<img style="float: left;" src="http://images.mid-day.com/images/images/2026/jul/Mayank-Shekhar-new_e.jpg" alt="Mayank Shekhar" width="150" height="76" />The following are the set of scenes<a href="https://www.mid-day.com/mumbai-guide/things-to-do/article/-immerse-in-the-odyssey-through-this-online-lecture-that-dives-into-homers-greek-epic-23640942" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener"> Christopher Nolan </a>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.&nbsp;
The camera follows two freaks. One&rsquo;s a guy, who stalks people on the streets. He&rsquo;s a loner, and a writer (by vocation). The other fellow, likewise, breaks into homes, when the occupants are out.&nbsp;
There&rsquo;s a third character, a woman, whose house has been vandalised by these blokes. And if you aren&rsquo;t paying attention through these parts while watching the film (on YouTube) &mdash; chances are, you wouldn&rsquo;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.
<a href="https://www.mid-day.com/entertainment/hollywood-news/article/the-odyssey-box-office-christopher-nolan-gets-his-biggest-opening-weekend-in-india-23640718" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">Nolan&rsquo;s first,</a> 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.&nbsp;
Yet, at its core, it&rsquo;s as indie as it gets &mdash; live locations, over isolated studios for sets; in-camera tricks, as against extensive CGI; the visuals, evidently, drawing inspiration from the world&rsquo;s greatest art-house directors, Akira Kurosawa (Ran), Andrei Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev).&nbsp;
<img src="http://images.mid-day.com/images/images/2026/jul/The-Odyssey-ij_e.jpg" alt="Stills from &lsquo;The Odyssey&rsquo; and &lsquo;Following&rsquo;" width="1280" height="720" />Stills from &lsquo;The Odyssey&rsquo; and &lsquo;Following&rsquo;
Indeed, Nolan&rsquo;s own powers then, of staying on as such a strong auteur in the global mainstream &mdash; coinciding with the most crassly commercial decades of Hollywood, altogether descending/degenerating towards braindead spectacles and sequels alone &mdash; seems an odyssey as inspirational as his event film on Homer&rsquo;s Greek mythology itself.
Nolan&rsquo;s second/breakout picture, Memento (2000), about a guy with short-term memory loss, of course, took non-linear plotting to another level &mdash; by making it its main plot!&nbsp;
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&rsquo;s been to India a few times. Once that I met him in 2018, he was in town as a film activist &mdash; arguing for shooting, projecting cinema, only on celluloid. &nbsp;I don&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
The pedestal was still <a href="https://www.mid-day.com/text-shots/most-expensive-ticket-of-the-odyssey-is-at-this-imax-screen-in-mumbai-23640243" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">IMAX</a>. I remember watching The Dark Knight Rises at a regular theatre, and then on IMAX. It wasn&rsquo;t the same film.&nbsp;
Immersed in visuals, I felt the heart throbbing, seat shaking. I could&rsquo;ve travelled to another city for it. You still can, for The Odyssey, if there&rsquo;s no IMAX screen in your town. What&rsquo;s a film, if not FOMO, foremost. Nolan knows how to harness the magic of the biggest screen, first.&nbsp;
You could tell, even in his quiet, mystery-thriller, Insomnia (2002) &mdash; watched, chiefly, for Al Pacino as a sleep-deprived detective since Michael Mann&rsquo;s seminal Heat (1995). Recall the opening scenes of the plane carrying Pacino into an Alaskan town, shot from another plane, I guess.&nbsp;
Nolan simply upped that panoramic scale to load them, later, with wider, cleverer/ingenious ideas, within psychological dramas, instead &mdash; The Prestige (2006), Interstellar (2014), Inception (2010; my favourite).&nbsp;
Trust me: We know enough people, who&rsquo;ll go to a theatre, for set-pieces, of any kind. He just gave them something to discuss, beyond superheroes/superstars.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s okay, if you can&rsquo;t get the &ldquo;inversion of the entropy&rdquo; in Tenet (2020) &mdash; as The Protagonist (John David Washington) is told early on, &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t try to understand it, feel it!&rdquo;&nbsp;
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.&nbsp;
The latter, surprisingly, got Nolan his first <a href="https://www.mid-day.com/entertainment/bollywood-news/article/christopher-nolan-gets-his-first-oscar-nomination-for-best-director-18970167" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">Best Director Oscar nomination.</a> I didn&rsquo;t think much of either film. But then, film-buffs of all kinds have rendered Nolan critic-proof! He&rsquo;s also earned the power to fail.&nbsp;
Oppenheimer&rsquo;s (2023) a biopic. Odyssey&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
Moral of those stories? Uninhibitedly empower an imaginative storyteller, consistently, over time; return cinema to the director&rsquo;s medium &mdash; and you can save studio-led, predictably ho-hum Hollywood, forever. It&rsquo;s happened before. It must, more often.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com The views expressed in this column are the individual&rsquo;s and don&rsquo;t represent those of the paper.

Not done talking about Christopher Nolan, yet; neither have most movie buffs I know… 

Mid-Day Opinion: Returning from The Odyssey dance!

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Mid-Day Opinion: Returning from The Odyssey dance!

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