“In Christopher Nolan, the real world is a utopia”

Film critic Timothée Gérardin, author of a book on Christopher Nolan, talks to Première about the filmmaker’s obsessions.

While waiting for the 2024 Oscars, including Oppenheimer is the big favorite, TMC is currently rebroadcasting the director’s films Christopher Nolan. A week after Batman Beginsplace to The Dark Knight (2008), one of his biggest successes, both critically and publicly.

In 2020, to prepare for the release of Tenet, from the same creator, we spoke about the filmography of Chris Nolan with Timothée Gérardin, author of a reference book on this filmmaker. We are sharing this interview again during this rebroadcast.

How did you get interested in writing about Christopher Nolan?

There has always been a frustration for me to see that Christopher Nolan was appreciated by many people but few studies were devoted to it. I had been writing little bits of articles about his films for a long time and I saw certain motifs recurring. I wanted to show through my book that there was a coherent author’s vision, through a style of directing, writing, editing, in all of his films.

What strong idea do you get from his cinema?

What is first striking is its subjective vision of time which matches that of its protagonist. For him, human beings have an incomplete relationship with time. This is why he makes it an elastic material. But even more, this distortion of time comes from the fact that the main characters are affected by a pathology. In Memento, he addresses the issue of amnesia; In Insomnia, insomnia. In Batman, it’s a childhood trauma. This pathology is used to construct the aesthetic principle of the film. From there, a fragmentation of time will take place. These fragments to which the viewer has access will only make sense over the duration of the film, like a puzzle. In Inception, it is the loss of the loved one that will provoke Cobb’s behavior. We also have characters in mourning… Basically, there is always this idea that intimate experience has a consequence on access to the world. This is obvious in Interstellar where the child’s bedroom has an impact on the entire universe. The whole crux of the plot will consist of knowing how to regain the coherence of the world. Reality has become a utopia.

How does the Batman trilogy fit into its universe?

It’s a real aesthetic tipping point. First, the Batman trilogy gave him access to Hollywood. He realised Batman Begins just after Insomnia. But it is truly with The Dark Knight: The Dark Knight that he adopts a style close to the one he has today. There are particularly brilliant scenes in alternating montage. By changing the scale of production with bigger projects, he also changed his point of view. He began to have a lot of overhanging, aerial shots which modified his relationship to time. The Batman trilogy also has a political dimension where each of Batman’s villains represents a danger for democracy: anarchy, fascism, savage justice. The question of order is very important to Nolan. What we see in these films is that his ultimate fear is chaos.

With the Batman, he will further evolve in his relationship with time…

Nolan, by adopting an omniscient point of view, will place stories in an even larger narrative pattern where spaces and times will mingle. It is precisely thanks to a sonar system which allows him to see everything that is happening in the city that Batman will find the Joker. Inception, Interstellar the infinitely large and the infinitely small will be interwoven. He uses parallel editing a lot to advance stories on different scales. With Dunkirk, a historical film about the war, he goes even further and engages in pure experimentation with time where he analyzes the repercussions of a moment. There, there is no longer a narrative thread but an assumed distortion of time. The “pedagogy” of the previous films has disappeared.

How do you analyze its trajectory?

The evolution is impressive. He left from Following, a thriller cobbled together with friends, and has become one of the only directors to whom the studios give carte blanche. Its budgets are more and more substantial. At the same time, he maintains a true author’s vision, a directing style, and he is very militant about cinema formats. He knew how to evolve and question himself because he, who had long been accused of making machine films devoid of soul, tackled melodrama with Interstellar and is now trying to go into new territories like espionage with Tenet.

To read: Christopher Nolan, the possibility of a world, by Timothée Gérardin (Editions Playlist Society, 2018)