Transcription
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 want to 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 kind of 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 eating out micro-budgeted three-minute shorts to making billion-dollar blockbusters. Nolan's films have earned over $5 billion 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 million 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 he's 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 7:00 a.m. and finishing at 7:00 p.m. 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 his films a bad review. He has the mystique of a magician who takes his applause below the stage having just disappeared through it.
"People will say to me, 'There are people online who are obsessed with Inception or obsessed with Memento. They're asking me to comment on that as 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. Every film I do, I have to believe that I'm making the best film that's ever been made. Films are really hard to make. They are all-consuming. So, it had never occurred to me that there are people doing it who weren't trying to make the best film that ever was. Why would you do this otherwise? 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. It is a huge thrill. I feel like I've managed to wrap them up in it the way I try to wrap myself up in it.'"
That is an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is *The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan*. And it was written by Tom Shone. One of my favorite books I ever read, I think the first time I read it was about three years ago. And with Christopher Nolan's new movie coming back out, uh, I've just been thinking about especially his idea that he wants to live in an analog world. So there's like a handful of ideas. There's probably like six ideas that we'll repeat over and over again. uh, because we're going to move through the book in chronological order, which also covers his filmography in chronological order, but I'd say he has a handful of ideas that he just repeats over and over again. And one of them that's been on my mind is his desire to live in this analog world. So, we're going to go right into that. That'll that's something that will reappear throughout our conversation today. And it goes into the fact that Nolan does not have an email account or a smartphone. He has like a like a flip phone. So, the the the basis of this book was a series of interviews done over many years with Christopher Nolan and Tom Shone. And so if Tom wants to get in touch with Chris, he's got to go through his assistant. And eventually Chris will say, "Okay, I'll meet you here in this physical location at this time on this day." And so he wants to he talks about over and over again about making sure that we're using technology and that technology is not using us and that he wants to live in an analog world. In fact, it sounds very similar if you listen to a few weeks ago when I did the episode on the founder of Honda. He talked about that. He's like, "We are building technology to serve man, not the other way around. Make sure that you are using the machines and the machines are not using you." Who is what the Honda founder says.
So then he just goes into the fact that, hey, uh, I would say the main idea of the book, uh, is the fact that obsession is the engine for his entire career and he he's going to give a lot of his life energy into his craft into his work. He considers himself a craftsman and if I'm going to be giving over my limited life energy, you know, the only finite resource I have, I will run out of time one day, then what we're making has to be great. It has to be the best. And I love what he said. It's like, listen, I'm going into this with every movie assuming that I'm going to make the best movie there ever was. Now, he knows that's not going to be the outcome, but he acts as if that is going to be the outcome. I love that.
So, he says, "I find filming very difficult. I find it totally engaging, but it's an arduous process. There's a lot of strain on the family, a lot of strain on my personal relationships. It takes a lot of physical strength. So, the movie's got to be great. It's got to be something that I love." And then he talks about the fact that he likes to do the work. I we'll get into the the the even though he's known now, you know, he's made billions and billions of dollars at the box office. He's had this multi-decade partnership with a major movie studio, he likes being involved in all aspects of the movie. And like I said at the in the very beginning, he either wrote the entire script or had a hand in writing the script of every single one of his movies. And he talks about this. He goes, "I'm not really looking for a script to come fully formed and land on my desk. No project that I've ever been involved with has been like that." He doesn't like that. He wants to have complete control.
Now he talks about how the fact that he enjoys screenwriting and then how he does it. "I enjoy writing screenplays because they are very stripped-down, simple documents, and the more stripped-down they are, the better they are." So it's interesting. I went back and looked at some of my old highlights for this book. This is a different I have I had the hardcover before. Now this is uh the paperback. But I went in and and searched all my highlights for this book. And when I got to that section, I had forgotten one of my favorite uh one of my personal heroes is this guy named David Ogilvy. He built, you know, one of the most successful advertising agencies of all time. I found him because I was reading through all of uh Warren Buffett's shareholder letters and he kept calling this guy David Ogilvy a genius. I'm like, "Well, Warren Buffett's calling you a genius. I need to go, you know, research this guy." So, I started reading about him. So, David, one of his bosses before he was a founder of his own company, this idea that's like, you you need to just strip things down. You need to get to the essence. This is something that Nolan will repeat over and over again. And you'll see I like that he's starting with the written document uh because he sees that he's got this really clear thinking and he knows the essence of what he's trying to make. But David Ogilvy's boss taught him the the importance of what he called the TUR memo. So he would send you a message, David Ogilvy's boss, and it'd be it'd have three responses, right? So you you send him, you know, "Hey boss, I, what do you think of this, you know, this thing we're working on?" You get come back to you in one of three ways: Yes, no, or speak. And if he says speak, that means come see me and we're actually gonna talk. It's faster than me writing it out. But I love that. Yes, no, or speak.
Uh, then he gets into the fact that he says, "I feel more of a craftsman than an artist." Everybody says, you know, if you're a filmmaker, you're an artist, you're you're making a movie, you're making art. Christopher Nolan says, you know, "I I'm a craftsman, not an artist." George Lucas has that almost exact same line in his biography that's written by Brian Jay Jones, which I think the book is called *George Lucas: A Life*. You know, he he says that "I don't make a work of art, I make a movie. I don't I'm not an artist. I'm a craftsman." So, you see that Christopher Nolan arrived at the same conclusion that that uh George Lucas does. And then there's just some one-liners that he's got a very unique personality. It's almost like, you know, I've watched every single one of his movies. I get to the end of Tenet. I've watched Inception, you know, I don't know, six times. I still don't completely understand it. And I think that Nolan's very comfortable with ambiguity. He he thinks that there's much more to the world than meets the eye. That the world is, you know, beyond our comprehension. And so there's just some lines in throughout the book that I just think make you think and kind of give you an insight to this unique individual that we're dealing with. And it says he dreams with his eyes open.
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And so then he talks about throughout the book as he's being interviewed, he'll use the word "fascinating" a lot. He says, "I'm fascinated by this. I'm fascinated by this." And could be art. It could be like literally a piece of art. Could be a short story. It could be a piece of architecture. It could be an idea. It could be a sentence. And what Tom realized is talking uh to Christopher Nolan is everything he's fascinated goes back to his craft. It's almost like he's using the world as a classroom. So it says, "All roads lead back to the original fascination: cinema itself." And again, this is something that's going to come up with the book because he starts making like little home movies when he's like 8 years old. So this idea of that true interest is revealed early. He's been obsessed by the time this book is published. He's been obsessed with movies for as long as he's had memories.
Um, there is one thing that I think is super important because he talks about he takes these inspirations. We'll talk about this later on, but he takes these inspirations from, you know, he'll read a short story, or he'll watch another movie, or he'll have an experience, or he'll go for a walk, or he'll sit in the dark with his eyes closed, and he's just giving his his brain space to think and to work, and then he takes all the calculations, the computations of his own brain, and applies it to his work. And so in Inception, my favorite line in Inception is this. And I think this is really a large part of what you and I are doing together every week, where, you know, I've done, I don't know, 426 of these, was that a thousand hours at least, a decade of doing this. And I think what we're looking for is we're just looking for ideas. And I think the reason this works, whether you read these biographies yourself, you listen to the podcast, what you're looking for is this idea that you can make your own. Why is that important? Because if you think about the movie Inception, the character of Leonardo DiCaprio is saying this uh to another character. He says, "What is the most resilient parasite?" Uh, bacteria, a virus, an intestinal worm. It's an idea. Resilient, highly contagious. And once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it's almost impossible to eradicate. And if you've seen that movie, you know that can't be an idea that somebody else gave you. Can't be said, "You should believe X, Y, and Z." You've got to do the mental calculus yourself, and then you take ownership of the idea. If you've seen Inception, you know exactly how they do that uh with what they're trying, the main goal of what they're trying to accomplish uh in the movie.
So, I want to touch on most of this is really how Christopher Nolan thinks about work, which I think is applicable to, you know, all the businesses that you and I are building. But, I do want to give you some of this these biographical details because I think it's really important. And the first thing I want to tell you is the fact that when he was 7 years old, he's inspired by the work of George Lucas. Nolan remembers seeing George Lucas's Star Wars upon its release in 1977. He was seven years old. "I was the kid who saw it the most times. I had a real fascination with those films and with the technology behind them. I remember I had a magazine about Industrial Light and Magic that I read obsessively. Anything about the behind-the-scenes and how they made those films were fascinating to me." So this is again, he's seven. In the next page, he's eight. He's going to start making movies. But this is something that he does his whole life. When he gets obsessed with something, he will watch it over and over again. He will read it over and over again. He will look at it over and over again. And then he will read everything that he can get his hands on because what he's seeking and what I would say he's obsessed with, he's he's obsessed with how the movies are made. And I I I went back and listened to the first Christopher Nolan episode I did and then reread all the highlights and I just jotted down some notes to myself and one of the notes I I left myself was, "Oh, like this guy's obsessed with understanding." That is what he's trying to figure out. He's trying to understand. He has a deep desire to understand.
So when he turns eight, his dad gives him these like little Super 8 cameras. And so his first version of a movie is going to play on the Super 8 camera. Super 8 camera only holds, they can record for like two and a half minutes, if I'm not mistaken. It might have been in black and white, and it definitely had no sound. Now at 13. Okay, so he knows he he liked making films. He didn't know what the job was. So you're just a kid, right? But at 13, with Ridley Scott's help, Nolan is going to find his life's work. So Nolan starts watching a bunch of movies and two of the movies that he loved were Blade Runner and Alien, and he then discovers after the fact that he winds up being shocked. He's like, "Oh, wait. What these two things have in common, even though they're vastly different, is the same person made them. What is that person? What job is that? I want that job." So he says, uh, the direct direct quote from Nolan here: "Then when I found out it was the same director. Wow. So totally different story, different writers, different actors, different everything. All the things that as a kid you identify as making films what they are, all those things are different, but there's a connection, and that connection is the director. I can remember thinking that's the job I want."
And so his family, so his dad is from England, his mother is American. They're going to move back and forth across the Atlantic quite a bit. And they actually send him to this boarding school. And it's called Haileybury. And this is really important because we talked at the very beginning the fact that he runs a very strict schedule. He likes to do all the work himself. He's accustomed himself to handling a large workload. He's kind of indifferent to, you know, problems. He's indifferent to heat, to cold. He has this like very strong discipline and a high pain tolerance. He learned that at this boarding school. O says this is what they used to say about the boarding school they went to that if you could survive your first two years there, you can survive anything. It was a Spartan, old-fashioned institution. Then Christopher Nolan says, "I remember Stephen Fry being asked about jail in an interview and him saying, 'Oh, I went to boarding school. It's not so bad.' Meaning jail is not so bad. That was not my experience. I enjoyed it, but I also recognized that a lot of people didn't. I always referred to boarding schools as a Darwinian environment. It is sink or swim. It was very militaristic. You either roll with it or you absolutely hate it. Life at the school was lived under the clock in every sense. Every minute of every day rigorously time-labeled." Now they keep them busy from the time they wake up. By the time they go to bed around 9:00, says by the end of the day, everybody's just too tired. All they can do is just fall into their bed exhausted.
Now this is what obsession looks like. Nolan is going to be sitting in the dark. Instead of sleeping, he's going to be listening to scores and soundtracks from movies in the dark and just thinking and and tapping into his imagination. So, it says, "No one remembers lying in bed after lights out listening to the soundtracks of Star Wars, the movie 2001, or Chariots of Fire on his Walkman. This is what he says: Film scores leave a bit of space for the pictures and for your imagination. He used the word imagination over and over again. It gave me a bit more space to think. That's something he also repeats. More like ambient music, I suppose. I certainly prized the imaginative space of listening to music in the dark, thinking about things, imagining things, films, stories. That was very important to me."
This idea of people just laying down either in the dark. So I think Jim Simons, founder of Renaissance Technologies. I stole this idea. I think the first time I read about Jim was like all the way back on episode 80. So this is probably like seven years ago. And people would go into his office and they'd see him, the lights would be off. He'd be lying on like prone on his sofa. They thought he was taking a nap. He's like, "No, I'm not taking a nap. I'm thinking." So, no noise, no light, no he can't see anything. And he just lets his mind try to chew on the problem uh that that like that he's trying to solve. There's a great uh there's a great anecdote and a great story from the early days of Bill Gates' career when he was building Microsoft. This journalist gets in the car with him and they're like, "Oh my god, somebody broke into your car, Bill, and stole your car radio." And Bill's like, "What are you talking about?" He's like, "You don't have a car radio?" "Oh," he's like, "Yeah, I removed one on purpose." And he does. In in a typically geeky way, he he figured out was okay, the from the office from my house to the office is eight minutes, and from the office to the airport's, you know, 15 minutes, and I go home, you know, this many times a week, and I go to the airport this many times a week, and so basically it's just like, oh, I took it out because then I save, you know, whatever 120 minutes a week instead of listening to music, I can be thinking about Microsoft. So this idea, I think, is really important that uh, Nolan will repeat. He's like, "You have to give your brain space to think."
Now there's another thing where where he talks about his fascinations over and over again. Again, a lot some of this is like almost like put ideas into your head and then maybe your subconscious does something with it later. Maybe feed your intuition or something. But he is fascinated, interesting that he became a filmmaker because he's fascinated with the fact that cameras can see time in ways we cannot. So just think about his the movies in this non-linear structure and the way he he explains uh presents the plot in his movies. The fact that he is obsessed with seeing time in a way that we cannot. So he says, "There's no other way to conceive of this. The camera sees time in a way that we can't. That's the essence of it. That, for me, was the magical thing. It's about that fascination." He goes, he talks about time over and over again. Time is something that we can't really understand, but we can feel it. We have a very strong sense of time. It affects us greatly, but we don't know what it is. We have clocks and watches, but time is inherently subjective.
So then he goes back to the fact that the discipline that he learned as a very young man in high school age uh of the from the boarding school winds up being a godsend. So it says, "It was at this boarding school that he acquired the punctuality, discipline, and indifference to cold weather for which he would be famous among his film crews for." Now he's also used to being different and separate and making his own decisions. Part of this is because he he says there's like kind of this paradox where, okay, his family left him in England. They live in Chicago at the time. He's like 4,000 miles away from his parents. So he's like, "You have the freedom that you're kind of on your own as a young man, but then you have this like rigid discipline, almost like constraints put around you that you have to operate in." So you're at time way more free than like a typical, let's say, 16-year-old, but also way more strict and disciplined environment. And then all this time of being alone is really interesting.
So this this is pretty crazy because I think before Dunkirk came out, I would say Inception is probably my favorite uh Christopher Nolan movie, but he worked, he had the ideas. So from the the the coming up with the idea for Inception to actually doing it, something like 23 years in between that gap. And so he was talking about when he's in these sessions at night, he first comes up with this idea of like, oh, like what about this idea of playing music or a dream within a dream? And so he says, "It was during one of these late-night sessions after lights out that the idea for Inception first took shape, and he talked he describes it. He says, 'The idea of sharing a dream that was a jumping-off point, and the use of music or playing music outside someone dreaming, and the idea that if you played music to somebody who was asleep, that it would translate in some interesting way.'" "I really did come up with a couple of ideas that went into it, Inception, when I was about 16. The film was a very long time in coming. I said it was 10 years. It was probably more like 20. It was something I was thinking about for a very, very long time." I mean, I think it was what uh I know I've been talking about Edwin Land a lot. I gotta do another episode on him, I guess. But I think he came up with the idea for the instant photography camera somewhere in the 1946. And by the time it was fully finished, and it was the size he wanted, and it could do color, I think it was like 1973. So, it's like 30 years of working on the same idea. Go back to Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs would talk about in the 1980s about having a handheld computer, and when you read about what he's imagining and what he's envisioning that he could accomplish one day in the 1980s, remember, I think the iPad came out, what, 2009, something like that. Sounds hell of a lot like an iPad 40 years before there were iPads. So I just love this idea of the find the idea that ideas can just like sit in your mind and you just have to kind of you just wait. You don't know how to make the thing yet, but you can use the ideas you have today, 15, 20, 30 years from now.
So, at this point in the story, now Nolan is in college, going to college. He kind of doesn't even go to college. He is the president of the Film and TV Society. Okay? And he spends much of the time that he's supposed to be in college in this windowless, soundproof basement. They said it was essentially his office. And what is he doing at when he's at the University College uh College London? He essentially creates his own curriculum. He spent most of his time in the Film and TV Society and he's practicing learning the job that he already knew that he wanted. "What's the point of me going and taking these other classes very seriously?" He there was this great discussion in the book where one of his prof, I think it's the literature professor, is like, "Hey, I can see you're obsessed with with movies. What I need you to do is that same obsession that you have for movies. I need you to have that same obsession for the books." And Nolan's like, "I just know that will never happen." So he knew the job what he already wanted. And so he's like, "I'm just going to build my own curriculum and use this time, make the most use of my time, and actually learn how the hell do I make a movie." So he said, "I did spend most of my time in the basement of the Film and TV Society, learning firsthand how to operate cameras, how to edit, how to cut film by hand, and how to sync sound. We spent three years in college making short films, running the film society, raising money to make more films. It was student-led. I learned a huge amount about the craft of putting films together. It was a great education."
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And then a few pages later, there's just one line. Again, I think he's talking about filmmakers. I think the best founders have this. You have a distinct point of view. You we talked about last week, what is the point of building an undifferentiated commodity business? You should have something unique to say. You should have a new take on the world. And so he says, "Everything you do as a filmmaker is about a point of view. I think the best founders obviously uh have the same thing." I have this sticky note that's on my desk right in front of me, and it's just it's the point of view of Steve Jobs summarized in three words: Insanely great products. That was his point of view.
So his first job out of college is actually making videos for large corporations. Says after graduating, Nolan had applied to and was turned down by the National Film and Television School in England and the Royal College of Art. But he immediately found work as a camera operator in a small video shop turning out corporate videos and media training uh videos for large corporations. This is really important because then we start hitting on the fact that he is going to be relentlessly resourceful. All these ideas I'm discussing with you will fit together just like the plots in a lot of his movies. The relentless resourcefulness is because he's going to be obsessed with control, which we'll get to in a minute. But this is what's fascinating. It's like, how bad do you actually want it? He made his first movie on the weekends while working a full-time job. So he says uh, "The script was written with a view of what can I do with really no resources, just with a camera and scraping together money." He wrote the script on a typewriter. They decided simply to use the bonus from his cameraman job and shoot the film only on weekends for almost a year. They had to rehearse each scene carefully, almost like a play, so they could shoot it in one or two takes, working out they could afford to shoot and process between 10 to 15 minutes of footage a week. Every weekend, everyone would squeeze into the back of a taxi and head to whatever location they'd been able to scrounge up. They shot without permits. Nolan operated the camera himself.
And so again, I just love this idea. It's like, relentless resourceful. I have this goal that I have. Well, I also need to to to eat and I don't have any money, so I'm going to work during the week and then at the weekend I'm going to chase my dreams and okay, maybe if I was working on this full-time, I could do this this movie in two months, but it's going to take me a year. So, so be it. That's what it's going to do. And I love this idea of um doing it on a typewriter. He again goes back to this analog world. Um, one of my favorite um fiction authors is Cormac McCarthy. And one of my favorite facts about one of my favorite fiction authors is the fact that Cormac McCarthy bought a typewriter for $50. He used that typewriter for 50 years and wrote 5 million words on that typewriter. It's not it's not the tools. It's it's that it's the person, it's the talent. And this is what again, Christopher Nolan has a very unique way of working. But I just love that idea. It's like think about *Blood Meridian* if you read it, or *The Road*, or any of Cormac McCarthy's one incredible books that came from hands on a $50 typewriter. It's absolutely incredible.
So then we get into the fact that he goes to time and he had written the original for his first movie. He wrote that script in chronological order and then he rearranged the order of the scenes. And so he was a fan of Quentin Tarantino's time. He says it was heavily influenced by *Reservoir Dogs*. So I was very interested to see what Tarantino had done for his follow-up. And so he says, "If you look at *Pulp Fiction* and *Citizen Kane*," so again, anybody gets to the top of their profession is going to have this historical database of knowledge in their head that they're going to they're going to draw from. So he's constantly referencing these movies in some cases that were made 50 years, 60 years in the past. Uh, they have a lot of similarities in terms of their structure. In no other media is there this insistence that information be introduced chronologically. So he's like, "So why should it be introduced chronologically in my very first film?" So again, he writes the script in chronological order. Then he cuts it up and literally rearranges the orders of the scene. And he he says he rejects chronological conservatism, which I thought was a funny term. He says, "We don't tend to have chronological conversations either. They go all over the place." So again, he's just saying, "Okay, well, why am I expecting?" And he thinks because of TV. TV presents things in more of a chronological order that influenced film. But if you go back in the films of the past, kind of reject that chronological conservatism. Think about the the books you read. They're not in chronological order. The conversations you're having are not in chronological order. So I don't my movie shouldn't have to be either.
And then I just love this idea. I always think about like a person's setup, like what is their setup? Like what is their home life like in relation to their work? I just did this episode last week on the merchant bankers, and there was one guy in the book that I thought was interesting. I think it was an Italian guy, and he had a house or excuse me, an apartment, merchant bank, and a publishing house, and it was like on the street, say, not only was on the same street, it was on the same side of the street, just so he wouldn't have to cross the street. And so um, in Christopher Nolan's case, he's got a house in Los Angeles. Okay? So it says, "His home in Los Angeles and the production facility that sits in a nearly identical residence at the end of his garden. So the two residences sit back to back on opposite sides of the same block like mirror images of each other, like a Tenet com." So he's in his house, and then to commute to his work, he has to walk through the the backyard of his house to the backyard of his other house, which is then his production facility. And it says, "His commute between his home and his work can be completed in under one minute."
And so here's Christopher Nolan at 27 years old. His first movie following is going to lead to Memento. And really, the reason I'm reading this paragraph is because I think doing the best job you can with the opportunities in front of you is going to lead uh to opportunities in the future you can't possibly predict. And so there's this other friend of his at the time is describing Christopher Nolan when Christopher Nolan is 27. "Rather than being discouraged by his rejection from his film school, he was hot on a new idea for a movie. The story of a guy who loses his short-term memory and tries to solve the murder of his wife by tattooing clues on his body like little mementos. Chris also wanted to tell the story backward. That was very important. He said, 'I couldn't quite see it, but when you're around someone who does, you start to believe it.'" Again, you could, you know, be sad or depressed that you got rejected from what you thought you wanted to do. That leads him to this next idea, which again, how we started the conversation today. Memento is what causes his his the new like near vertical ascent of his career.
So he actually in the year 2000 debuts Memento at the Venice Film Festival, and he describes the turning point of his life, which I absolutely love. So he says, "My films always end the same way, with some sort of sudden flourish. It's building to that moment, and then the film ends very abruptly, and for a few seconds everyone was completely silent. I thought, 'Oh no, they hate it.' There were a couple seconds where literally I had no idea what was about to happen. I was very frightened. And then there was an enormous standing ovation and everything. It was extraordinary. It was the turning point of my life." And so each chapter goes into great detail of how they make each movie. The chapter on Memento is obviously the one we're in. There's just one line from there. Again, I think these lines give you an insight into who this is, who this person, this unique person we're talking about is. He's talking about Memento, but he's really talking about what he believes in real life. I think this goes back to the fact that he just feels that there's way more to the world than we understand. There's way more to the world than meets the eye. He says, "I find the idea of not being able to trust your own mind very creepy."
And so for the next movie to be made, Chris Nolan actually had to have the help of an older, more experienced director. So, he's going to make this uh movie called Insomnia, and another director called Steven Soderbergh. He says, "Steven was the one that basically got Insomnia made at the time." Nolan's going around and trying to pitch his movie to a bunch of major studios, and he couldn't even get meetings. And so Steven Soderbergh, upon hearing of Nolan's difficulties getting a meeting with the executives of Warner Brothers, marched across the lot to the head of production and told him, "You're insane if you don't meet with this guy." He even offered to executive produce Insomnia himself, along with George Clooney, by the way of guaranteeing the then 31-year-old director, which is Christopher Nolan. And Christopher Nolan says, "Steven didn't have to do that, but he did. He and George became the executive producers of Insomnia." And this was another very important turning point of Christopher Nolan's life because then he starts to learn how to operate within the studio system. How to work with the big studios.
The way I describe what's about to happen this, and the way Christopher Nolan approaches work, is that constraints breed resourcefulness, and then resourcefulness helps you maintain control. By the end of the production, he had learned an important lesson about working for the studios. This is what he said: "The efficiency of filmmaking is for me a way to keep of keeping control. The pressure of time, the pressure of money. Even though they feel like restrictions at the time and you chafe against them, they're helping you make decisions. They really are. If I, this is great, if I know that deadline is there, then my creative process ramps up exponentially. Creative power in filmmaking is very important to me. I'm very protective of it, but I can get my power from spending less and moving faster. Not giving anybody a reason to come and visit me and interfere or complain. I made that decision very early in my career. If I can work a little bit faster than people expect, if I can work a little bit cheaper than people expect, then they'll let me do my thing." Again, constraints breed resourcefulness. Resourcefulness helps him maintain control.
And so, it's these experiences that he just realizes that big studios, they have this way of just working that encourages waste and doesn't give Nolan the control and involvement that he desires. And he says, "You're encouraged in a big movie to very rapidly hire an enormous number of people, artists, concept guys, and all this stuff. Then you have to feed that beast. And so you're in a situation where you go, 'I need a robot for this science fiction film. Figure me out a robot.' And then you go away while they do whatever they feel like and come back with a robot." This is the most important part of this section. "Which didn't suit my way of working at all." He wants to be involved. They will spend literally, and he's talking about the big studios, they will spend literally millions of dollars on films that don't happen. Meanwhile, Nolan's working out of his garage at home trying to do as much work in pre-production before spending any money. It's the opposite of spending millions of dollars on a movie that never comes to fruition.
Another thing that's surprising about Nolan that's a little different from a lot of people you and I talk about, a lot of you people you and I talk about have this like delusional self-confidence, this this self-belief, this like reality distortion field. He's a pessimist, and it's not what I would say is the way the reason this is an interesting tool for him is he's imagining failure constantly and then doing everything he can to avoid it. "I am very much a pessimist. I always plan for the worst." And then I thought it was really interesting when the book went into a 20-year creative partnership between that Christopher Nolan has uh with Hans Zimmer. He says, "That's why Hans and I have worked so successfully together because I like to say that he's a minimalist composer with maximalist production values. It is a very big sound, but the ideas behind it are incredibly minimalist, very, very simple, and that gives me space to work as a filmmaker between the notes. What I've done with film scores over the years is to try and totally reverse the process and start with the emotion. Start with the basic heart of the story, and then build the mechanics after that." Nolan's description of Hans Zimmer, a minimalist with maximalist production values, does double duty as a description of Nolan himself and hints at why the two men could forge such a close creative partnership in the years to come.
And so this is another thing that he does I think is really interesting. This idea that you need to start with the heart and work backwards. So before shooting, Nolan actually types up a one-page summary of the film's vision and then will return to it repeatedly so he never loses the heart of the movie in the chaos of the film production. I thought that was really interesting that you start with the heart and then you work backwards. Go back again. I told you he's got a handful of these ideas that he applies year after year, movie after movie. We're in many years in the future since the last time I told you this different movie. But
He says, "You never expect success." I'm a very negative, super superstitious, pessimistic person. Again, he's assuming it's going to be a failure and then working to to do everything that he can to prevent that. Uh oh, and it also goes back to making things that you're actually really proud of because he's had so many examples where they're like, "Oh, like uh his film got bad uh review. It's going to flop at the box office." He kind of tries to buy, he kind of temporarily buys into what the outside world's uh saying and then winds up getting on when it's released, goes to like number one, gets great reviews. So this is what he learned about that.
What I learned was it's really important uh to me that I knew the film was good, that I knew that I liked what I had done. I felt very good about that and you realize when the chips are down and everyone turns around and tells you that it's crap, that is all you have. So if you don't believe in it in the first place, you're taking a risk, you're taking a terrible risk.
This has already been mentioned several times, but the fact that Nolan loves operating within constraints. He's making this movie, has a very tight budget of just 40 million. And it says, "This tight budget enforces Nolan's favorite conditions. Improvisation within a set of restrictions."
Few pages later, it goes back to this idea that I've repeated a few times. I make films that are huge endorsements of the idea that there's more to our world than meets the eye. He goes back to this idea that he desires to live and to work in an analog world. Nolan's antagonism with regard to new technologies is far-reaching. An absolute believer in the difference between photographic and computer-generated imagery, he prefers the grain and texture of celluloid to the flatness of digital, location shootings to sets, and physical sets to computer-generated backdrops. The appeal of his films in some ways rests on the same principle behind the popularity of boutique hotels, low-fi recording uh methods, glitch music, and Etsy. That in the information age, more value, not less, will accrue to precisely those elements that cannot be cut and pasted.
Goes back to this idea that there's more uh to the world than meets the eye again. And also the fact that he thinks we're being duped by technology, which he repeats over and over again. The idea that you think all this information, like all the all the human knowledge is online. And so he, he has like this interesting thought experiment, not even thought experiment, an actual experiment to see if that's true. So he says, an interesting experiment would be to walk into a library, go to a book, open the book to a random page, find a fact or piece of information, write it down, do that 10 times, and then go online and see how many of those 10 you can find. Our feeling is that 90% of the information is online. I have a suspicion that the real answer is .9%. So the author of the book actually does this and he has 10 facts and he only found one of them uh online. So not .9%, but way less than 90%. Uh, so then we go back to again, this is the year 2006, and he goes back to the fact that he's going to find the best way that he wants to work and he's going to do that regardless of what the rest of his industry is doing.
So it says, "We live and work in an analog world." The Prestige, which is the movie that came out in 2006, was the first film where we were expected by the studio to digitize the negative and edit electronically. To this day, we've never converted to the other workflow used by most of the industry. We've continued to shoot on film, edit electronically, then take the frame numbers and cut the film by hand, and that's what goes out. The Prestige was very much the point at which we separated from the rest of the industry, or rather they separated from us.
And so a few pages later, you can kind of expound on that. You can easily sum up Nolan's entire ethos as a filmmaker. He takes the rules of genre and he flips them. Another thing that he says, he'll use the word strip away, reduce, minimalist, cut. So he says, "I think," and he talks about the older he gets, the more experience he gets, the more confidence he has, the more he can actually cut. I think a lot of that is about confidence because it takes more confidence to strip things away. And so when he's working on the Batman series, there's this line by the Joker that again sounds like it would come out of not the Joker's mouth, but Christopher Nolan's mouth. "The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules."
And so there's this really, he talked about the turning point of momentum being, you know, critically acclaimed. I think it won uh two Oscars. Uh, winds up, I think, returning like something like 5x or 10x its budget. And then he was able to like just take, have this like near vertical ascent. But then one of his movies makes a billion dollars. The Dark Knight makes over a billion dollars at the box office. And this momentum changes his entire career. And then the way he thinks about the changes that he experienced during this time of career, I thought was really interesting.
So it says, "Suddenly his position at Warner Brothers went from solid to unassailable." The immediately thing that this did was extraordinary and allowed me to do whatever I wanted to as the next film. Creatively speaking, they were going to let me do whatever I wanted to do. Everything up to that moment had been a fight or a struggle one way or another. And then he said, "Suddenly realizing this, I said, 'Oh, okay. I'm going to get the last word.'" It was very liberating in a lot of ways, but it was also scary because you know that every filmmaker would give their teeth for that. So finally, you've got it and what are you going to do with it? For the first time, I was able to step back and go, "Okay, what do I want to do now?"
And then he figured out, remember I said that these ideas can be dormant or ruminate for decades. And so he says, "What I've always wanted to do was to do Inception." So throughout the book, he's always talking about these influences that he has. He'll use the world as this giant classroom, take those influences and apply it to his work. But he makes a really interesting point here. He's a big fan of the short stories and the writing of Jorge Luis Borges. And his point on the influence that he has, like you, you have to have something else going on in your life. Like you can't, somebody can't just give you a story and then what are you going to do with it? You have to have something to hang it on. So he says, with those short stories, you have to have something rattling inside you already that then connects with that. But if you're not already predisposed to that, it just comes to you as a story and it doesn't necessarily spark anything.
So he took one idea from the short story uh that Borges wrote and it's actually one of the main ideas in Inception. And that was important because he had taken multiple shots up until this point to try to finish writing Inception. He says, "I managed to get about 80 pages in. I got into the beginning of the third act and then got stuck and I stayed stuck for years and years." Inception was thus the work of half a lifetime. An idea first conceived by Nolan when he was 16, nursed at university, elaborated upon when he came to Hollywood, and finally executed in the wake of The Dark Knight's success. Inception took input from its maker at every major point of his life. The schoolboy, the university student, the Hollywood neophyte, the success story, the father. What a paragraph. I love that.
And again, there's a crazy line a few pages later. 23 years after first conceiving of the idea, Nolan commenced principal photography on Inception on June 19th, 2009. I would encourage you to buy this book, read this book, but you should look at the pictures because then you see how he like maps everything out. And so this is one of the most interesting ideas, this idea that first flip it. Okay? So, and you can see how he like writes out the plots and everything. So it says, "When the director first hears or has an idea, his first instinct is to flip it, turning it almost into a three-dimensional object that he can hold in his hands or walk around." Storytelling thus becomes a three-dimensional exercise like sculpture.
And then he talks about as your career continues, you have this like confluence of events you can't, and influences you can't even, almost like they operate at a subconscious level. I think this is why Steve Jobs said that the older he gets, the more important that he thinks intuition was. And that intuition played a much larger role in his career than intellect did. And so Nolan says, "What I've accepted over the years is that the job of a director is one in which a lot of what you do is instinctive and unconscious."
I actually uh was with a friend the other day. He's one of the greatest investors uh basically no one has ever heard of. And and he likes it that way. And what he told me was very interesting. He says, "The more I understand about investing, the better I get at it." He says something like uh the less I think I should actually have a team, that it was something like the performance could be like inversely correlated to the amount of people on his team. And part of it was because he's like had this intuition or instinct that we should be doing something. And you try to give it, give it to somebody else on the team to do or explain it to them and they don't, because they don't have whatever is like that intuition you have in you, that subconscious that's driving you. They don't understand how important it is. They basically kind of like take an idea that if he just ran with it would have been a lot more successful and they kind of just [ __ ] it up. But I love that idea. What I've accepted over the years that the job of director, entrepreneur, whatever case is, is one in which a lot of what you do is instinctive and unconscious.
And so in any endeavor, you're going to get stuck. And in Inception, you get stuck. In almost all these movies, you get stuck. But on Inception, it's very fascinating because then he talks about what you do when you get unstuck. And this is going to remind me of Rick Rubin. Uh, somewhere a few weeks into the cut where normally you begin to gain a little bit of confidence that it's coming together. We just hit a wall. We got stuck for a long time. I couldn't get to sleep for a couple days. It was just awful. I was like, "Oh my god, we've just taken $200 million and burned it in a bonfire." As you make a film, most things tend to work along this sliding scale of like, "Yeah, that's got to, that's going to get better. We need to tweak that." And you just adjust it. It's like tightening with lug nuts on a tire. You do this one, and then you do that one a little bit, and you do that one a little bit, and you keep the rotation. But every now and again, you get somewhere where it just doesn't, and you're like, "This will never work. This, we will never get past." So what do we do? The solution was a ruthless cut.
So Rick Rubin talked about this and it's again, think about what Steve Jobs did when we talked about Steve Jobs in exile. Comes back to to Apple and says, "You have, you know, 300 products. We're going to do four. We're going to do this ruthless cut. This ruthless edit." So, the ruthless cut in this book, what Nolan's talking about, is called "The Ruthless Edit" by Rick Rubin. Let's say they're stuck. We need 10 songs on an album and I'm working with this band that's really important. You know, we have 15 that we kind of like or 20 that we kind of like. Let's not try to cut that 20 down to 10. Let's cut that 20 down to three. There's, what are the three we cannot live without? And then let's try to add each one back. So, number four, what is one that absolutely has to be number four? And you know if you got it or not. There's not one that actually has to record. That means you, you made, now you made 17 out of the 20 that you're not going to use. So then you might have to make another 20, 30, 40, 50 songs. But again, when you're stuck, just ruthlessly cut, ruthlessly edit. Uh, absolutely love that idea. I think it's a really interesting idea.
Goes back to his desire to live in an analog world. I think this is just a really great metaphor. The idea that you do not want to encourage dependency and you want to be able to find your way. Before I read this to you, something else popped in my mind just now where he talks about, you know, like his kids at the time. Now, can you imagine what you would do with like ChatGPT? Uh, but his kids at the time, like if they wanted to look up information, they just Google and they get it immediately. He's like, well, when I was younger, I had to like go through like the Dewey Decimal System in the library or something, or like I have to hunt for that information. And that activity of hunting, of working, of it being laborious to get what you want, he says that activity, even if you don't get, take away what you got after the activity, that activity of putting in the work and the effort is valuable in and of itself. And so he's trying to get his kids, you know, away from just overly like being dependent and over-relying, essentially outsourcing their thinking.
So he says, "You have to be really careful on how much information you're given." There's a danger when we start to rely on particular technologies or on corporations that manage our information and track our movements. They're encouraging dependency. One of the things I try to teach my kids is when we go to a new city, I like to wander around and get lost and then explain to them how I've managed to find my way without a phone, without a map. I just embrace that. I said, "Look, we'll get lost, but we'll find our way." It's something that applies to filmmaking very, very directly because you look at the plan of the set that you're building. You're always reconciling two-dimensional imagery with three-dimensional space. But again, you don't want to encourage dependency. You want to be able to find your way. I think that's just a great metaphor for life.
So, moving ahead, he likes constraints. He doesn't like rules. And so, he says, "What you don't want as a filmmaker is to feel restrictive." So, one of his favorite movies is 2001, A Space Odyssey. It was actually produced in 1968. Created in 1968 by Stanley Kubrick. And he's just got a great line about this. He says, "That's why I say 2001 is the punk rock of movies. It's not that it breaks all the rules. It's a film that doesn't acknowledge that there are any rules." And so, go back to that line from the Joker from earlier. "The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules." One of Nolan's favorite movies. This is his description. One of his favorite movies. It's not that it breaks all the rules. It's a film that doesn't acknowledge that there are any rules. And you see, Nolan does exactly this.
So, he talks about how he built Dunkirk. Dunkirk is a war movie. That is a well-worn, well-known genre, right? And so he's describing what he wanted to do. Pure present tense, pure climax. There would be no shots of generals pushing boats across a map, no Churchill, no politics. From its very first sequence, we are given the film's starkly utilitarian moral calculus. Survive or die. What I stripped away on Dunkirk was the backstory. If you think about what he's doing here, he's describing this is a product that is defined by what it doesn't have. He's not, he's rejecting that there are rules for a war film. He keeps going. "We made a war film in which we don't use any of the visually chaotic devices. Lots of quick cuts, lots of activity, lots of smoke, lots of fire, bits and bobs flying everywhere that usually sell the idea of war to an audience. Dunkirk is entirely about the absence of those things."
And then finally, the last idea I want to tell you about is this combination of discipline and obsession. It's the fact that I keep going no matter what, and I make sure that my team knows it. I'm known in the film business for having good luck with weather. That's inaccurate. I often have terrible luck with weather, but my philosophy is to shoot no matter what the weather is. Always shooting no matter what weather. Just keep going. Just keep going. Letting everybody on the crew and cast know that we're really serious about doing that. No matter what the conditions are, shoot in any weather. And that is where I'll leave it. That is 426 books down, 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.