The time of his life
Tenet director Nolan takes years to reconcile high concept and genre
Christopher Nolan’s 2000 bigscreen breakout Memento opens with a scene of a bullet jumping back into a gun, its target coming back to life as the film plays backward. So while the writer-director says he’s been working for six or seven years on the spy thriller Tenet, he’s clearly had time on his mind for much, much longer.
“I’ve been playing around with some of these ideas for a very long time,” he says during a recent news conference for the new film. “It was used for metaphorical purpose in Memento. Here we try to actually make it concrete, make it a real thing.”
The trick to making that happen was to weld together some very strange notions of cause and effect with the constituents of a spy movie. “I was trying to construct as engaging a spy story as possible, having chosen the genre of the espionage film to try to embody these ideas of time,” says Nolan. “It was about reconciling concept and genre.”
So on the one hand Tenet plays as a kind of James Bond template — John David Washington as the next 007, anyone? — complete with dazzling international locations, fine clothes, high-powered weaponry, lots of murderous henchmen and key objects that include a secret doomsday formula and an exquisite forged painting.
And on the other? Well, let’s just say that Bond’s writers and directors don’t usually cite the work of Dutch artist M.C. Escher or English mathematician and philosopher Roger Penrose as inspiration for their movies. Nolan doesn’t say when he first came across the mind-bending works of Penrose and Escher, but he was seven when The Spy Who Loved Me opened in 1977. “That is still a great favourite of mine,” he says. “What I remember and what I’ve tried to retain from that experience was the feeling of possibility. It had such scale ... pure escapism. I think I’ve spent a lot of my career trying to get back to that feeling, and trying to give that feeling to audiences, that sense of wonderment of what movies can do and where they can take you.”
Any discussion of Tenet by its creators has to move carefully to avoid spoilers, and the actors are guarded in their comments. What comes across, however, is that everyone had a blast making it.
“Maybe it’s working on films about time,” says Kenneth Branagh, who plays villainous Russian
oligarch Andrei Sator. “But (Nolan) seems to change time so that when do a scene with him, it doesn’t matter whether there are 5,000 people in the room — the only thing he seems to be interested in is what you’re offering up. It’s a beautiful thing to be on the receiving end of.”
“My expectation was more full of pressure and terror than the reality,” says Elizabeth Debicki, who stars as Kat, Andrei’s estranged wife. “The story takes us to some really dark places, but the experience of making it was actually a joy.”