22 July,2026 09:20 AM IST | Mumbai | Mayank Shekhar
Filmmaker Christopher Nolan at a press conference in Mumbai. Pic/Instagram/@universalpicturesindia
The following are the set of scenes Christopher Nolan made his directorial debut with. By which I mean his first feature, Following (1998). Which feels like a set of scenes, stretched out of a short.
The camera follows two freaks. One's a guy, who stalks people on the streets. He's a loner, and a writer (by vocation). The other fellow, likewise, breaks into homes, when the occupants are out.
There's a third character, a woman, whose house has been vandalised by these blokes. And if you aren't paying attention through these parts while watching the film (on YouTube) - chances are, you wouldn't know what the hell happened to the plot that primarily began as an existentialist piece of sorts. The narrative is non-linear. The opening shot concerns hand movements from an event somewhere in the middle of the film. Both these tropes became associated with Nolan thereafter.
Nolan's first, Following, was possibly one of cheapest feature films of its time, pulled off at $6000. His latest, The Odyssey (2026), is probably the most expensive adult-rated movie, ever, at $250 million.
Yet, at its core, it's as indie as it gets - live locations, over isolated studios for sets; in-camera tricks, as against extensive CGI; the visuals, evidently, drawing inspiration from the world's greatest art-house directors, Akira Kurosawa (Ran), Andrei Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev).
Indeed, Nolan's own powers then, of staying on as such a strong auteur in the global mainstream - coinciding with the most crassly commercial decades of Hollywood, altogether descending/degenerating towards braindead spectacles and sequels alone - seems an odyssey as inspirational as his event film on Homer's Greek mythology itself.
Nolan's second/breakout picture, Memento (2000), about a guy with short-term memory loss, of course, took non-linear plotting to another level - by making it its main plot!
As butterfly effect goes, it inspired a filmmaker in Tamil Nadu, AR Murugadoss, to script two blockbusters, Ghajini (2005, 2008), from Mumbai and Chennai, from the same thought.
Nolan's been to India a few times. Once that I met him in 2018, he was in town as a film activist - arguing for shooting, projecting cinema, only on celluloid. I don't think he cared much for my Third World concerns over how digital projection makes simultaneous, nationwide movie releases cheaper/feasible.
I cared more for how he could use some of his time, going over to producers of Ghajini, for a cut from their profits, if not a belated acknowledgement for Memento! He was 30, an indie, back when he made the film.
Subsequently, Nolan, obviously, derived his superpowers from Batman, directing the Dark Knight Trilogy (2005-12). The films subverted the superhero genre by making the issues and vulnerabilities in them all the more human.
The pedestal was still IMAX. I remember watching The Dark Knight Rises at a regular theatre, and then on IMAX. It wasn't the same film.
Immersed in visuals, I felt the heart throbbing, seat shaking. I could've travelled to another city for it. You still can, for The Odyssey, if there's no IMAX screen in your town. What's a film, if not FOMO, foremost. Nolan knows how to harness the magic of the biggest screen, first.
You could tell, even in his quiet, mystery-thriller, Insomnia (2002) - watched, chiefly, for Al Pacino as a sleep-deprived detective since Michael Mann's seminal Heat (1995). Recall the opening scenes of the plane carrying Pacino into an Alaskan town, shot from another plane, I guess.
Nolan simply upped that panoramic scale to load them, later, with wider, cleverer/ingenious ideas, within psychological dramas, instead - The Prestige (2006), Interstellar (2014), Inception (2010; my favourite).
Trust me: We know enough people, who'll go to a theatre, for set-pieces, of any kind. He just gave them something to discuss, beyond superheroes/superstars.
It's okay, if you can't get the "inversion of the entropy" in Tenet (2020) - as The Protagonist (John David Washington) is told early on, "Don't try to understand it, feel it!"
Or see it simply as a steroidal spy-thriller, enjoying chase sequences, with the car speeding backwards! Just as Dunkirk (2017) is more about being viscerally in the centre of war, rather than engaging with its characters.
The latter, surprisingly, got Nolan his first Best Director Oscar nomination. I didn't think much of either film. But then, film-buffs of all kinds have rendered Nolan critic-proof! He's also earned the power to fail.
Oppenheimer's (2023) a biopic. Odyssey's mythology. Script-wise, you can only get that inventive with said genres, while Nolan owns those films, with a completely contemporary purpose. Both will go down as his hugest, greatest, global, mainstream blockbusters.
Moral of those stories? Uninhibitedly empower an imaginative storyteller, consistently, over time; return cinema to the director's medium - and you can save studio-led, predictably ho-hum Hollywood, forever. It's happened before. It must, more often.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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