Christopher Nolan Quotes

To be honest, I don’t enjoy watching movies much when I’m working. They tend to fall apart on me a bit.

I like films that continue to spin your head in all sorts of different directions after you’ve seen them.

Revenge is a particularly interesting concept, especially the notion of whether or not it exists outside of just an abstract idea.

A hero can be anyone. Even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a young boy’s shoulders to let him know that the world hadn’t ended.

The thing with computer-generated imagery is that it’s an incredibly powerful tool for making better visual effects. But I believe in an absolute difference between animation and photography.

The problem with big films is they snowball very rapidly and you can never pull back. It’s a pipeline that needs to be fed.

I made ‘Batman’ the way I made every other film, and I’ve done it to my own satisfaction – because the film, truly, is exactly the way I wanted it to be.

I sometimes think how strange it is that I’ve got to do exactly what I want, and that is difficult to cope with. You have to remind yourself every few weeks: I’m making this film and this is exactly what I want to do. And suddenly you’re happy again.

I think audiences get too comfortable and familiar in today’s movies. They believe everything they’re hearing and seeing. I like to shake that up.

If I could steal someone’s dream myself, I’d have to go for one of Orson Welles.

But I have been interested in dreams, really since I was a kid. I have always been fascinated by the idea that your mind, when you are asleep, can create a world in a dream and you are perceiving it as though it really existed.

As soon as television became the only secondary way in which films were watched, films had to adhere to a pretty linear system, whereby you can drift off for ten minutes and go and answer the phone and not really lose your place.

Every great story deserves a great ending

Sometime, when you start thinking too much what an audience is going to think, when you’re too self-conscious about it, you make mistakes.

I’m taking a bit of a wait-and-see attitude towards 3D.

I have always been a huge fan of Ridley Scott and certainly when I was a kid. ‘Alien’, ‘Blade Runner’ just blew me away because they created these extraordinary worlds that were just completely immersive. I was also an enormous Stanley Kubrick fan for similar reasons.

I think there are advantages to different scales of filmmaking. You wouldn’t want to do just one thing.

Superheroes fill a gap in the pop culture psyche, similar to the role of Greek mythology. There isn’t really anything else that does the job in modern terms. For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously.

I don’t particularly enjoy watching films in 3D because I think that a well-shot and well-projected film has a very three-dimensional quality to it, so I’m somewhat sceptical of the technology.

No, I’ve only ever done one film at a time.

Writing, for me, is a combination of objective and subjective approach. You take an objective approach at times to get you through things, and you take a subjective approach at other times, and that allows you to find an emotional experience for the audience.

Well, you always discover a lot in the editing room. Particularly the action, because you have to over-shoot a lot and shoot an enormous amount of material because many of the sequences have to be discovered in the editing and manipulation of it.

For the last 10 years, I’ve felt increasing pressure to stop shooting film and start shooting video, but I’ve never understood why. It’s cheaper to work on film, it’s far better looking, it’s the technology that’s been known and understood for a hundred years, and it’s extremely reliable.

Every film should have its own world, a logic and feel to it that expands beyond the exact image that the audience is seeing.

I’ve been fascinated by dreams my whole life, since I was a kid, and I think the relationship between movies and dreams is something that’s always interested me.

One of the things you do as a writer and as a filmmaker is grasp for resonant symbols and imagery without necessarily fully understanding it yourself.

I think there has been this increasing misperception that kids will not respond to something because it’s also for adults. I think that often that tends to get underestimated.

I’ve been interested in dreams since I as a kid and I’ve wanted to do a film about them for a long time.

A camera is a camera, a shot is a shot, how you tell the story is the main thing.

The best actors instinctively feel out what the other actors need, and they just accommodate it.

You know when Hollywood does a great big blockbuster that really wraps you up in a world, and lets you believe in extraordinary things that move you in some way, in an almost operatic sensibility? That to me is the most fun I have at the movies.

But in the back of my mind I’ve always looked to the biggest-scale Hollywood movies. Because to me the most satisfying experience is of watching a movie, if it’s done really well. And so that aspiration is always it for me, if I have the opportunity to do it.