Let the movie flow through oneself, Nolan: Don't overthink
Oppenheimer is currently being released globally.
"Nolan's films are easy to enter but extremely difficult to exit. After watching them, they are like ink dripping into water, constantly spreading in your mind. We can't erase the movie we just watched from our minds. It's not even really over yet. In many ways, it's actually just beginning."
This is Tom Sean's evaluation of Christopher Nolan, one of the most eye-catching and controversial film creators in the world today. This senior film critic and scholar, who has known Nolan for over 20 years, conducted an exclusive in-depth interview with him for over 3 years and published the book "Nolan Variations". This book is intertwined with dialogue interviews and Sean's discourse, providing unprecedented closeness and a vast amount of first-hand information, making it a must read for understanding Nolan and his films. Each chapter is structured around Nolan's infatuated themes such as "time", "space", "illusion", and "dream". The director personally explains the inspiration and behind the scenes stories behind his 11 feature films and 4 short films.
This article is excerpted from the book, with some deletions, and the title is added by the editor.
The Nolan Variations, written by Tom Shawn and translated by Li Sixue, published by Democracy and Construction Press
"I feel more like a craftsman than an artist"
Christopher Nolan, one of the most eye-catching and topical film creators in the world today
Although the beginning of this book chronicles Nolan's early life and his films are later organized in chronological order, it is not a biography. This is the first time Nolan is happy to talk about his experiences of growing up across the Atlantic, his boarding school years, all the things that had an impact on him before picking up the camera to shoot a movie, his experiences, and sources of inspiration. But he still hates others interpreting his works from a biographical perspective almost physiologically.
I don't want to compare myself to Hitchcock, but I believe I am at risk of being misunderstood because there are many very obvious connections between my works. I really don't deny this, but it comes more from the perspective of a craftsman than from an inner obsession. I also see Hitchcock in the same way. He is an extremely outstanding craftsman, and there is no Freudian subtext in his films. Yes, you can analyze his films at a deeper level, but the problem with doing so is that you will overlook the more obvious driving forces in his works. I feel that my creation is more based on technical techniques, abstract concepts, and drama. To be honest, I feel more like a craftsman than an artist. I'm not pretending to be humble when I say this. I think some filmmakers are artists, such as Terrence Malik. Perhaps the difference between the two lies in whether you use movies to express something purely personal, heartfelt, and unappealing, or whether you're working hard to communicate and connect with the audience, connecting their expectations and experiences. Compared to everyone's expectations, my work focuses more on the practical aspects of film production
The most surprising aspect of Nolan's self-evaluation may be that it shares the same views as Nolan's fierce critics. The latter believes that he is just an actor with a cleanliness fetish, playing some movie version of "magic eye" puzzle games - those are exquisite craftsmanship but empty and obscene, devoid of passion for creative expression of mission, and lifeless beyond the perfect glass section.
The only difference between Nolan and his critics is how they evaluate this glassy texture. Critics feel the lack of individuality in the part, but Nolan, like a magician, takes pride in this "self disappearance" technique. The reason why I wrote this book is that I believe neither is correct. The autobiographical nature of Nolan's films may not be as strong as in "The Bad Alley" or even "E.T. Aliens", but they all have a personal touch. The codenames used in his works during filming often originate from his children - "The Dark Knight" is "Rory's First Kiss", "Inception" is "Oliver's Arrow", "The Dark Knight Rises" is "Magnus King", and "Star Trek" is "Flora's Letter". The landscape and mythology constructed by Nolan's films, for this creator, are as personal as the cheap bars in Scorsese or the suburban communities in Spielberg. These movies are set in the city and country where Nolan lived, echoing the buildings he lived or studied, borrowing from books and movies that shaped him, and rearranging the themes he encountered on his journey to adulthood: exile, memory, time, identity, and fatherhood. His movies are highly personalized fantasies that are given a sense of urgency and persuasiveness by their creators, allowing them to be viewed not as second-rate versions of reality, but rather as equally important. Fantasy is as indispensable as oxygen. He dreams with his eyes open and wants us to be with him.
Not a collection of interviews, but the result of dozens of hours of interviews
Movie Dunkirk Poster
This book is not a collection of interviews by Nolan, although it is the result of decades of interviews. The interview took place at his home in Hollywood and took three years. During this period, Nolan wrote, prepared, filmed, and edited his latest work, "Creed.". What are his guidelines? What is the difference between a great plot twist and a "decent" twist? How personalized are his movies? What can move him? What makes him afraid? How long does he think the ideal plot time span should be, weeks, days, or hours? What is his political viewpoint The first thing you quickly learned during the interview with Nolan was that if you were to ask him directly where those unique themes and obsessions originated, you wouldn't get any answers. For example, if you ask him how he initially became interested in the maze, soon you will also fall into the maze yourself. "I really don't remember much, it's not that I don't want to reveal it. I feel like I gradually developed a clear interest in mazes and other things while starting to tell stories and make movies." By asking a few more questions about something he was infatuated with, he actually got more infatuated things, which formed a long recursive chain. "I think my obsession with identity may really stem from my obsession with narrative subjectivity," he would say, or "I think my obsession with time actually stems from my obsession with movies." He wanted to follow the clear boundary between life and movies, so he had this rhetorical habit. His infatuation, or what I call "obsession," floats in mid air like Alexander Calder's dynamic sculpture, with each part interconnected, ultimately returning to the original obsession - the film itself.
Ripple and bulge at the edge of an interpretable range
Poster for the movie "Creed"
The second thing you learned during the interview is that he often uses the word "charming".
When he uses the word "charming", it has a slightly antique connotation, reminding people of the etymology of the word - one is the Latin word "fascinatus", which is the past participle of "fascinare", meaning "bewitched or bewitched, causing it to fall into a trance"; The second is fascinus, which means "incantation, witchcraft". At first, I put in a lot of effort to find the literary source of this word, but eventually I realized who it reminded me of. In Brem Stoke's "Dracula the Vampire Count", Van Helsing is determined not to procrastinate until "the lascivious female vampire hypnotizes him with beauty", and he discovers that "although his eyes are open, he is slowly falling asleep and about to enter a sweet illusion.". In Conan Doyle's "The Hound of the Baskervilles," Watson describes the bloodthirsty jaws of the Baskervilles as "ferocious yet captivating," "so terrifying yet so charming.".
Victorian people often made you feel that their quirks were not strictly rational, but under such heavy pressure, rationality continued to expand. The same goes for Nolan's films, which ripple and swell on the interpretable margins, and they are films of rational trauma. Tearing open the surface of Christopher Nolan's films, you often find sources from the Victorian era. Goethe's "Faust" overshadows the trilogy "Deadly Magic" and "Dark Knight"; The Rise of the Dark Knight is a reprocessing of Dickens' Two Cities; In Star Trek, there is an astonishing amount of space borrowed from Thomas Robert Malthus's theory, including the complete works of Conan Doyle, as well as a pipe organ with 382 stops; The ships in Dunkirk are named after Wilkie Collins' 1868 novel Moonstone, while the music composed by Hans Zimmer echoes Edward Elgar's Riddle Variations.
"What if knowing something means being controlled by it?"
Movie Inception Poster
If the Gestalt in the design of the film was influenced by Joseph Stalin, then its intellectual godfather is J. Robert Oppenheimer, who provided the film with McGonagall - a type of reverse radiation produced by nuclear fission. Moreover, the film was originally scheduled to be released on July 17th, the day after the world's first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945. That was detonated by Oppenheimer in the desert of New Mexico, with the code name of the nuclear testing site being "Trinity", from the poem of Oppenheimer's favorite poet John Donne. The light generated by a nuclear explosion can reach up to 10000 feet, equivalent to several suns radiating light at noon. Light can be seen from over 100 miles away, and heat can be felt from 20 miles away. "A few laughed, a few cried, and most remained silent." Oppenheimer later wrote, "I remembered a line from the Hindu classic" Bhagavad Gita "that Vishnu was trying to persuade the prince to fulfill his duty. In order to impress the latter, Vishnu transformed into a multi armed form and said, 'I have now become the god of death, the destroyer of the world.'" Due to Oppenheimer's quote, "I have now become the god of death, the destroyer of the world" became the most widely circulated line in the Bhagavad Gita, but it was translated by Oppenheimer as the Sanskrit original word for "death." Actually, it is more often explained as "time". Therefore, in the classic version of Penguin, this sentence is translated as "I am the eternal time, devouring everything.".
Oppenheimer is the ultimate Faustian figure - in fact, in 1932, at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Oppenheimer participated in a play that imitated Faustian, along with several physicist colleagues, including Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Ellenfest, and James Chadwick. For the same reason, Oppenheimer perfectly highlights Nolan's style in intelligence. Oppenheimer is tall and thin, with a sensitive nervous system and an almost arrogant aristocratic temperament. After the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his nerves collapsed. "He keeps smoking, non-smoking, non-smoking," said Dorothy McKibin, the administrative director of the Los Alamos Laboratory for the Manhattan Project. One day, Anne Wilson, Oppenheimer's secretary, noticed that he looked particularly worried and asked him what was wrong. He replied, "I've just been thinking about those poor civilians." Nearly 80000 people in Nagasaki were turned into ashes by atomic bombs - two years later, on November 25th, Oppenheimer gave a public speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology titled "Physics of the Contemporary World.". He said in his speech, "From a rough meaning - a meaning that no vulgar, humorous, or grandiose words can completely dissolve - physicists have seen evil, and they cannot forget this cognition." This article is included in Oppenheimer's post-war speech collection, which succinctly expresses his contradictory psychology towards nuclear technology.
At the closing party of Creed, Robert Pattinson gave this speech collection as a gift to Nolan. The feeling of reading is strange because the things they release also make them conflicted. How to control it? The responsibility is immense. Once this knowledge is exposed to the world, what else can you do? The toothpaste squeezed out cannot be put back. This is actually a thoughtful and insightful killing gift, because like us, we all grew up in the post nuclear era. In Graham Swift's "Water Country", there is a whole paragraph about the end of the world. Nuclear technology has ultimate destructive power - we all grew up in the shadow of knowing this. If this technology disappears, you won't miss it much. Just like in the movie "Angel Heart". The quote from Sophocles in the movie only made me realize this sentence: 'In a place where wisdom is disadvantageous to the wise, how terrible it is to have wisdom!' Generally speaking, knowing something means being able to control it. But what if the opposite is true, and what if knowing something means being controlled by it
What is the most dangerous verb? The answer is "know"
Through Nolan's lens, we can see what American movies are made up of verbs - shooting, kissing, killing; Nolan added his own unique subset - forgetting, sleeping, dreaming. But what is the most dangerous verb in his work sequence? The answer is "know".
In "Fragments of Memory," Natalie tells Leonard, "Even if you avenge yourself, you don't even know it happened." "I don't know if it makes any difference," he responds, "I don't remember these things, and it doesn't make my actions meaningless." Ironically, when he finally finds out who the wife killer is, he is not satisfied with that answer, making the ending of the film entirely dependent on another question: can your understanding of something go from "knowing" to "not knowing"?
In "Insomnia," Ellie asks the police officer Dommer played by Al Pacino, "Did you intend to shoot Harp?" "I don't know," Dommer shouts, "I don't know anything." All the protagonists in Nolan's movies may shout this way, they are creations of the Victorian era under certainty, but fall into this world where certainty no longer exists. "Believe it! Sir, I just know." Victorian art critic John Ruskin once responded to those who questioned his views. Nolan's protagonist is Ruskin in Einstein's universe, troubled by known or supposed limitations. Murphy from Star Trek said, "You say science is admitting what we don't know." She is a student who is loyal to scientific methods, but there is a question that has been tormenting her: how much her father knows about his plan to leave Earth forever - "Does he know? Does my father know?!" No matter how much he knows, he leaves, leaving her to gaze at the black hole and find the answer.
The best advice in Creed comes from the scientist played by Clement Percy, who says, "Don't try to understand... feel." This is Nolan's usual invitation to the audience not to overthink, but to entrust themselves to the movie and let it flow through them.
