersive experiential cinema starting with the dark knight nolan's directorial style began trending more towards spectacle marking the first time he utilized imax technology with each subsequent film his experimentation with the technology would push his work further and further into the territory of experiential cinema interstellar represents the apex of this experimentation in which nolan fully realized the potential of the medium seeking to push that potential to its furthest limit nolan's next film dunkirk saw the director apply his newfound mastery of imax to create a purely experiential piece of cinema mirroring his approach to genre boiling it down to its bare essentials dunkirk was the proof of concept for the potential of experiential cinema so for his next film nolan set his sights on applying the tricks he had learned on dunkirk to a more traditional narrative film if dunkirk was nolan perfectly perfecting the highly choreographed routine tenet was nolan taking that mastery and being able to effortlessly freestyle tenet is the equivalent of a live experience instead of meticulously planning and constructing every fine detail to then recite it back to the audience exactly as conceived he allowed himself to go off script surrendering to the moment he knows the spy genre he has mastery over imax technology and visual grammar he understands how to texturize characters through the situation so now is the time for nolan to get out of his own head and become spontaneous while the logic of a tight narrative remains present nolan focused his efforts on tenet into constructing moments he was experiencing the story on a far more personal and emotional level allowing himself to go in different directions depending on how his memory served him in that particular moment this also gave him the freedom to pivot and pluck from different genres and stylistic choices as they came to him in tom shone's the nolan variations nolan speaks to simple concepts ideas memories and moments that resurfaced during the making of tenets such as the imagery of the bullets coming out of the wall an idea that i've been sitting on for a very long time 20 to 25 years something like that a nature documentary he once saw while running backwards in an editing suite in paris at age 16 and a detour attending a three-day conference in mumbai called reframing the future of film to discuss the cause of protecting film as a medium made during a location scouting trip in 2018 and it wasn't just moments from nolan's own life he drew upon being an avid learner reader and researcher nolan filed away real world happenings and concepts in his head that he found to be cinematic in nature the idea of free pores for example a massive underground network of vaults that the rich use in order to store priceless pieces of art without paying taxes was based on a 2013 article he read in the economist nolan understood that it wasn't the 1940s or the 1950s anymore we live in an age where the magic of movies is often taken for granted and he couldn't simply dazzle with the flawless execution of reverse imagery as seen in orpheus it has to be used for narrative purpose in many ways nolan needed to throw out the playbook and re-engage with how he was looking at the world and taking in influences to create the film one of the things i was most excited about with tenets was i found something that i wanted to do with this that you can't articulate on a page you actually have to see it you have to experience it to properly understand it it speaks to the essence of cinema hitchcock biographer peter aykroyd poses similar sentiment explaining that in north by northwest its plots may be baffling in cold print but on the screen it's pure flights and pursuit rapid changes and fleeting moments one switch follows another with such speed that the audience registers only panic and excitement tom shone further examines this in the nolan variations connecting it to nolan's fascination and love of the true cinematic sensory experience stating the desire to induce pain and excitement is just what it always was but as nolan has gotten older he has like hitchcock grown more intrigued by the abstract potential of composition and the use of music to pattern and structure his films i think you see the connection i'm trying to make here nolan's methodology is incredibly hitchcockian and is why a film like north by northwest wild dense in plot isn't so much about the details of the narrative but being whisked away in the spectacle of roger thornhill's journey and it's not like we're given an extensive backstory as to oh who is thornhill is he what what is he doing here what's going on with the uh the agents and the suits and uh and why is he on mount rushmore and all that he's a character forged through the actions of the film a lesson nolan implemented in dunkirk and fine-tuned even more intent he understands that you can create empathy through characters just by virtue of the situation they're in we don't need the protagonist to come on screen and recount a long sob story about why he decided to become an international super spy or neil to explicitly tell us who he is and what he's doing there characters don't need to make a case for why you should care about them if you follow hitchcock and nolan's logic to elicit empathy out of your characters you simply need to align the audience closely with the point of view of the character and follow them with a camera these two great titans of cinema while separated by decades understand that sometimes the best films need to consider the point of view of the storytelling sometimes the key to telling a truly gripping story is the narrative itself in the same way hitchcock used characters as a tool to convey the immediacy of the story to the audience nolan pivots from his personal experience making tenet to create an experience for the characters who are tools or vessels for then delivering that experience to the audience don't try to understand it feel it many have quoted this line in an effort to write off tenet's narrative as convoluted or nonsensical sure it's a bit operatic but if you really want to dissect it the pieces are all there instead clemens posey's line is merely an invitation for how the audience should experience nolan's spy epic as shonen explains in the nolan variations the most dangerous verb in a christopher nolan movie is to know we see this in memento as leonard tirelessly searches for answers to his wife's murder when he realizes who really killed her he doesn't like the answer he gets as the film ends with the question of if it's possible to unknow something in interstellar shone points out that murph's scientific progress is halted upon the realization that her father may have embarked on this mission with the knowledge that he was leaving the people of earth to die as nolan's films examine we all have a thirst for more knowledge and want all of the answers especially while watching a film as ripe for conversation as tenet however there often comes a price with such knowledge and you might not like the answer you get during the tenet wrap party robert pattinson gifted an anthology of speeches given by j robert oppenheimer the creator of the atomic bomb following the bombing of nagasaki and hiroshima in which the physicist expressed his ambivalence towards the creation of the atomic bomb in the nolan variations nolan comments i've grown up in the post-nuclear age in graeme swift's waterland there's a whole section about apocalyptic thinking we've grown up in the shadow of the ultimate destructive knowledge there's very little you would miss if that technology disappeared it's like that sophocles line they quote in angel heart which is the only reason i know it how terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the man that's wise to know something is to have power over it generally but what if the reverse is true if knowing something gives it power over you if the characters intended are vessels for the audience to experience the story then their knowledge is critical to the overall experience of the film in most spy movies the protagonist is in pursuit of knowledge fittingly in tenet it's the inverse to unknown something there's a cold war cold as ice we even know its true nature is to lose this is knowledge divided all i have for you is a gesture in combination with a word tenet our heroes are trying to prevent the future from destroying the past to ensure the longevity of tomorrow information is purposefully kept from the protagonist for the good of the mission no stone is left turned otherwise the future will use it against them john david washington's the protagonist is therefore left using his cunning wit intellect emotions instinct and the word paired with a gesture tenet to maneuver his way through the world of international espionage for both the creator and the protagonist knowledge was not power it put them at a disadvantage similar to the protagonist nolan's way of conceiving the story was to remove all knowledge that wasn't memory or instinct from the table in order to reinvent the spy movie tenet wears its influences on its sleeves but as i mentioned before it's not absolute in that approach to the narrative becomes the central core of the story and the goal of the characters and thus becomes how nolan wants the audience to experience the film the don't think about it feel it line is important because the film takes the traditional interpretation of knowledge and inverts it the less you know the better the experience is in using this approach to create moments tenet is a film that operates differently on repeat viewings not only for the audience but for the characters as well offering a new experience with each viewing just like a memory for instance the first time through the audience experiences the film through the eyes of john david washington as he experiences the sweeping journey of his mission we take it all in using our intuition and movie going savviness to guide us we might not consume all the fine details but the broad strokes the emotions the visceral intensity of the narrative swells over us allowing us to understand what just happened the second viewing armed with the knowledge of what happens asks us to participate through the lens of neil as we experience the inverse of the narrative it works an entirely different part of your movie watching brain and while still the same movie offers a wholly new experience how does the knowledge of who neil is and his relation to the protagonist inform how we view him how does knowing the plan works affects neil's actions and decisions if we take a step back and look at the entirety of tenet how does our knowledge of nolan's films and trademarks affect how we view this one and how does that knowledge then circle back around to how nolan chooses to construct his narrative this thought process weighed heavily on nolan's mind during the creation of tenet we tried to make the film palindromically correct that is to say if someone buys a dvd and they watch it backwards it's consistent these days when you make a film like this you are in a weird dialogue with the culture as well as the audience sitting in the seats it's a little unhealthy because i need to do my job you have to decide okay am i making this film for the theatrical audience or for somebody who's going to obsessively look at it once they've seen the film three times and then they go online and google this and start to ask why this and why that there are all kinds of questions that they could start to ask and i have an answer to most of those things but do you include the answer or not nolan's filmmaking revolves around a core ethos of understanding have the film make sense at every moment but also be willing to break small realisms for the sake of storytelling as a result while certain plot elements of say memento or inception can be open to interpretation or ambiguity nolan has also never made a film that leaves a bunch of questions unanswered or which tells an incoherent story nolan's films almost interact with their viewers daring them to think to ask questions in act one and to see if the answers line up in act three momento gives away its structure very quickly leaving audiences to ask how things might line up whereas the dark knight gripped theatergoers with its examination of the joker peaking their curiosity as to how far his brutality might go tenet appears to solidify something which nolan's devotees have proclaimed for at least a decade that his filmmaking defines itself as does that of all the great directors hitchcockian tarantino-esque now nolanesque is a term that dates back at least as far as the release of inception even just the aforementioned ways in which tenet emulates north by northwest not in plot but in self-aware filmmaking shows that nolan knows what his audiences expect when his name is attached to a movie and if tenet is any indication of the future of his filmmaking nolan appears to be more than willing to meet those expectations while following his own instincts interests and pursuits can you be sincere and self-conscious i'm not sure you can there are things in this project that are all very direct repeats of things i've done in the past and the sincerity to me is in not taking them out when i was writing the film i went rogue for a long time on my own without anyone knowing what i was doing but when i showed the script to my brother i asked him is this me repeating myself he was like no it's more the apotheosis of a set of ideas i said great that's how i feel about it you're working out your fascinations in public so people see development of things and in some senses that's good and in another sense it can be reductive it can be like okay he's repeating himself that knowledge is dangerous yes i'm aware of it but i'm not riffing on my past work i'm trying to be true to the impulses that have defined me in other words i didn't finish the last film and go okay i should do another inception that wasn't really in my thinking but emotionally this is the film that was in my heart you're driving at something you're driving at your own obsessions cinematically the theatrical landscape is an ever-changing one and now more than ever audiences have to feel a movie is worth the time and money to venture outside of their homes especially with streaming invading the marketplace the way it is and that's not to say streaming is inherently bad there is a lot of value in content heading straight to netflix amazon prime hulu hbo max and so on and so forth and most importantly it's easily accessible however no matter how hard the industry tries it's damn near impossible to replicate the experience of when the lights go down in a crowded theater as a group of strangers gets swept up in the magic of cinema a film has to offer audiences a one-of-a-kind larger-than-life experience they can't get on their televisions computers tablets or phones a film must engage you as an active participant inviting you to live in and surrender to the moment with your senses feelings emotions the things that make us human these are the same impressionable elements that cemented themselves in the mind of christopher nolan as he watched the bond films at a young age his entire career has been in the pursuit of achieving that same feeling and passing it down to future generations tenet is the manifestation of nolan as his own adjective and like all great filmmakers he accomplished that by relying on instinct memory and own personal experiences to create an experience that spreads to the world of the characters and audiences it's a film that puts into practice his mantra of being true to your own passion and what excites you as a storyteller while doing things that bring you back to that youthful sense of play in the words of christopher nolan himself i'm not going to be different for the sake of being different the approach to me has to be sincere when i go to see somebody's film and i don't think the filmmaker loved the film that's when i feel i've wasted my time [Music] hey guys it's griffin here thank you all so much for taking the time to watch this deep dive into tenet and the mind of christopher nolan christopher nolan is my favorite filmmaker working today and uh it was a real treat to finally be able to dissect one of his films in a film that means so much to me if you aren't aware this video is part of the director project a monthly playlist series featuring some of your favorite creators across film tube who like to dissect and dig deep into a filmmaker for that given month this month january we are dissecting the works of christopher nolan so definitely go support and check out the incredible video essays on christopher nolan and his work and most importantly if you want to contribute to this playlist and you want to be considered for uh the director project and you want to be a part of this whole uh great collaboration we have going on here feel free to make your own and then tweet it out to at cult popsure and uh we'll make sure it winds up in the playlist there but most importantly guys if you haven't done so already be sure to like this video share with your friends and subscribe to the filmspeak channel for more deep dive video essays like this i promise you all the quantum assaults one is coming and it is coming it will be in fact the next video essay that we do here so feel free to subscribe to the channel so you don't miss out on that we like to say the conversation continues after the credits and of course we'd love to have you be a part of that conversation so consider subscribing to the channel and lastly guys if you like me specifically and you like what i have to say you can give me a follow on twitter at griffshiller alright thank you all so so much uh this this video is i'm i'm really proud of it so please share it around it would be amazing but until next time guys thanks for watching take care you

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Id: 2AY1JghA4tw

Length: 31min 23sec (1883 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 07 2021