Christopher Nolan is a director cherished by one and all for his movies. Christopher Nolan‘s exceptional vision and execution are unique and provide people with a much-needed escape from the real world. On top of that, everything’s backed up with facts and utterly believable.
For a director as visionary as him, it’d be great to know who he admires in the same field as him. Christopher Nolan has expressed his likeness for many films and filmmakers time and again in interviews.
Christopher Nolan has talked about how he’s inspired by certain movies and scenes to go ahead with his filmmaking ideas. Some critics and viewers have also drawn parallels of his work with past works of some ace filmmakers.
A stan for Stanley Kubrick’s work.
From a young age, Christopher Nolan was interested in filmmaking and was a great fan of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Talking about it in an interview Nolan expressed, “I remember very clearly just the experience of being transported to another world. I was a huge Star Wars fan at the time. But this was a completely different way of experiencing science fiction. I was seven years old, so I couldn’t claim to have understood the film. I still can’t claim that. But as a seven-year-old, I didn’t care about understanding the film. I just felt this extraordinary experience of being taken to another world. You didn’t doubt this world for an instant. It had a larger-than-life quality.”
“It just has that sensory stimulation of pure cinema that speaks to people of all ages. People forget kids like it too — because we were all into spaceships.”
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, not just intrigued a 7-year-old Christopher but went on to leave an impact such deep, that he still draws inspiration for his work from that art of a film.
Stanley Kubrick’s influence on Nolan’s filmmaking:
Reciting how Kubric’s work has made an impact on his way of making art, Nolan described:
“From a storytelling point of view, from a directing point of view, there is one thing I associate with what he does, which is calm. There is such an inherent calm and inherent trust in the one powerful image, that he makes me embarrassed with my own work, in terms of how many different shots, how many different sound effects, how many different things we’ll throw at an audience to make an impression.”
“But with Kubrick, there is such a great trust in the one correct image to calmly explain something to the audience. There can be some slowness to the editing. There’s nothing frenetic about it. It’s very simple. There’s a trust in simple storytelling and simple image-making that actually takes massive confidence to try and emulate.”
And not only did Kubric’s vision as a filmmaker influence Nolan, but also his mindset about studio collaborations and other processes of making a film and succeeding in that.
About which, in an interview, Nolan elaborated, “I think anyone who is working [for the studios] looks to Kubrick as the great example of someone who can make films that were very personal to him, very idiosyncratic, with a great degree of passion while collaborating with the studios and making what he did fit within the economic models of their times.”
Other Favourites of Nolan:
Apart from Stanley Kubric’s masterpiece, other favorites of Nolan include Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, Roger Moore’s The Spy Who Loved Me, and Dick Dinner’s Superman from which he drew inspiration for how to merge realism and superhero in The Dark Knight trilogy.
