Christopher Nolan

The Tenet filmmaker reflects on the film of 2020.

‘It’s always fun when you’ve made something that people are interested to debate and discuss’

Congratulations on Tenet being named TF’s film of 2020... Thank you. You’ve talked before about how when you’re making a film, you don’t know what kind of world it’ll be released into. Tenet must be the most extreme example of that?

Yeah! I mean, there’s really no way of knowing, when you work for years on a film, what kind of world it’ll be coming out into. With Tenet, certainly, coming out in 2020 was a very extreme version. But any time you take on a project that takes years to make, there’s always that tension between the world in which you conceive the film, and the world in which you release the film.

How did you conceptualise the time inversion in the film?

There’s a lot of Post-It notes, a lot of doodles, a lot of everything really. I was drawing a lot of diagrams. It’s something I’ve done for years, really. Probably since Following… I gravitate towards a lot of diagrams. I stick a lot of stuff up on the walls, and spend a lot of time puzzling it out before I write. And then as I write, I try to really be a part of the audience. I try to really let the story flow. I try to really write the experience for the audience, and experience that for myself as I write.

Tenet works so elegantly on screen but is quite hard to explain on paper. Was it particularly challenging to share the film in your head with your collaborators?

Very much. What I loved about this premise, and what kept me going with it, is that it doesn’t really work on the page. It doesn’t even work to explain it. You actually have to see it cinematically. That’s based on the fact that the camera can see time. The camera can see something and manipulate something that we can’t in ordinary life. We can see things run backwards with the camera. We can see things run slowly or fast with a camera. So what you’re working on, for me, is really a big prize for any filmmaker: you’re finding a subject that can really only work as a film.

Your films always invite rewatches. Are you expecting Tenet to have particularly fervent rewinding and freeze-framing?

[laughs] Yes. It’ll hit the home circuit, and I think it’ll be fascinating, because when you show it to people in a cinema, the great advantage as a filmmaker is that people can’t rewind the film, and check what it is you’ve done. We had that in mind as we were editing the film, and we tried to be very consistent and very careful as we were putting it all together. But at the end of the day, you never want to sacrifice the flow of the actual experience for the scrutiny that some fans might give it once they have it in their hands. And that’s a balance. But I feel that we put a lot of care and attention into how it was put together. If people want to really analyse that and take that apart, I’m grateful for the attention [laughs].

Have you been amused by any of the fan theories that have sprung up so far?

It’s always fun when you’ve made something that people are interested to debate and discuss and come up with theories. The wonderful thing about an audience’s response to the work that you’ve put there, and the thing that’s really exciting for a filmmaker, is that there are all kinds of things that you’re hoping that people will notice and that they’ll respond to, but you just have no idea what people are going to come up with, and how they’re going to interpret things.

Outside of the Dark Knight trilogy, you haven’t done sequels. Do you see Tenet remaining a standalone experience or would you ever consider revisiting the concept or The Protagonist?

I don’t really want to answer that question. [laughs] I’m not going to. The answer I’ll give you is: the choice to do a sequel or not to do a sequel is not based on any kind of principle of whether I do sequels or not. Each project is assessed on its own merit. TENET IS AVAILABLE ON 4K UHD, BLU-RAY, DVD AND DIGITAL FROM 14 DECEMBER.