#426 How Obsession Built Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan had just spent a long anxious year trying to secure distribution. He had been turned down by every distributor in town with the same variation of, this is great. We love it. We really wanna work with you, but this is not for us. This film was personal to him. Memento was born into the world on the back of obsession. Failure to find expression would have been almost inconceivable to Christopher Nolan. Nolan made the movie because he had to. What happens when you make a film is you burrow into it. You dig in so deep, so you kinda can't see it anymore. You're fully immersed in it, he said. The only thing you can do is trust your initial instincts. You just have to say, this is what I'm making. This is what I'm doing. It's going to work. Just trust it. Memento would go on to earn two Oscar nominations, nearly two years to the day after that disastrous screening for distributors. Nolan's ascent since that movie has been near vertical. In the space of two decades, Christopher Nolan has gone from eking out micro budgeted three minute shorts to making billion dollar blockbusters. Nolan's films have earned over $5,000,000,000 at the box office. To the studios, he is as close to a sure thing as a director gets, One of the few filmmakers who can walk into a studio with an original script idea and walk out with the 200,000,000 necessary to make it. Like Spielberg and George Lucas before him, he has become a franchise unto himself. And unusual for a director working at this level, he has either written or had a hand in writing all 11 of his movies to date, granting him entry into a very exclusive club of directors. Among his collaborators, he is known for 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, which were kept on set, were watermarked with the actors' names, so that any missing copies could be traced back to their negligent owners. Nolan came This is hilarious when he is trying to recruit people to be in his movie. They're like, great. Send over the script. I'll read it. Well, he's coming with the script. So it says, Nolan came to the actor's house with a copy of the script. Nolan insisted on staying with him, drinking tea in the actor's living room until he had finished the script and then took it away with him. He refuses to use a 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 7AM and finishing at 7PM with a single break for lunch. He has the kind of passionate following one associates with a cult director. Critics have received death threats when they give …