What I learned from reading The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan by Tom Shone.

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to tell you about before we jump into the intense mind of Christopher Nolan.

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Christopher Nolan's second film, Memento, had a long, anxious year spent trying to secure distribution.

been turned down by every distributor in town, with some variation of, this is great, we love it, we really want to work with you, and this is not for us.

Memento was born into the world on the back of obsession.

Failure to find expression would have been almost inconceivable to him.

What happens when you make a film is you burrow into it, You dig in.

The only thing you can do is trust your initial instincts.

2 years to the day after that disastrous screening for distributors, Memento earned 2 Oscar nominations.

Nolan's ascent since has been near vertical.

In the space of 2 decades, he has gone from eking out micro-budget, three-minute short films to making billion-dollar blockbusters.

To the studios, he is as close to a sure thing as a director gets, 1 of the few filmmakers who can walk into a studio with an original script idea, 1 that is not part of a pre-existing franchise, intellectual property, or sequel, and exit with the $200 million necessary to make it.

Like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas before him, he has become a franchise unto himself.

And unusual for a director working at his level, he has either written or had a hand in writing all 11 of his movies to date, granting him entry to a very exclusive club of directors, the only other 2 being Peter Jackson and James Cameron.

He came up with an idea for a science fiction heist inside the moving contours of a dreaming mind, and he had the boldness and audacity to have the singular vision to make it happen.

his punctuality, discipline, and secrecy.

Of the more than 600 people who worked on Dunkirk, only 20 were allowed to read the script.

Copies of the script were watermarked with the actor's names so that any missing copies could be traced back to their negligent

Nolan is notorious for coming to an actor's house with a copy of a script, insisting on staying with the actor until he had finished reading the script, and then taking it away with him.

On set, you wouldn't know he's the director.

He's very quiet, very confident, and very calm.

He wants to see what the camera sees, the old-fashioned way.

He refuses to use his second unit, preferring to shoot every frame himself.

Minds don't wander on a Chris Nolan set, said Matthew McConaughey.

Nolan is known by his crews for shooting fast, starting at 7 a.m.

And he has the kind of passionate following 1 associates with a cult director.

Critics have received death threats when they give his films a bad review.

That is an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to

you about today, which is the Nolan Variations, the Movies, Mysteries and Marvels of Christopher Nolan, and it

Christopher Nolan worked hand in hand with Tom Shown.

The vast majority of the book is actually large chunks of Christopher Nolan speaking directly to you because Tom had been interviewing him over multiple years.

And so I wanna jump right into a conversation that they're having.

It's gonna reference something that was stated about the movie Memento and is really, I think, 1 of the most important things to understand in Christopher Nolan.

So it said, you know, that movie was born into the world on the back of obsession.

In addition to reading this book, there is this fantastic article in the Financial Times that I'll link down below as well, where Christopher Nolan gives you an insight into his mind.

At the very end of the article, the interviewer is asking, okay, after Oppenheimer, what's your next film?

And he says, I've never been any good at that.

The only way I know how to work is to sort of burrow in on 1 project very obsessively.

And so the word obsessed is in this book over and over again.

I think the main idea, the reason I wanna read this to you though, is because The idea behind what Christopher Nolan's about to tell us is like if you're obsessed with what you're making You can make other people obsessed with it, too And I love what he says here He says people will say to me that there are people online who are obsessed with inception or obsessed with memento They're asking me to comment on that is if I thought it was weird or something and I'm like well I was obsessed with it for years genuinely obsessed with it so it doesn't strike me as weird we put a lot into these films every film this is so good every film I do I have to believe that I'm making the best film that's ever been made.

So it had never occurred to me that there were people making films who

weren't trying to make the best film that ever was.

That's a perfect insight into Nolan's mindset.

Even if it's not going to be the best film that's ever been made, you have to believe that it could be.

You just pour yourself into it, and when it affects someone that way, that is a huge thrill for me.

I feel like I've managed to wrap them up in it the way I try to wrap myself up in it.

So I already mentioned James Cameron 1 time since him, Peter Jackson, and Nolan are really the only group of directors operating at that level that are also writing the movies that they're making.

Because I just spent so much time studying Cameron for episode 311.

He was on my mind a lot while I was reading this book.

And what is fascinating about both Christopher Nolan and James Cameron is that they got to the top of their profession.

lot of similarities in their obsessive work habits, but they're also very different.

And so as I go through Nolan's perspective on his own work, I'll try to compare and contrast the way he looks at it with the way James Cameron work looks at it.

And I would start with the biggest difference is that Nolan doesn't like to use CGI and Cameron is literally inventing the new technology for other filmmakers.

And so you see this in, I watched a bunch of interviews with Nolan and I watched a bunch of interviews with people that worked with him.

And 1 of the most remarkable things about Christopher Nolan is, or most surprising things to me rather, would be the fact that he wants to live and work in an analog world.

That is gonna be a reoccurring theme that you and I will revisit today.

And so what I mean by that, actors will talk about how hard it is to communicate with them.

Because Christopher Nolan does not have an email account and he doesn't use a cell phone.

his assistant and then he'll either call you or he'll just show up and

be like, okay, we're going to meet in a physical location at this time and date.

And so he's something he talks about with not only his kids, but younger generations is the fact that they're overstimulated by technology.

And as a result, they're not giving their imagination room to actually work.

And I actually think that Nolan's desire to live and work in an analog world is his version of mute the world and then build your own.

We're only in the first chapter of this book and they've already used the word obsessive and focused and of singular mind multiple times.

And this I think is why, like he puts a lot of like time and effort into what he's doing.

I find it totally engaging, but it's an arduous process.

There's a lot of strain on family, on personal relationships.

And that last line, something that I love, that is his North Star.

His North Star that you'll see him use throughout his career is like, do I love what I made?

And this idea of his that if you love what you made, 1, it's easier to go out and sell it to other people and 2, it's easier to withstand the inevitable criticism that anything that you create and put onto the world is going to receive.

And so this idea of being in love with what you're making and then being obsessive about what you're making, Chris, he says in the book, he's like, listen, I don't feel, people describe him as an artist.

He's like, I don't feel like I'm an artist.

Like 5 years ago, I read this incredible biography of George Lucas.

It's called George Lucas, I think, The Life or A Life.

And what's fascinating is when I heard Nolan say that, you know, I'm a craftsman, I don't feel like I'm an artist.

I'm like, wait a minute, that's almost exactly to the T what George Lucas said in that book.

And for Nolan, the first part of the craft, he just loves screenplays.

And so he insists on writing all or part of every single screenplay that he's gonna turn into a movie.

And he says, the best screenplays are completely stripped down.

The more you can strip them down, the better.

And that's something he has common with some of the greatest leaders in history.

If you go back and look at some of how the greatest leaders in history communicated inside of their organization,

Churchill may be the best example of this because he even has

He says, it's slothful not to compress your thoughts.

But I love the story that I found in 1 of David Ogilvie's books because Ogilvie's boss was a partial inspiration for Ian Fleming when he was writing James Bond.

And what was fascinating and something that Ogilvy tried to copy when he was building his own organization is that when you would send a memo to Ogilvy's boss, it'd be returned to you with 1 of 3 responses.

Nolan has memories of loving cinema and loving movies for as long as he's had memories.

And so 1 of the funny things is his younger brother writes a ton of the screenplays.

They write a ton of screenplays together.

And Nolan has a British accent and his brother has an American accent.

So Nolan's dad was a British ad executive.

His mom was a flight attendant and then later a teacher.

And the family couldn't decide where they wanted to live permanently.

So depending on when you were born in the family, you either grow up most of your time in England or most of your time in America.

And this actually becomes really important later on because the movies would come out in America first.

So if he happened to be living in America at the time, he would see movies like Star Wars, for example.

And then 6 months later, he might be in England when Star Wars is released.

And so he'd go watch it again and again and again.

And so to this day, Christopher Nolan can tell you stories about being 6 years old and going to see movies with his dad.

In fact, his parents actually there was a there's a connection to James Cameron here.

His parents after they realized their young son was interested in movies, they actually took him to do like a tour and a visit of Pinewood Studios.

Pinewood Studios was that studio in London that James Cameron hated.

Cameron said the crew that worked at Pinewood were actually lazy, insolent, and arrogant, and he does this hilarious, he was obsessed with what he was working on.

He said they were like lifers, they were just like kinda punching the clock, they weren't really into it.

And so when he finally wraps on the last day, he couldn't wait to get out of there, He actually gets in front of the entire crew.

And Cameron has this hilarious, like parting shot at them.

He says, this has been a long and difficult shoot fraught by many problems.

But the 1 thing that kept me going through it all was a certain knowledge that 1 day I would drive out of the gate of Pinewood and never come back and that you sorry bastards would still be here.

So that's the exact same studio that Christopher Nolan's touring when he's might be, you know, 6, 7, maybe 10 years old.

And so 1 of the most influential movies that Nolan ever saw when he was a kid was Star Wars, which came out in 1977.

And his response to seeing Star Wars is not the normal response that you would see with a seven-year-old.

I think that true interest is revealed early.

Like I had watched movies when I was a kid.

And then he becomes obsessed with knowing how

And so he would watch Star Wars over and over and over again and then he'd find out, he'd find trade magazines.

This is something he does for his whole life.

Like if he's interested in something, he reads about it obsessively.

So he winds up finding like trade magazines that go into detail about how Lucas's company, Industrial Light & Magic, were able to make the special effects and how the shots and everything else.

That is not normal behavior from an elementary school-aged kid.

And then once his dad sees how obsessed he is with movies, his dad does something really smart.

He takes him to another showing, a re-release of a movie that came out half a decade earlier.

And this was actually Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey.

Now, what is fascinating is that movie is the same movie Cameron saw where he's like, Oh, I don't want to just be interested in watching films.

And a young Christopher Nolan had the same response.

He said he credits that movie with realizing, Oh, movies can be anything and I can make my own.

And when I was reading about Christopher Nolan's like childhood, it reminded me very much.

I read a biography of Steven Spielberg all the way back on episode 209.

He starts making movies when he's like 789 years old.

I think they were making movies on the same kind of camera, these like super 8 cameras that would let you record for maybe like 2 and a half or 3 minutes long.

Both Spielberg and Nolan would figure out how to make crude movie sets out of whatever's around the, their house.

They would use like the, the fellow kids in the neighborhood.

And so from the age of 8 to 13, Nolan's watching movies.

He's trying to make little movies, but it's not till he realizes what a director is, he's like, oh, wait, that's the job that I want.

So he would go back through and watch a bunch of his favorite movies.

And 2 of his favorite movies were Blade Runner and then Alien.

And then 1 day he realizes, wait a minute, that's the same director?

And he realized the director was the connection between everything else.

Like both movies had, there was completely different stories, completely different people that wrote the screenplay, different, they

The only thing that was the same, the only thing that tied all those together was Ridley Scott.

And so at 13 he says, I can remember saying, oh my god, I want that job.

1 of the most interesting parts of Christopher Nolan's early life is the fact that his parents sent him to boarding school outside of London and they were 3, 000 4, 000 miles away living outside of Chicago and so we see this obsession with movies has grown to the point where they have this it's a very strict boarding school the schedule is very regimented everybody goes to bed at the same time they wake up at the same time, they have breakfast at the same time, they have class at the same time.

So what Nolan would do is after lights out, he would lie in bed in the dark with his eyes closed, listening to the soundtrack and the scores of like Star Wars and this other movie called Chariots of Fire on his Walkman.

He's listening to movie soundtracks in the dark.

And so this is when he brings up the fact that his kids nowadays, right, if they're fascinated, they're interested in something, they can just go and Google it or they can follow what they're interested in very fast.

And he's like, well, when I was a kid, that just wasn't the case.

And he thought this was something that's valuable, the fact that your imagination has to fill in the blanks for you.

And so that's why he'd want to listen to like the scores of other movies, because they leave space for your imagination.

It gives you room to actually sit and think.

And so he talks about while he's doing this, his eyes are closed.

He's starting to get ideas for certain themes in a story.

And he said this act was very important for the development, the future development that comes down the line of him starting to make movies.

book at his time at this boarding school.

But 1 thing I thought was fascinating, because I think it gives you insight into just the level of discipline that Nolan has, that is constantly described by the people that work with him.

And the boarding school is trying to drill into these young adults the importance of discipline of punctuality of a certain tolerance of pain it is described as a Darwinian environment and some of the kids can't take it they wind up churning out I think they use the term they either sink or swim.

And so many years later, some of the actors that have worked for Chris talk about the fact that, you know, he's unbelievably punctual.

His sets are very calm, but they're run like a disciplined, almost like machine like manner.

And then Nolan seems indifferent to both fatigue and like cold or extreme temperatures.

And I think a lot of that was created in these formative years at this extreme boarding school.

And so something he's doing during these years that he's going to do also when he goes to college, and really for the rest of

This reminded me very much when you read early, like read biographies of Kobe Bryant, how Kobe is

13, 14, 15, 16, and he's watching game tape of Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson relentlessly.

Throughout Christopher Nolan's entire career, his version of watching game tape is he's constantly influenced and inspired by past filmmakers.

And so he'll find a film that maybe came out 50 years ago that gives him an idea for like Inception, as an example, that he's making in the early 2000s.

And then he'll watch it, and then he'll make sure everybody on his team watches the same material as well, so they have this shared base of knowledge.

And so in many cases, he's not gonna use these ideas for multiple decades, this idea that ideas can ruminate for decades.

This is the same thing that you and I went over with James Cameron.

It's almost like Inception before Inception.

And so he's watching it while he's at boarding school.

It was during 1 of his storytelling sessions after lights out, so this is when he's in the dark just thinking, right?

That the idea for Inception first took place.

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