Christopher Nolan is one of the most influential, revered and successful directors of his time, creating a seemingly endless run of expectation-defying movies - but his rise is also the reason behind some of the key problems in modern Hollywood. When we talk about Nolan's influence, it tends to center on two key things: the brooding darkness and PG-13-pushing of Interstellar. These have certainly had a major impact on blockbuster cinema, although to take in the scope what he's truly done, we need to step outside of the movies' actual content and look at how he's altered the studio approach.
Nolan is from the generation of Following (a student film in all practicalities, although not one without hints at future greatness), the big step was Memento; his revenge drama in reverse got massive attention and marked him out as one to watch. Next up was remake Insomnia, but then - after just three films, two of which were moderate successes - he was handed the keys to the castle. Warner Bros. wanted to save Batman from the Schumacher era and so they got Nolan to craft a top-down new take on the Caped Crusader, and both the character and his career just went from strength to strength.
While the rise to The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar have been more experimental and thus divisive (mainly due to vastly increased ambition), he's continued to only more success.
No matter how you measure it - reviews, audience assessment, box office, lasting legacy - Christopher Nolan is the ideal blockbuster filmmaker. So it's little wonder studios have tried to find another.
The Real Nolan Influence
That first step in Nolan's journey - the jump from small movies to a massive studio tentpole - is hardly groundbreaking by today's standards. In the just the past few months we've had Dean Israelite on The Amazing Spider-Man, most of Marvel's recent hires; plucking an indie star out of immense but lesser-seen success is the way you make a blockbuster in the 2010s.
But back in 2005, it was a pretty unprecedented move. You had director wunderkinds, sure, but they grew off their previous successes, not promise of potential. Going back a couple of decades, while George Lucas and Steven Spielberg both rose to hitherto unbelievable heights, they did that by first making low-budget films mid-range successes and then the mid-budget projects they received off the back of that into all-timers (Star Wars cost $11 million, a mere $44 million in today's money). And even then they were subject to continued studio pressures - Spielberg went into Raiders of the Lost Ark unwanted by Paramount and immense pressure to prove himself a frugal, timely director. There was no free . People would make jumps, but the indie darling done good really only became the go-to when Nolan brought continued success to Warner Bros.; everybody wanted a similarly loyal, driven filmmaker.
The problem here isn't that the resulting films haven't worked or the talent is undeserving of praise - many of the movies cited above are good. It's that Hollywood has tried to replicate Nolan without quite understanding the full scope of his success.
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What The Studios Miss About Christopher Nolan's Success
All the studios hiring this relative new blood take the basic idea of promise trumping evidence without really looking at what Nolan did after he got to that point. His movies aren't just indie sensibilities painted onto the blockbuster formula; he built his own, new machine. Watch a Nolan and you're seeing Nolan; he constructs the narrative and injects the themes that make him distinctive, all the while making sure he hits the required marketability. He's a workman director, marking every checkpoint off on the studio mandate without asking while adding his own flair. Finished product aside, his productions are a well-oiled, with minimal excess waste produced; there are few deleted scenes from his films usually because there aren't any. He plans, he executes, he delivers.
Further, when he's not making the requisite tentpoles - something rated PG-13. That's a bold move on the part of Warner Bros., but it's also a highlight of how well Nolan works in the system, becoming a next-level event filmmaker.
This approach should be obvious from the voice of his work. The Prestige, made just after that Batman rise, is a movie all about creative debate, with Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman's magicians representing different sides of the performer coin; Bale believes in art for the artist and lives his greatest trick, while Jackman cares only about "the looks on their faces" and having the audience believe in the unbelievable through whatever means necessary. In the end, both characters end up having to sacrifice literal halves of themselves to achieve success, in the process losing that pure ideal. Nolan's point with the film isn't just commenting on the idea of duality or the extents we go to for our ions, but saying that true artistic brilliance comes from a balance of both sides, something his entire career represents.
Nobody has really shown comparable sense or ability. The big movies the directors we've discussed take on don't have the same assured production, whereas their personal projects are just that; James Gunn wrote the little seen (and messy) Fant4stic under a snowstorm of studio reshoots, in turn impacting his Star Wars hopes.
The closest we may have to a proper new Nolan is Matt Reeves. From Cloverfield onwards, he's been someone with an astute understanding of the artistic-business balance of Hollywood, shown in his resplendent, subtle Planet of the Apes prequels. In The Batman is a humorous parallel with Nolan, it only serves to highlight their differences.
It's important to Batman wasn't a primo series when Nolan took over. Yes, it had immense potential, but after the complete failure of Batman & Robin had been stuck in development purgatory for the better part of a decade. It was tainted goods, with the series closer to Adam West's camp than the brooding Dark Knight of the contemporary comics. A new tone was needed, which predicated a unique voice; getting someone from outside the usual rat race was essential. For a while this looked to be Darren Aronofsky - a director of similar prominence to Nolan at the time - who was eyeing up a straight Year One adaptation, but it obviously later shifted to Chris. He was fast-tracked in a very specific situation.
That's totally different to a new Jurassic Park or Godzilla, movies that have a high bar set from conception. There is some logic in going small and indie for, say, Marc Webb on The Amazing Spider-Man - the initial aim was a boutique, low-budget version to retain the rights - but the moment you start puffing randoms up to large scale, dependable films, the choice becomes questionable and really representative of a larger shift.
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Directing In A Producer-Led Hollywood
The ultimate irony with Nolan is that for all he represents about a director running free in Hollywood and the ideology of the artist, the wave he's accidentally semi-started has just led things round to producer dominance. The other side of the hiring of green directors is that they will be easier for a studio to rein in than high flying artists who demand creative control. And you can imagine some executives thinking that's exactly what Warners got with Nolan, rather than the deft director-producer he really is.
Now before we go too deep into this, it is worth clarifying that this dichotomy is much, much bigger than one man. We're not pinning the structure of the entire studio system on Nolan, but will say all we've discussed does certainly factor into it.
Hollywood has always been producer-led, but it's become increasingly noticeable in the rise of mega-franchises and shared universes. These are such massive business enterprises they need someone removed from the graft to shepherd the big picture, but at the same time there's an eagerness to keep artistic drive front and center (an idea that definitely sounds Nolan-esque). This has proven easier said than done. The Aquaman and The Batman that is shifting.
The emergent best example of this conflict is actually Star Wars. After the safe hands of J.J. Abrams (who is of course as powerful a producer as director) for Han Solo: Phil Lord and Chris Miller are established directors in the industry who've built up their brand over time and thus their hiring on the prequel doesn't quite fit the Nolan model, but the fact they wouldn't bend the knee to Kennedy's demands is still a result of this producer-led perception shift all the same.
Conversely, the real success is Marvel Studios. There is no doubt that Kevin Feige is the mastermind of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with each director clearly working under a set of demands. And while there have been upsets along the way - Age of Ultron - those who've made it work are the ones who walk the line; James Gunn makes James Gunn movies within the Marvel confines. There's success here, but that's implicit in Feige's leadership; going young is mainly just a way to avoid conflict.
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Nolan doesn't have to even try to play the game because he does it naturally. The real lesson to take with him isn't that indie directors can be a good fit for blockbusters or ion projects need to be big hitters; it's that great studio filmmakers can't be plucked out by any random set of rules. Trying to apply formula to hiring is as tricky as it is to the movies themselves. If you stop trying to make the new Nolan, you may just find one.
