Musings from Christopher Nolan
From AICN:
Ahoy, squirts. Quint here.
Geoff Boucher’s Hero Complex Film Festival continued last night with a double feature of INSOMNIA and THE DARK KNIGHT. The two features were split by the Q&A with Nolan and he had some really cool stuff to say about all things filmmaking. I’m especially fond of his scientific distrust of 3-D as a viable and ongoing format.
Lots and lots of thoughts including some fascinating insights re Nolan’s approach to crafting a story. Some excerpts:
- Nolan first pitched Inception to Warner Bros right after Insomnia. They liked it, wanted him to write it, but he realized he couldn’t write it on assignment, that he’d have to do it on spec and come back with the finished thing. “So, I went off to write it figuring it would take me a couple of months and it took me ten years!”
- Ever since Nolan was a kid he wanted to make a movie about dreams. 10 years ago he settled on the concept of a heist movie set around the idea of a technology that allows people to share dreams.
- Nolan was struggling with the script so much because he said he didn’t have a strong emotional connection to the material. “I had written a heist film and heist movies it turns out, and it’s not something I really realized, tend to be deliberately superficial. They tend to be glamorous and fun and procedural based. They tend not to have massive emotional shifts and that wasn’t really enough for me to move forward.” He ultimately did, but that’s why it took so long.
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- Nolan wanted to point out that when you’re reading a published screenplay “you’re reading something that’s 14 or 15 drafts in because they publish the shooting draft which includes all the revisions from production.”
- Nolan’s first drafts very rarely get read (“in fact they very rarely leave my house!”). He called his first drafts “rambling.”
- He doesn’t outline and generally starts from page one and tries to write in a linear fashion. Even when the story is non-linear.
- Nolan’s first film, Following, was written chronologically and then, at the script stage, he edited it to make it non-linear as he had diagramed it out. He found that very difficult because there was an enormous amount of rewriting to make it flow right together.
- When it came to Memento, he thought it was important to write the film the way the audience would see it unfold, instead of doing it like he did Following.
- While he doesn’t outline, Nolan does draw a lot of diagrams and sticks stuff all over his walls. “It all gets a bit Beautiful Mind by the end of it.”
- “I always start with story rather than characters. When I write I try to write from the point of view of defining a character through action. That way having the narrative shifts define what we think of the characters. That’s why I love film noir crime fiction because double-crosses, twists and turns… you’re constantly readdressing your opinion of the characters and you’re reassessing who you think those people are. I find that a really interesting and very strong form of characterization, but it means putting story first and then just seeing where that leads the characters.”
- When it comes to writing dialogue, like the Joker’s multiple origin stories in The Dark Knight, Nolan tends to write it free-form and it can go on for three or four pages. Then he spends days and days editing it down. “I try not to stop an idea before it is born. In this way I throw it all out there and then edit it down. It really is like editing. You write a bunch of dailies and then you edit it together into a comprehensible form.”
And then there are these gems:
- Chris Nolan doesn’t look at the internet. “I think I realized at a very early stage on Batman Begins that it wouldn’t be helpful to look at what everybody was saying.” Nolan felt like all he could do was deliver the movie he wanted to see and if he tried to accommodate everybody the movie would have been a mess.
- He doesn’t have email or cell phone. “It gives me a little more time to think.”
Story first, then characters. Is that your approach or not?
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