Christopher Nolan imagines every movie is the last he'll ever make
Christopher Nolan directed this summer's "The Odyssey" as if it would be the last movie he ever made, as he does for each of his films.
From "Memento" to "Inception," "Oppenheimer" and "The Dark Knight," he pushes the limits of what's possible. "The Odyssey" is the first ever theatrical release shot entirely with IMAX film cameras. Over 91 days, Nolan shot 2 million feet of footage, filming across Greece, Iceland, Morocco, Italy and Scotland.
"In taking on 'The Odyssey,' it does become about scale. It needed to be the biggest film that we have done," Nolan said. "It needed to be challenging to all of us because that's the nature of the story."
Adapting a story that's nearly 3,000 years old
Nolan's "Odyssey" is an extreme version of the Bronze age war story. The highly anticipated epic is Nolan's 13th film in 28 years. Unlike many directors, he writes screenplays himself.
"I feel a real responsibility to try and get as much on screen for the audience as possible to give the audience the fullest flavor, the fullest set of images and events that we can give them for a given story," Nolan said.
The director said that when he writes, he tries to put his future audience into the shoes of his characters.
"I want to try and give the audience a sense of what a place would smell like, what it would feel like," Nolan said. "But you're also trying to make the most involving, the most extreme version of a story possible."
The director, who's always eager to push the limits of what a film can be, said he "pushed pretty hard on this one and maybe found some limits."
This was Matt Damon's third Nolan film after "Interstellar" and "Oppenheimer."
"It was the hardest movie I've ever done by far. I mean, not even close," Damon said.
Nolan was upfront about how challenging the film would be.
"The first meeting I had with him, at the end of the meeting he said, 'This movie's going to be hard.' I kind of looked at him, like, 'I've made, I don't know, a hundred movies or whatever,'" Damon said. "I looked at him like, 'Yeah, I know.' And he looked at me and went, 'No, this movie's going to be really hard.'"
A lesson in humility, patience and independent filmmaking
"Hard" has been a recurring theme throughout Nolan's career.
"My earliest memories, literally, are of Chris making movies," Nolan's younger brother, fellow Hollywood director Jonathan Nolan said.
He may have grown up making movies using the family Super 8 camera, but Nolan was turned down when he applied to film school. He kept shooting short films despite the rejection.
A turning point came in 1999 when he made "Memento." Movie executives feared the public would find the film — a complex mystery with an amnesiac investigator — too confusing.
"It was a lesson in humility, it was a lesson in patience, of independent filmmaking, which is, you know, you finish a film, and you really feel you've achieved something. But convincing the industry of that, the distributors of that, it can take a long time," Nolan said.
It took a year to find someone to distribute the movie. Audiences found it unforgettable. The screenplay was nominated for an Oscar.
"Every 'no' that he got just confirmed for him, even more, that he wanted to do this," Nolan's wife, Emma Thomas, said.
Nolan met Thomas on his first day of college. They've been married for 26 years and she's produced each of his films.
"I cannot imagine Chris, if he wasn't making films," she said, adding, "It's horrifying to think how frustrated he would be if he wasn't able to tell stories via the medium of film."
Surging ahead in Hollywood
Today, the 55-year-old director's blockbusters have won 18 Academy Awards and hauled in more than $6 billion.
Actors covet roles in his movies.
"He really understands what actors do and what is required of them to do it," Damon said.
To Damon, what separates Nolan from other directors is the ambitious nature of the stories he tells and how far he'll go to tell them.
Nolan collapsed an actual building in "The Dark Night." For the film "Tenet," he bought a 747 and built a hangar to crash it into. The director will use computer animation, but only if it's impossible to do something authentically.
Despite being expensive and cumbersome, IMAX is Nolan's great ambition.The director is undaunted by rules in the industry.
"I'd love to feel that I had added something to the body of work of all the filmmakers I have admired and that great film history that's developing," he said. "If I can play some part in moving the language of it forward somehow that would be, that would be a great thing to be remembered for."