The director Christopher Nolan would perform inception on: “If I could steal someone’s dream”
Christopher Nolan is one of the most widely celebrated and revered modern filmmakers, with a spectacularly inescapable presence in Hollywood as he churns out new additions to his twisted universe each year.
With a body of work comprising classics such as Interstellar, The Dark Knight and Oppenheimer, the director is known for his logic-defying worlds and deeply cynical undertone, often portraying characters who are trapped in a hell of their own making and struggling to break free, whether it be Matthew McConaughey’s character in Interstellar as he journeys through time to be reunited with his daughter or the moral dilemma of J Robert Oppenheimer after making one of the deadliest weapons in the world and struggling to reconcile with its consequences.
With years of films that have stunned global audiences, the director is now one of the most powerful people in the industry, creating stories that appeal to people through the sheer magnitude of their visual scope and scale. However, greatness often doesn’t solely come from the person in possession of it, and Nolan described the filmmakers who he would most like to inhabit the dreams of in order to steal some of their ideas and infuse them into his work.
Quentin Tarantino has often cited the infamous quote, “good artists copy, great artists steal” when describing his work, discussing the impact that directors like Sergio Leone and Martin Scorsese had on his style. Nolan seems to have adopted a similar philosophy, with the director often speaking at length about his love for Ridley Scott and the magnitude of his visual style, describing the influence that this had on his own films. This is certainly something he has carried into his work, with his films rarely holding up in their emotional intelligence and writing of the characters but instead relying on the innovation of his visual storytelling. After all, it is more important to have fast-paced action sequences and cool special effects than any characters with substance.
But there are many other directors who have influenced the immersive visual qualities of his work, turning each piece into a spectacle that is made to be seen on the big screen. While he can try to imitate their style, Nolan revealed the filmmakers whose dreams he would most like to invade in order to pick their brains, saying, “If I could steal someone’s dream myself, I’d have to go for one of Orson Welles”.
Welles is most well-known for Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil, the first of which is widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time due to its impressive visual language that feels completely ahead of its time. The director also described the influence of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Brazil, which both blend light and dark to create dissonant and challenging narratives.
Nolan has honed a specific tonal palette in all of his films, but perhaps this is something that will be utilised in a different way for his upcoming film The Odyssey. Adapting such as classic literary text is no small feat, and perhaps this will force the director to widen this scope and try something different.
