An open letter to the Gestalt Thinker… CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

Dear Nolan,

I’m sure you are the only director who will make any Director in the world feel like an idiot compared to YOU. The greatest thing about it is that You will take it for granted that the audience is intelligent whereas most idiotic directors assume that the audience is too foolish to understand anything that complex is difficult to understand.

you’re a Gestalt thinker and entertainer, and you think that its technical detail like these, even the ones we register only consciously, the theatrical experience is a vivid and continuous dream.

part of the reason Nolan’s work has done so well at the box office is that his audience members find themselves watching his movies twice, or three times, bleary-eyed and shivering in their dusky light.

very late in the day when I finally saw “Interstellar”, I think Christopher Nolan himself is from another planet…M…F…ing Awesome.

The Techniques he uses…

Primarily, Nolan is known for using his trademark non-linear storytelling, where he presents the plot of a movie out of order. This is apparent in his films Memento, Batman Begins, and The Dark Knight Rises. By telling a narrative in his way, Nolan can create intrigue in his story, presenting certain portions of the story which at first do not make sense if watched on their own. however, this creates suspense as Nolan makes the viewer want to know what has led up to such a monumental moment.

Nolan’s expert use of non-linear storytelling helps the plot of his films pack more of a punch.

aside from revealing the plot in an unorthodox manner, Nolan has strayed from the typical Hollywood manner of using special effects in every way possible. prime examples of this are Inception and Interstellar. while much of what happens in the dream world of inception is computer-generated, one specific scene stands out when viewing the film. a scene in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character is fighting against a goon in a dream world and sees the two characters go at each other in a rotating hallway.

while most directors would not even attempt such a scene, let alone use CGI, Nolan did the unthinkable and filmed the entire shot using practical effects. using a massive centrifuge, he shot the scene with the actors performing inside a literal rotating hallway. filming in such a manner he added an extra level of realism to the scene, with Gordon-Levitt himself stating that he loved it and there is “no replacement for real, human energy and performance.”

Nolan’s continued prominence as an auteur of cinema in Hollywood is no surprise as every one of his films seems to tell another brilliant story while moving atop the box office. his highly insightful films range from a story of a world war 2 battle to magicians exploiting the uses of quantum mechanics. nevertheless, every one of his movies provides a new and exciting story that is consistently woven together with brilliant characters, cinematography, and storytelling techniques.

your MOVIES created a benchmark so high that it will take years for us lesser folk even to comprehend it let alone attempt to execute it.

it’s like if you aspire to be a runner and somehow hope to run at a speed of 20kmph you would rather give up and come back and make family dramas and TV serials and leave the running to Christopher Nolan.

the more I try to discover you… the more I reinvent myself and the lesser I feel about myself

“I didn’t go to film school. I guess my whole experience has been just to make films. What I’ve talked about in the commentary to the DVD of Following (1998) is the production method and how things came about. I feel like that might be a point of interest that a lot of people might be thinking about with their own films, so I’ve tried to put in as much detail as I can remember. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized that everybody’s situation is unique, and the one thing I’ve learned is that instead of copying someone else’s model for a low-budget film, you really have to look at what you’ve got available and see how you can tell the story you want to tell, using the things that you have around you. That’s what we did with “Following”, and on the DVD I try to explain how it worked for us and what I learned from it, but at the same time suggest that it’ll be different for someone else.”~Christopher Nolan

His ideas

it seems that every film that Christopher Nolan comes out with is a new and never-before-seen story. films such as Memento, The Prestige, and Interstellar are fresh new ideas, ones that Hollywood typically does not see break records. primarily, Nolan explores the realm of science fiction. every one of his films takes place in a unique setting and provides a host of interesting, complex characters.

he takes real and possible stories and puts cerebral twists on them, whether it be in how the film is told or the plot itself. films such as Memento and Insomnia give the viewer a unique sense of immersion as the audience learns all the twists and turns in the film at the same time as the characters in the film. On the other hand, some of his other films take real and possible concepts and put a spin on them.

in the Prestige, the film starts with two magicians competing to produce the best magic trick, but quickly takes a turn as the domain of quantum mechanics is explored when Hugh Jackman’s character goes to Nikola Tesla to create a machine that can replicate physical matter, with Interstellar, the idea of earth devasted by blight is presented, with the characters going to another galaxy in an attempt to find salvation for humanity. In doing so, ideas about the fabric of spacetime are presented, as Matthew McConaughey’s character falls into a black hole and is met with a multidimensional; the interface, one that allows him to communicate with his daughter from years ago.

Additionally, Nolan’s film Inception takes an entirely new idea and builds an extremely compelling plot. Nolan explores the world of consciousness and dreaming with a rather perplexing story that sees its characters infiltrate the dreams of others.

while all of Nolan’s films have a coherent plot, he tends to leave his films with ambiguous endings. in doing so, he allows for a vast amount of room for interpretation by the viewer. By far his most famous ambiguous ending, Inception gives its viewers a bittersweet taste in their mouths at the end of it all.

His Themes

In my opinion, the themes that Nolan delivers are by far the most overlooked and important portions of his works. with every one of his films, there is an emotional takeaway to be had. Even in Dunkirk, a film constrained by history, Nolan is still able to present themes of hope and salvation with its ending.

Nolan delivers the theme that “sometimes, the truth isn’t good enough”. In a world where many of us are disappointed by the often harsh truths of life, this theme is especially impactful, we are led to believe that we should always be in pursuit of the truth, no matter the consequences. Nolan plays devil’s advocate and tells us that sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.

Christopher Nolan has given us films that make us think on a very deep level. his films such as Inception, Interstellar, and all of the Dark Knight trilogy will undoubtedly become classics one day. Through his very insightful and entertaining filmography, it is no surprise that Nolan Continues to experience success in the world of cinema.

Story of Nolan…

Christopher Nolan was born on this day in 1970. Today he has such power that he can walk into a studio with an idea and walk out with a 200 m budget. But there was a time he struggled to find a distributor for his film. This is the story of Nolan’s struggle. Christopher Nolan’s first film was Following. But his second film, Memento, catapulted him into Hollywood. His success has been vertical ever since. But the journey to get Memento to the audience was full of ups and downs. Memento was screened at Sundance Film Festival in January 2001 and earned great reviews. After a long, anxious year spent trying to secure distribution. A devilishly structured neo-noir, Memento concerns an amnesiac trying to solve the case of his wife’s death. Everything up to that point he can remember; everything after he loses every ten minutes or so—a discombobulation mirrored by the film’s structure, which unspools backward before our eyes, plunging the audience into a permanent. The film’s knack for winning fans but not distribution had become something of an open secret in Hollywood after screening the weekend of the 2000 Independent Spirit Awards, at which EVERY distributor in town turned them down. Everyone turned down the film with some variation of “This is great,” “We love it,” “We really want to work with you,” and “But this is not for us.” Director Steven Soderbergh knew before he saw the film that everyone in town had seen it and declined to distribute it. He watched it and came out thinking, “That’s it. When a movie this good can’t get released, then it’s over.” After a year in movie limbo, the film’s original production company, Newmarket Films, took the risky decision to distribute it. Memento was borne into the world on the back of obsession, powered by a voice whose failure to find expression would have been almost inconceivable. Nolan: Always in the back of my head, I was like, Can you really do this? You’re going to make a film backward. The only thing you can do is trust your instincts. You just have to say, This is what I’m making. This is what I’m doing. It is going to work. Just trust it.” Finally released in eleven theaters a few weeks later, on March 16, the film took in $352,243 in its first week and expanded in its second week to fifteen theaters, where it took in $353,523. Among the distributors who had initially turned the film down was Miramax, which circled back and frantically tried to buy the film from Newmarket, but as word of the picture spread, and it expanded in its third week to seventy-six theaters, taking in $965,519. Miramax could only watch as the film took off, spending four weeks in the top ten, eventually playing in 531 theaters. Memento would gross over $25 m in North America and $14 m overseas, making the film’s total worldwide tally $40 million – the sleeper hit of the summer. It earned two Oscar nominations, one for Best Original Screenplay and the other for Best Film Editing, and won Best Director and Best Screenplay for Nolan at the 2002 Independent Spirit Awards, two years to the day after that disastrous screening for distributors. Nolan’s ascent since has been near vertical. In two decades, the British-born director has gone from eking out micro-budgeted three-minute shorts to making such billion-dollar blockbusters as The Dark Knight (2008), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), and Dunkirk (2017). Collectively, Nolan’s films have earned over $5 billion worldwide, making him the most successful filmmaker to come out of the British Isles since Alfred Hitchcock. To the studios, he is as close to a sure thing as a director gets. He’s one of a few filmmakers who can walk into a studio with an original script idea (one that is not part of a pre-existing franchise, IP, or a sequel) and exit with the $200 m budget to make it. Like Spielberg and Lucas, he has become a franchise unto himself. (Taken from the book ‘The Nolan Variations’ by Tom Shone.)

Why you should watch NOLAN?

It’s not very often these days when I decide to go and watch a film in the theatre. But Nolan invites you to savor and be baffled by what these screens could possibly do to the naivety of the human mind. As far as I can rummage through time, the earliest of my cinematic experiences had a lot to do with Christopher Nolan. Even though my present self doesn’t relate much and often with this ‘Larger than life’ brand of cinema, negating Nolan as someone’s cinematic journey would be blasphemous.

He isn’t a Kiarostami or a Ray. A Tarkovsky neither. His films are made for the greatest of screens ever made. As the score ticks, you feel something detonating inside you. The ensemble he assembles would take the budgets to ooze out of billion-dollar pockets. The cerebral furrows he deepens feel very palatable. He’s built and destroyed his own worlds. I fell out of this grandiosity when I discovered that cinema could be so acute and subtle. But when I watched ‘Oppenheimer’, I couldn’t make a concrete judgment about the film. But what I could certainly establish was that these are films very important. Even where science falls out of proportion, the questions that this man ponders upon and rigorously raises are significant and often overlooked in the mundanity of human life.

We both graduated in different disciplines. But Nolan still binds us together with high school science. Though I had an engineering degree it turns out I have slipped so far away from science that laid the basic foundations of it. Trigonometry has been left behind. Atomic models are just frivolous names. I barely remember the periodic table now. There’s a lot that’s been buried forever now, I reckon. But these films, enlighten you to think, to challenge your own realms and understanding of science. I guess both of us came to a joint inference that at an age where we can comprehend concepts so well, we don’t have the memory to be as sharp and crisp as we used to be as students. On the flip side, back then when we had great memory and concentration, we didn’t have the comprehension game going our way. I guess that’s what we could say. Know, The Bohr. The Heisenberg. The Chadwick. The Neutrons. The Fission. The Isotopes. The Fusion. The Einstein. The Allies. The Communists. The Triumph. The Tragedy. Get some basic understanding of what these names suggest to you and leave the rest to the filmmaker’s vision. I am sure if you have done some of your homework, you’d have one hell of a ride through the Trinity. I wouldn’t speak anything about the film but I can certainly conclude that these films are important and so are the questions they flicker onto humanity. They won’t fear it until they understand it. And they won’t understand it until they’ve used it. Guess that’s what it is all about. Also, I missed out, Know, The Oppenheimer.

So I FINALLY WATCHED A FILM YOU WATCH IN THEATERS IN IMAX!!!!

As Nolan intended I definitely felt the explosion in the seats!!! Not only that Oppenheimer’s visualizations of Quantum Physics were also felt in the seats every time he thought of how things would work!!!

And I was BLOWN AWAY!!!!! The film is yet again a yes MASTERPIECE!!

I find CGI, however versatile it is, but always tends to feel a little safe to me” These words dragged people to forget OTT to watch the real explosion of an atomic bomb. But we witnessed the race of, an extraordinarily intelligent, enigmatic scientist against German, who learned difficult languages such as Dutch, Sanskrit .. assimilated complex physical theory in months, forced to be known as the “Destroyer of the World” who blamed himself for the life of thousands. Felt blood in his hands while proclaimed the “Father of Atom Bomb”. J Robert Oppenheimer the director of the Manhattan Project touches deeply. Brewed one Bomb for the Trinity test recreation but a hundred in our mind with his emotions… The one and only CHRISTOPHER NOLAN ..just another magic 🪄

‘Oppenheimer’ in my opinion, is one of the most insightful and significant works in Hollywood history. I salute Nolan for making a 3-hour movie in the middle of summer when people are constantly talking and arguing; we truly need more profound films in theaters that prompt us to contemplate subjects like science and how humanity has utilized it.
The visuals and sound design are consistently astonishing, leaving me in awe from start to finish. The handling of mathematics and science is impressive, but what captivates me, even more, is the ethical approach and the intriguing portrayal of the background, making it accessible to those unfamiliar with the subject.

MASTERPIECE is a very small word. We will take a hundred years to even understand NOLAN’s character depths. It’s not a bomb, it’s an EXPLOSION of EMOTIONS.

A scintillating MASTERPIECE from Christopher Nolan. The staging of the whole Trinity sequence itself deserves the hype. This isn’t an action film, it’s a drama that deals with human emotion and the ramifications of nuclear warfare. It’s a one-time life experience, especially for science students.

To think of #Oppenheimer just as a film is a grave mistake. Speaking for me it made me feel reborn and propelled me into a new horizon in my mind space. I find everything I did extremely redundant and insipid. I feel like going back in time to a school run by Nolan to get re-educated
Re-educated not in films, but in understanding the intriguing depth of human emotions and the explosiveness of human vulnerability ..#Oppenheimer is not a film, it’s HUMAN

Nolan unlike Oppenheimer who built a bomb to kill a few people created a cinematic bomb to explode in the minds of all people in the world, not just filmmakers. The reverbs of NOLAN’s explosions will keep resounding forever in the cinematic graveyard he created on July 21st. Not a nuclear era but a NOLAN era has risen. In short Nolan is the new age E= Mc square of CINEMA

Nothing! Just Christopher Nolan writing ending of #Oppenheimer pic.twitter.com/R2f1SdbcA3

— Retweet Waala (@RetweetWaala) July 29, 2023

I don’t think it can be understated how powerful that last scene between Einstein and Oppenheimer was. I was already blown away by the film but that scene will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Every once in a while you get to see a movie that is so mesmerizing, so beautifully crafted and so moving that it consumes you completely. #Oppenheimer is one such movie! It’s a total work of art! Every craft comes together seamlessly! Absolutely loved it!

I LOVE You for making all so-called filmmakers in the world feel like ants.

I love you for the passion and patience with which he created new benchmarks in every technical aspect of the medium of films.

Happy Birthday, Nolan… We’re eagerly waiting for your upcoming projects… I’m super sure that they’re going to amaze us as usual…

And lastly, “I Thank you for existing”.

Victor Paul (📸Victorpaul_zoomin_)

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