After getting up from behind his desk, Christopher Nolan sat in
a chair next to a small coffee table and a couch. An enormous
“Memento” poster hung over the desk, a smaller
“Following” poster over the chair in which he sat.
Earlier, he had walked into his waiting room after I had already
gotten there and ran his hand through his long, blonde hair. In a
subdued English accent you only find in Brits who have been in the
United States for a while, he asked for a cup of tea before we
began. A minute later, I walked into his office. As part of
“The Movie That Inspired Me” series put on by the UCLA
Film & TV Archive, Nolan, director of “Memento,”
will be screening “Blade Runner” tonight in the James
Bridges Theater. He will be present at the screening and will hold
a Q&A afterwards.
dB Magazine: Your films differ from what you see in a lot of
’80s style-over-substance filmmaking like “Blade
Runner.” Where do your stories come from? Christopher Nolan:
I’m very interested in points of view.
“Following,” “Memento” and
“Insomnia” are all very concerned with whose point of
view you’re receiving, whose head you’re in as you pass
through the story. dB: “Memento” is based on a short
story that your brother wrote. How did you turn it into a
screenplay? CN: If you could tell the story in the first person,
that would be the most interesting use of the concept (of memory
loss). I didn’t write anything until I figured that problem
out, and the solution was to invert the chronology, because if you
deny the audience the information that the character’s denied
because of his mental problem, you go a long way to getting into
his head. dB: So did you write the script forwards and then reverse
it? CN: I wrote it the way that it appears on the screen, and I
never viewed the material chronologically. The previous film I had
done, “Following,” has a nonlinear structure.
It’s a different structure, but it is non-chronological. The
way I had written that was that I conceived the structure and then
I wrote the script entirely chronologically and divided it up and
reassembled it according to that structure. That actually was an
incredible amount of work because you have to do so much rewriting,
so I decided with “Memento” never to do that. dB: The
opening shot of all three of your films is a close-up of
somebody’s hands doing something. Is that intentional, like a
trademark of some kind? CN: No, not really. I think it’s
always best to find an element or symbol of what’s going to
happen in the film that could be used to suggest a lot of different
directions in which the story’s going to go. dB: What’s
your trademark as a filmmaker? CN: In the directors I’ve
always admired, there’s something in their work that you can
connect in their different films, but it tends to be more
interesting than something that’s immediately identifiable. I
try to approach each project somewhat differently and then
hopefully in the subconscious there will be all kinds of
connections. dB: What’s your filmmaking process like? CN: The
truth is that the job of the director is to bring everything
together at every stage and be the lens through which
everybody’s input is focused. You really have enormous sets
of problems at every stage. What I find is that the beginning of
every stage is tremendous fun, and then, by the end, you’re
ready to move on to the next stage because it has become very
tiring. At the end, you’re very torn because you don’t
want to be finished because it’s been so much fun making a
film, but at the same time you’re pretty tired and want to
get it out there and see what people think of it. Interview
conducted by Jake Tracer.