CHRISTOPHER NOLAN
genre that’s an unlikely inspiration point of sorts. “I have no idea whether this is true, but I sort of have this idea that if you look at Sergio Leone when he made Once Upon A Time In The West, there’s a slight feeling of… I’m not sure he watched any westerns while he was making it,” says Nolan. “It expresses his love for the genre that’s grown over years and years and years. And there’s something so fabulously heightened about the way he then engages with that genre. It’s the distillation of all these things in his past, and his impressions of the genre. I wanted the crew to dive into this film, in a very unique way, and to not really be influenced by things in a conscious sense, but to just let our love for the re-engage with your childhood connection with those movies, with the feeling of what it’s like to go someplace new, someplace fresh. It actually has to take them somewhere they haven’t been before, and that’s why no one’s ever been able, really, to do their own version of James Bond or something. It doesn’t work. And that’s not at all what this is. This is much more my attempt to create the sort of excitement in grand-scale entertainment I felt from those movies as a kid, in my own way.”
Another thing that sets Tenet apart from the Bond movies is John David Washington’s lead character (that early, cinema-only teaser trailer proclaimed that the “time has come for a new kind of protagonist”). “He’s a very
this. They’re actually going to do this!’ And they’re not cutting any corners, and we’re watching it happen. So I think that that’s one of the pretty remarkable things about working on a Nolan film. It’s that the thing you read on the page – you then come to work, and you’re actually seeing it in front of you, in the flesh. None of it is CGI.”
Physicality was crucial when it came to casting Washington in the lead. “I was a broken man when it was all said and done,” Washington explains. “But it was all well worth it. I joked with my brother about it often. He actually helped my mum get over her worry a little bit. We were basically laughing about how I’m going to die for this man, Christopher Nolan!”
“I’m not sure I quite realised just how big the demands would be,” Nolan laughs of Washington’s casting. “I knew that in taking on the spy genre, I knew that I wanted, I needed a creative partner in the lead who would be up for really getting in there, and getting the physicality of the character. Because that, to me, is very important. If I’m going to do a spy film, I don’t want to be doing it half-arsed; I want to be doing the most extreme things we can safely do. We’d want to be involving the actor in the action, and the physicality of the character needed to be part of the story.”
Nolan compares the experience to working with one of his previous leading men. “We really, really wanted to integrate the character into the action, very much in the way of the collaboration I had with Christian Bale, actually, on the Dark Knight trilogy,” he says. “The action was always trying to express something about the character. We were always trying to use Chris’ creativity and his commitment to the role to have the action mean something in the story.”
The aforementioned teaser trailer heralded Washington’s character as that ‘new protagonist’, which is certainly true in the context of Nolan’s previous work. “I think that John David’s protagonist is very, very different to any of the protagonists I’ve dealt with before,” he confirms. “I think he’s also very different to the conventional protagonist of a spy movie. We wanted to do something different with it, not just for the sake