USA TODAY International Edition
Director Christopher Nolan inspires crazed Cannes crowd
CANNES, France – Do you love Christopher Nolan? Not as much as the French.
Merely getting into the director’s two-hour panel, marketed as a “RendezVous with Christopher Nolan,” required the steel of Batman on Gotham’s worst day. Film fans invoked pushing, shoving and yelling as they clamored to gain access to the afternoon event.
Inside the theater, festival-goers greeted the freshly bearded Nolan like a rock star with a standing ovation. “I’ve never been to Cannes before,” said Nolan, who was in town to premiere an “unrestored” 70 mm print of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey for the Cannes audience on Sunday.
2001: A Space Odyssey is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and Nolan worked with Warner Bros. to master the new print using photochemical technology, to render the film to be viewed the way Kubrick initially intended it. “The first time I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey I was 7 years old,” the Dunkirk director said. “My dad took me to see it in the biggest theater in London.”
While initially this reporter felt somewhat silly risking elbows to the ribs and backpacks to the face trying to get in to see a director who is often a few miles from me back in Los Angeles, I had to see what this Nolan fandemonium was all about. So what did I learn?
Nolan never envisioned a ‘Batman’ trilogy
“We hadn’t planned on doing a sequel,”
Nolan said. But he was drawn to Bruce Wayne because the character, played by Christian Bale, “doesn’t have any superpowers other than extraordinary wealth. Really, he’s just someone who does a lot of push-ups. In that sense, he’s very relatable and human. I think that’s why I gravitated toward it.”
Each ‘Batman’ film is a different genre crafted around the villain
Every film represents a different genre of filmmaking, Nolan said. For 2005’s Batman Begins, created as an origins story, the director said he utilized Liam Neeson’s Ducard as “an appropriate adversary” and a “mentorturned-enemy.”
In 2008, Nolan turned to Heath Ledger’s infamous, Oscar-winning Joker as a way for The Dark Knight to invoke terrorism in a crime drama. “The Dark Knight for me was always a crime drama in the mold of a Michael Mann film. The Joker was a terrorist, an agent of chaos set loose,” he said. And 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises was meant to feel like a “historical epic” with Tom Hardy as his villain. “Bane as a militarist foe helped that.”
He bugs his crew just enough
On Nolan’s first film, 1998’s Following, he had little money, so he and friends would shoot on Saturdays: “We all had jobs in the week.” Because crew members sometimes wouldn’t show up, Nolan learned jobs, from sound to camera work. “The larger the films have become, the more I’ve been able to appreciate the learning that I did by doing. I know enough about every job on set to sort of be a pain in the (butt) to everybody,” he said to laughter.
Nolan ‘couldn’t get in’ to film school
When asked about forging a career without a film degree, Nolan clarified. “Just to be clear, I didn’t go to film school because I couldn’t get into film school,” he said. “My father knew I wanted to be a filmmaker, but he advised me to get what he referred to as ‘a real degree in a real subject,’ so I’d have something to fall back on.
“So I studied English because that was the academic subject that I was best at. But what I found when I studied it, is (that) it greatly informed my filmmaking process, my writing process. I started to become more at ease with a lot of the literary concepts that underline film criticism.”