TSPDT

Key Production Countries: USA, UK
Key Genres: Thriller, Action, Post-Noir (Modern Noir), Psychological Thriller, Drama, Crime Drama, Science Fiction, Crime, Comic-Book Superhero Film, Fantasy, Historical Film
Key Collaborators: Emma Thomas (Producer), Nathan Crowley (Production Designer), Wally Pfister (Cinematographer), Lee Smith (Editor), Michael Caine (Leading Character Actor), Hans Zimmer (Composer), Cillian Murphy (Character Actor), Christian Bale (Leading Actor), Jonathan Nolan (Screenwriter), Charles Roven (Producer), Hoyte Van Hoytema (Cinematographer), David Julyan (Composer)

"Favouring small, intense, character-driven stories, his work is heavily influenced by noir narratives and aesthetics. Fashioning protagonists that become the detectives in the mysteries of their own lives, his two first films incorporate flashback narratives... Like David Fincher or Steven Soderbergh, he fashions stylish, smart and intriguing films that appeal on both an emotional and intelligent level to mainstream and art-house audiences alike." - Hannah Patterson (Contemporary North American Film Directors, 2002)

"Noted for the innovative structure of both his noirish, cerebral debut film Following (1998) and its follow-up, the equally unconventional and heady Memento (2000), London-born filmmaker Christopher Nolan has shown a unique talent for creating involving films containing concepts based on abstract breaks with conventional behavior and idealism." - Jason Buchanan (All-Movie Guide)

"The savior of the Batman franchise directed Super 8 movies at age seven starring miniature action figures before segueing into English literature during his university studies in London. His debut feature Following (1998) demonstrated an early predilection for the film noir sensibility." - Andrew Bailey (Cinema Now, 2007)

"That his films manage to be both mainstream blockbusters and objects of such cult appeal is what makes Nolan a singular, and singularly admired, figure in Hollywood. He is commonly found sharing discriminating sentences of praise with James Cameron on the one hand and Paul Thomas Anderson on the other; he has been anointed, without any apparent campaigning on his own behalf, the successor of both Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick. His loyalists have consistently and strenuously defended him against critics who claim that although he may be a masterful technician, he’s not a visionary or true auteur. Regardless of the visionary question, however, it’s pretty much impossible to think of a film that grossed more than a billion dollars and is better than The Dark Knight — or, to think of it in the way that Nolan prefers, a better film that was seen, so many times over, by so many people." - Gideon Lewis-Kraus (The New York Times, 2014)

"I think my generation of filmmakers is the first to have grown up with home video, and as soon as you have VHS - we got our first one when I was eleven - you can stop the film when the phone rings, and suddenly viewing films in the home become more like books. I think with things like DVD this will carry on. So I think there is more freedom and potential for filmmakers working now to create more dense and structurally complex narratives." - Christopher Nolan (Guardian Interview, 2002)

"The movie-obsessed son of an English ad man and an American flight attendant, director Christopher Nolan burst upon the scene in 2000 with the film noir Memento. The $4 million independent film delivered the usual crime thriller tropes but with a meta twist—the hero’s recurring short-term memory loss was illustrated by using an intertwined pair of narratives, one moving forward in time while the other told the story backward." - Jeffrey Ressner (Directors Guild of America, 2012)

"I studied English Literature. I wasn't a very good student, but one thing I did get from it, while I was making films at the same time with the college film society, was that I started thinking about the narrative freedoms that authors had enjoyed for centuries and it seemed to me that filmmakers should enjoy those freedoms as well." - Christopher Nolan