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The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan
An in-depth look at Christopher Nolan, considered to be the most profound, commercially successful director at work today, written with his full cooperation. A rare, revelatory portrait, as close as you're ever going to get to the Escher drawing that is Christopher Nolan's remarkable brain (Sam Mendes).
In chapters structured by themes and motifs (Time; Chaos; Dreams), Shone offers an unprecedented intimate view of the director. Shone explores Nolan's thoughts on his influences, his vision, his enigmatic childhood past--and his movies, from plots and emotion to identity and perception, including his latest blockbuster, the action-thriller/spy-fi Tenet (Big, brashly beautiful, grandiosely enjoyable--Variety).
Filled with the director's never-before-seen photographs, storyboards, and scene sketches, here is Nolan on the evolution of his pictures, and the writers, artists, directors, and thinkers who have inspired and informed his films.
Fabulous: intelligent, illuminating, rigorous, and highly readable. The very model of what a filmmaking study should be. Essential reading for anyone who cares about Nolan or about film for that matter.--Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood and Walt Disney, The Biography
In chapters structured by themes and motifs (Time; Chaos; Dreams), Shone offers an unprecedented intimate view of the director. Shone explores Nolan's thoughts on his influences, his vision, his enigmatic childhood past--and his movies, from plots and emotion to identity and perception, including his latest blockbuster, the action-thriller/spy-fi Tenet (Big, brashly beautiful, grandiosely enjoyable--Variety).
Filled with the director's never-before-seen photographs, storyboards, and scene sketches, here is Nolan on the evolution of his pictures, and the writers, artists, directors, and thinkers who have inspired and informed his films.
Fabulous: intelligent, illuminating, rigorous, and highly readable. The very model of what a filmmaking study should be. Essential reading for anyone who cares about Nolan or about film for that matter.--Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood and Walt Disney, The Biography
381 pages, Hardcover
First published November 5, 2020
About the author
Tom Shone
8 books22 followersTom Shone was born in Horsham, England, in 1967. From 1994 to 1999 he was the film critic of the London Sunday Times and has since written for a number of publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, the London Daily Telegraph, and Vogue. He lives in Brooklyn, New York."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 142 reviews
July 23, 2023
A fascinating read, impossible to put down.
Didn't want it to end.
A must-read for any cinephile.
Didn't want it to end.
A must-read for any cinephile.
September 13, 2020
My fondest theater memory remains seeing The Dark Knight at midnight at 15 years old, absolutely giddy when Batman hitched a ride via skyhook and when a truck flipped end over end. In 2010, I ran around like a madman, trying to finish all of my closing duties at Corner Bakery so I could run across the parking lot to see Inception on opening night with my brother. I took an extra day off on the end of my honeymoon to drive 3 hours from Chicago to Indianapolis to see Dunkirk in Nolan's preferred 70 mm IMAX format. I drove an hour and a half each way with my wife to see Tenet at a drive-in on its US premiere date, then did the drive again by myself two days later.
So, yes, I'm pretty in the bag for Christopher Nolan and his films, which is why I jumped at the opportunity to read an advanced (PDF) version of The Nolan Variations for my freelance gig writing culture pieces for the radio. But I was not asked to review it, and I definitely did not have to give it 5 stars. Tom Shone's The Nolan Variations earned that rating all on its own.
Shone has managed to pull off multiple magic tricks in this book, offering insightful analysis of Nolan and his films, providing incredible behind-the-scenes stories from the making of every Nolan movie and filling in more of Nolan's biography than we fans have ever received before.
Every chapter is full of references and inspirations that Christopher Nolan pulls from, brimming with theories and puzzles that have perplexed the man himself and inspired some of the puzzles and plots that have enthralled us for decades now. I was so excited to tear through this book that I stopped only a couple of times to re-watch some of Nolan's movies that I hadn't seen in a while - like Following and Memento - with the additional insights from this book. But like a Nolan film, I can't wait to revisit this book (which I'll definitely be buying in its physical form) soon to really digest its contents, re-watch the films, and make a list of those influences and theories. Shone has given us a treasure trove, and I'm positive other Nolan fans will be as absolutely delighted as I was.
So, yes, I'm pretty in the bag for Christopher Nolan and his films, which is why I jumped at the opportunity to read an advanced (PDF) version of The Nolan Variations for my freelance gig writing culture pieces for the radio. But I was not asked to review it, and I definitely did not have to give it 5 stars. Tom Shone's The Nolan Variations earned that rating all on its own.
Shone has managed to pull off multiple magic tricks in this book, offering insightful analysis of Nolan and his films, providing incredible behind-the-scenes stories from the making of every Nolan movie and filling in more of Nolan's biography than we fans have ever received before.
Every chapter is full of references and inspirations that Christopher Nolan pulls from, brimming with theories and puzzles that have perplexed the man himself and inspired some of the puzzles and plots that have enthralled us for decades now. I was so excited to tear through this book that I stopped only a couple of times to re-watch some of Nolan's movies that I hadn't seen in a while - like Following and Memento - with the additional insights from this book. But like a Nolan film, I can't wait to revisit this book (which I'll definitely be buying in its physical form) soon to really digest its contents, re-watch the films, and make a list of those influences and theories. Shone has given us a treasure trove, and I'm positive other Nolan fans will be as absolutely delighted as I was.
February 26, 2021
a form and design,
lonesome shine
against ebook, in time to define,
art, aesthetic, philosophy, academy shrine.
a tome, so fine,
hit home, a sign:
Nolan may peak -
cinema golden and IMAX I seek.
Stream in motion, CGI chic;
Reality unfolding, mass meek.
lonesome shine
against ebook, in time to define,
art, aesthetic, philosophy, academy shrine.
a tome, so fine,
hit home, a sign:
Nolan may peak -
cinema golden and IMAX I seek.
Stream in motion, CGI chic;
Reality unfolding, mass meek.
November 4, 2020
This biography was so interesting and filled with tidbits of Christopher Nolan's life, such as him being colorblind that I hadn't heard before. Christopher Nolan's life is so much more exciting than the movies he makes. It was nice to see behind the scenes of his life.
May 14, 2024
To nie jest biografia, choć do biografii reżysera się odnosi. Najlepiej ująć to słowami samego autora: to retrospektywa twórczości Christophera Nolana od pierwszego filmu po „Teneta”. Oparta przede wszystkim na rozmowach autora z samym reżyserem. Film po filmie, ale również przekrojowo. Bogata w szczegóły, szczera i bardzo wciągająca opowieść. Mniej o ich powstawaniu od strony technicznej czy historycznej, a bardziej o inspiracjach, pomysłach, wizji kina.
To książka przeznaczona przede wszystkim dla filmoznawców i/albo fanów twórczości Christophera Nolana, a do tych drugich się z całą pewnością zaliczam.
To książka przeznaczona przede wszystkim dla filmoznawców i/albo fanów twórczości Christophera Nolana, a do tych drugich się z całą pewnością zaliczam.
July 24, 2023
The Nolan Variations (Tom Shone) | Being
★★★★ ½
โนแลนไม่ใช่อัจฉริยะเขาเป็นแค่พวกบ้าความสมบูรณ์แบบที่เคี่ยวกรำความสามารถและบ่มเพาะมันออกมาผ่านการลงมือทำนับครั้งไม่ถ้วน ซ้ำยังยืดหยัดอดทนและซื่อตรงต่อแนวคิดของตนเองจนถึงที่สุด
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การให้คะแนนหนังสือเล่มนี้ไม่ใช่เรื่องยากเลยสำหรับเรามันง่ายกว่าการให้เรทหนังเสียอีก ส่วนตัวการพิมพ์หนังสือ The Nolan Variations แทบจะเรียกได้ว่าเกิดขึ้นได้ยากมากในสังคมไทย
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คุณลองมองไปบนแผงหนังสือดิว่าหนังสือที่เกี่ยวกับภาพยนตร์มันมีเยอะแค่ไหน ในหนึ่งปีอาจจะมีแค่เล่มเดียว หรือภายในระยะเวลาสามปีอาจจะปรากฏสักหนึ่งเล่ม มันก็ไม่แปลกที่เราจะให้หนังสือเล่มนี้ด้วยคะแนนเต็มเปี่ยมเพราะการเปรียบเทียบคะแนนของมันกับบทเล่มอื่นช่างน้อยเสียเหลือเกิน และเราก็ดีใจมากที่สำนักพิมพ์เลือกแปลหนังสือที่เกี่ยวกับภาพยนตร์ / สมัยเรียนถ้าไม่อ่านนิตยสาร Bioscope เราก็ต้องพึ่งพาโลกอินเตอร์เน็ต(คือมันก็ไม่ได้เก่าขนาดนั้นน่ะเราเรียนมหาลัยก็ 2016 55555) ความขาดแคลนหนังสือที่เกี่ยวกับหนังในประเทศนี้มันเป็นเรื่องใหญ่จริงๆ
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พูดไปเรื่อยมานานกลับเข้าเลยหนังสือดีกว่า The Nolan Variations ก็พูดถึงหนังโนแลนนั่นแหละพูดถึงตั้งแต่เรื่องแรกอย่าง Following (1998) ถึง Tnent (2020) โดยแบ่งบทย่อยออกเป็น 13 บทภายใต้ 13 บทผู้เขียนก็พูดถึงมันในกรอบการวิจารณ์หนัง ที่ทุกคนย่อมรู้ดีนั่นก็คือการหยิบยกกรอบเรื่องขององค์ประกอบภาพ, โครงสร้างการเล่าเรื่อง, วิธีการเล่าเรื่อง, เวลาในหนัง, พื้นที่ในหนัง, ไปจนถึงอื่นๆ ด้วยความที่มันเป็นกรอบการวิจารณ์ที่ครบลด(ในฝั่งผู้ศึกษางานและวิจารณ์งานในฝั่งอเมริกัน)
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เราแนะนำหนังสือเล่มนี้ให้กับคนที่สนใจศึกษาภาพยนตร์แรกเริ่มนักศึกษาภาพยนตร์ไม่ว่าคุณจะชอบดูแลหรือไม่ชอบแต่นี่นับว่าเป็นหนังสือที่เกี่ยวกับหนังที่อ่านง่ายแล้วหนังของหนูแรงก็ไม่ได้ยากจนเกินไป(อันที่จริงก็ต้องบอกว่ามันไม่ได้ยากเลย การทำความเข้าใจหนังผ่านภาษาหนังกับการทำความเข้าใจเนื้อเรื่องไม่เหมือนกันนะ ทุกคนต้องแยกจุดนี้ออกให้ดีๆ การที่หนังดูไม่รู้เรื่องมันก็ต้องขยายคำว่าดูไม่รู้เรื่องให้ออกด้วยว่าเราดูไม่รู้เรื่องเพราะเนื้อเรื่อง การลำดับเรื่องการถ่ายทำที่เป็นเทคนิคหรือเป็นที่เนื้อหาของมัน แน่นอนว่าของแบบนี้อาจจะใช้ประสบการณ์สักหน่อย)
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คืออ่านไปก็อาจจะงง อธิบายอย่างง่ายก็คือหนังสือเล่มนี้เป็นหนังสือที���เจาะลึกหนังของโนแลนในมุมมองของนักวิจารณ์ที่ใช้กรอกการวิจารณ์ขั้นพื้นฐานบวกกับบทสัมภาษณ์เชิงลึกการที่กูเขียนติดตามโนแลนมาอย่างเนิ่นนานสิ่งที่เขาเขียนเลยไม่ใช่การตีความแบบเพียวๆ หากแต่เป็นการรู้วิธีการทำงานรู้สิ่งที่อยู่ในหัวของโนแลนมาบ้างผ่านการสัมภาษณ์รู้ชีวิตส่วนตัวมันก็เลยกลายเป็นบทวิจารณ์ที่ถูกเขียนขึ้นมาได้อย่างน่าเชื่อถือ(ในมุมมองคนชอบงานโนแลน)
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แต่ไม่ได้หมายความว่างานชิ้นนี้ถูกทั้งหมด เพราะเราจะมองว่ามันเป็นบทวิจารณ์ภาพยนตร์ไม่ได้และเราก็ไม่สามารถตัดสินคนที่วิจารณ์หนังโนแลนได้เช่นกันเพราะมันยืนอยู่บนพื้นฐานข้อมูลที่แตกต่างกัน เมื่อคุณอ่านไปสักพักคุณจะเห็นชุดข้อมูลที่เป็นข้อมูลส่วนตัวจำพวกวิธีการทำงานมันมีผลต่อคำวิจารณ์ก็จริงแต่นักวิจารณ์บางคนก็ไม่ได้ใช้กรอบนี้ในการวิจารณ์ภาพยนตร์ เพราะการวิจารณ์ภาพยนตร์ผู้วิจารณ์ย่อมยึดถือหลักสำคัญอันได้แก่การตีความผ่านสิ่งที่เห็นและสิ่งที่ได้ยินเท่านั้นอะไรที่เราไม่ได้เห็นและไม่ได้ยินเราย่อมไม่ตีความ
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ข้อมูลเชิงลึกจึงไม่ได้ส่งผลกับการตีความเสียส่วนใหญ่แต่มันก็สำคัญต่อการตีความในรูปแบบทฤษฎีประพันธกร (Auteur Theory) อันเป็นทฤษฎีที่ไม่ได้มองแค่สิ่งที่อยู่ในหนังแต่มองถึงภาพรวมบริบทหนังชีวิตของผู้กำกับมองย้อนกลับไปว่าหนังเรื่องที่ผ่านมาเค้าทำเช่นไรแต่มันก็ก้ำกึ่ง
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ก้ำกึ่งเพราะในหนังสือเล่มนี้ผู้เขียนรู้เรื่องราวส่วนตัวของโนแลนมากกว่านักวิจารณ์ทั่วไปเราเลยมองว่าการมองให้ลึกลงไปเลยไม่ได้เกิดผลอะไร(คือที่พิมพ์มามันก็อาจจะไม่ได้สำคัญกับหนังสือมากนักแต่ในโลกอินเตอร์เน็ตพอเป็นหนังโนแลนแล้วมันจะเกิดการถกเถียงระหว่างสองฟากได้แก่คนดูแลนักวิจารณ์หนังที่ก่นด่าโนแลน เราเลยหยิบยกเรื่องนี้มาขยายความให้ผู้อ่านได้ฟังว่ามันเป็นเรื่องบางๆ ระหว่างประสบการณ์เท่านั้น)
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แต่เราชอบหนังสือตรงนี้โดยที่มันเสนอเบื้องลึกเบื้องหลังที่เราไม่เคยรู้ของโนแลนนั่นแหละเราได้รู้ว่าเค้าชอบผู้กำกับแบบไหน แล้วคนที่เค้าชอบก็ล้วนแต่เป็นผู้กำกับสายอเมริกันทั้งนั้น555555 ไม่ว่าจะเป็น Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, David Lean, Nicolas Roeg
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งานของ��ู้กำกับอเมริกันจะแตกต่างกับงานกลุ่มกับยุโรปมากวิธีการทำงานแตกต่างกันโดยสิ้นเชิงด้วยความเป็นอุตสาหกรรมความเป็นหนังตลาดการเล่าเรื่องให้รู้เรื่องเลยเป็นเรื่องใหญ่หนังของผู้กำกับอเมริกันหรือฮอลลีวู้ดเลยแข็งแรงในด้านการเล่าเรื่องแตกต่างจากหนังยุโรปที่มีความอิสระสูง
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แต่โนแลนก็ไม่ใช่คนที่ชอบแต่ผู้กำกับอเมริกาและการทำหนังตลาดเท่านั้นเรายังไม่รู้ว่าเค้าชอบหนัง Andrei Tarkovsky, Terrence Malick, David Lynch แถมต้นทางการทำหนังทั้งหมดของโนแลนยังเป็นวรรณกรรมในยุควิคตอเรียนอีกด้วย วรรณกรรมในยุคยุควิคตอเรียน ส่งผลกับโนแลนอย่างมากไม่ว่าจะเป็นในแง่ของเนื้อหาและแนวคิดที่วนเวียนอยู่ในยุคนั้นแล้วเค้าก็ยืนหยัดที่จะหยิบยกความเป็นยุควิคตอเรียนมาใช้
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สุดท้ายตามที่สัญญากันไว้เราจะพูดถึงเรื่องที่เราเกลียดโนแลนเรามักจะบอกเสมอว่าเราสามารถเกลียดโนแลนได้โดยที่ไม่ต้องมีเหตุผลแต่ความจริงแล้วมันมีเหตุผลที่หนักแน่นแล้วมันก็ถูกกลั่นกรองมาแล้วเป็นอย่างดีเราถึงได้เกลียดหนังเขา
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ก่อนอื่นต้องขยายคำว่าเกลียดก่อน การเกลียดของเราคือการเกลียดที่ตัวหนัง เกลียดเทคนิคบางประการที่เขาใช้ เกลียดความกร���หายในความสมบูรณ์แบบซึ่งในจุดนี้เราเกลียดหนังโนแลนเทียบเท่ากับงานของ Stanley Kubrick แต่ถามว่าเราชอบหนังคูบริกไหมก็ต้องตอบว่าชอบ ชอบเพราะมันส่งอิทธิพลต่อสิ่งอื่นและเราก็รู้ข้อจำกัดของมันในทางเดียวกันแต่ไม่เคยปฏิเสธความสามารถหรือความทรงอิทธิพลของหนัง ไม่เคยปฏิเสธภาษาหนังชั้นครูของเค้าในทางเดียวกันหนังของโนแลนก็เหมือนกัน
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เราไม่ค่อยชอบความสมบูรณ์แบบในการเล่าเรื่องเท่าไหร่ อันนี้เป็นความรู้สึกส่วนตัวเพราะเราไม่ได้ชอบหนังอเมริกันที่เล่าเรื่องชัดเจนขนาดนั้น แล้วหนังโนแลนมันเป็นหนังที่เดาโครงสร้างเรื่องออกทั้งหมด ไม่ใช่ว่าเราดูมันรู้เรื่องนะแต่เรารู้ว่าพอมาถึงจุดหนึ่งหนังมันต้องมีการหักมุมแบบนี้ มันต้องเล่าแบบนี้ มันต้องทำแบบนี้แล้วโนแลนก็ทำเหมือนจริงทุกเรื่อง เพราะฉะนั้นคำว่าเกลียดของเรามันกลั่นกรองมาแล้วจากการศึกษาจากการดูมันไม่ใช่การเกลียดลอยๆ ถึงแม้ว่าเราจะแซะเค้าบ่อย แล้วก็คงแซะไปตลอดชีวิต 5555 เป็นคนชั่ว จบ
★★★★ ½
โนแลนไม่ใช่อัจฉริยะเขาเป็นแค่พวกบ้าความสมบูรณ์แบบที่เคี่ยวกรำความสามารถและบ่มเพาะมันออกมาผ่านการลงมือทำนับครั้งไม่ถ้วน ซ้ำยังยืดหยัดอดทนและซื่อตรงต่อแนวคิดของตนเองจนถึงที่สุด
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การให้คะแนนหนังสือเล่มนี้ไม่ใช่เรื่องยากเลยสำหรับเรามันง่ายกว่าการให้เรทหนังเสียอีก ส่วนตัวการพิมพ์หนังสือ The Nolan Variations แทบจะเรียกได้ว่าเกิดขึ้นได้ยากมากในสังคมไทย
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คุณลองมองไปบนแผงหนังสือดิว่าหนังสือที่เกี่ยวกับภาพยนตร์มันมีเยอะแค่ไหน ในหนึ่งปีอาจจะมีแค่เล่มเดียว หรือภายในระยะเวลาสามปีอาจจะปรากฏสักหนึ่งเล่ม มันก็ไม่แปลกที่เราจะให้หนังสือเล่มนี้ด้วยคะแนนเต็มเปี่ยมเพราะการเปรียบเทียบคะแนนของมันกับบทเล่มอื่นช่างน้อยเสียเหลือเกิน และเราก็ดีใจมากที่สำนักพิมพ์เลือกแปลหนังสือที่เกี่ยวกับภาพยนตร์ / สมัยเรียนถ้าไม่อ่านนิตยสาร Bioscope เราก็ต้องพึ่งพาโลกอินเตอร์เน็ต(คือมันก็ไม่ได้เก่าขนาดนั้นน่ะเราเรียนมหาลัยก็ 2016 55555) ความขาดแคลนหนังสือที่เกี่ยวกับหนังในประเทศนี้มันเป็นเรื่องใหญ่จริงๆ
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พูดไปเรื่อยมานานกลับเข้าเลยหนังสือดีกว่า The Nolan Variations ก็พูดถึงหนังโนแลนนั่นแหละพูดถึงตั้งแต่เรื่องแรกอย่าง Following (1998) ถึง Tnent (2020) โดยแบ่งบทย่อยออกเป็น 13 บทภายใต้ 13 บทผู้เขียนก็พูดถึงมันในกรอบการวิจารณ์หนัง ที่ทุกคนย่อมรู้ดีนั่นก็คือการหยิบยกกรอบเรื่องขององค์ประกอบภาพ, โครงสร้างการเล่าเรื่อง, วิธีการเล่าเรื่อง, เวลาในหนัง, พื้นที่ในหนัง, ไปจนถึงอื่นๆ ด้วยความที่มันเป็นกรอบการวิจารณ์ที่ครบลด(ในฝั่งผู้ศึกษางานและวิจารณ์งานในฝั่งอเมริกัน)
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เราแนะนำหนังสือเล่มนี้ให้กับคนที่สนใจศึกษาภาพยนตร์แรกเริ่มนักศึกษาภาพยนตร์ไม่ว่าคุณจะชอบดูแลหรือไม่ชอบแต่นี่นับว่าเป็นหนังสือที่เกี่ยวกับหนังที่อ่านง่ายแล้วหนังของหนูแรงก็ไม่ได้ยากจนเกินไป(อันที่จริงก็ต้องบอกว่ามันไม่ได้ยากเลย การทำความเข้าใจหนังผ่านภาษาหนังกับการทำความเข้าใจเนื้อเรื่องไม่เหมือนกันนะ ทุกคนต้องแยกจุดนี้ออกให้ดีๆ การที่หนังดูไม่รู้เรื่องมันก็ต้องขยายคำว่าดูไม่รู้เรื่องให้ออกด้วยว่าเราดูไม่รู้เรื่องเพราะเนื้อเรื่อง การลำดับเรื่องการถ่ายทำที่เป็นเทคนิคหรือเป็นที่เนื้อหาของมัน แน่นอนว่าของแบบนี้อาจจะใช้ประสบการณ์สักหน่อย)
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คืออ่านไปก็อาจจะงง อธิบายอย่างง่ายก็คือหนังสือเล่มนี้เป็นหนังสือที���เจาะลึกหนังของโนแลนในมุมมองของนักวิจารณ์ที่ใช้กรอกการวิจารณ์ขั้นพื้นฐานบวกกับบทสัมภาษณ์เชิงลึกการที่กูเขียนติดตามโนแลนมาอย่างเนิ่นนานสิ่งที่เขาเขียนเลยไม่ใช่การตีความแบบเพียวๆ หากแต่เป็นการรู้วิธีการทำงานรู้สิ่งที่อยู่ในหัวของโนแลนมาบ้างผ่านการสัมภาษณ์รู้ชีวิตส่วนตัวมันก็เลยกลายเป็นบทวิจารณ์ที่ถูกเขียนขึ้นมาได้อย่างน่าเชื่อถือ(ในมุมมองคนชอบงานโนแลน)
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แต่ไม่ได้หมายความว่างานชิ้นนี้ถูกทั้งหมด เพราะเราจะมองว่ามันเป็นบทวิจารณ์ภาพยนตร์ไม่ได้และเราก็ไม่สามารถตัดสินคนที่วิจารณ์หนังโนแลนได้เช่นกันเพราะมันยืนอยู่บนพื้นฐานข้อมูลที่แตกต่างกัน เมื่อคุณอ่านไปสักพักคุณจะเห็นชุดข้อมูลที่เป็นข้อมูลส่วนตัวจำพวกวิธีการทำงานมันมีผลต่อคำวิจารณ์ก็จริงแต่นักวิจารณ์บางคนก็ไม่ได้ใช้กรอบนี้ในการวิจารณ์ภาพยนตร์ เพราะการวิจารณ์ภาพยนตร์ผู้วิจารณ์ย่อมยึดถือหลักสำคัญอันได้แก่การตีความผ่านสิ่งที่เห็นและสิ่งที่ได้ยินเท่านั้นอะไรที่เราไม่ได้เห็นและไม่ได้ยินเราย่อมไม่ตีความ
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ข้อมูลเชิงลึกจึงไม่ได้ส่งผลกับการตีความเสียส่วนใหญ่แต่มันก็สำคัญต่อการตีความในรูปแบบทฤษฎีประพันธกร (Auteur Theory) อันเป็นทฤษฎีที่ไม่ได้มองแค่สิ่งที่อยู่ในหนังแต่มองถึงภาพรวมบริบทหนังชีวิตของผู้กำกับมองย้อนกลับไปว่าหนังเรื่องที่ผ่านมาเค้าทำเช่นไรแต่มันก็ก้ำกึ่ง
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ก้ำกึ่งเพราะในหนังสือเล่มนี้ผู้เขียนรู้เรื่องราวส่วนตัวของโนแลนมากกว่านักวิจารณ์ทั่วไปเราเลยมองว่าการมองให้ลึกลงไปเลยไม่ได้เกิดผลอะไร(คือที่พิมพ์มามันก็อาจจะไม่ได้สำคัญกับหนังสือมากนักแต่ในโลกอินเตอร์เน็ตพอเป็นหนังโนแลนแล้วมันจะเกิดการถกเถียงระหว่างสองฟากได้แก่คนดูแลนักวิจารณ์หนังที่ก่นด่าโนแลน เราเลยหยิบยกเรื่องนี้มาขยายความให้ผู้อ่านได้ฟังว่ามันเป็นเรื่องบางๆ ระหว่างประสบการณ์เท่านั้น)
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แต่เราชอบหนังสือตรงนี้โดยที่มันเสนอเบื้องลึกเบื้องหลังที่เราไม่เคยรู้ของโนแลนนั่นแหละเราได้รู้ว่าเค้าชอบผู้กำกับแบบไหน แล้วคนที่เค้าชอบก็ล้วนแต่เป็นผู้กำกับสายอเมริกันทั้งนั้น555555 ไม่ว่าจะเป็น Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, David Lean, Nicolas Roeg
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งานของ��ู้กำกับอเมริกันจะแตกต่างกับงานกลุ่มกับยุโรปมากวิธีการทำงานแตกต่างกันโดยสิ้นเชิงด้วยความเป็นอุตสาหกรรมความเป็นหนังตลาดการเล่าเรื่องให้รู้เรื่องเลยเป็นเรื่องใหญ่หนังของผู้กำกับอเมริกันหรือฮอลลีวู้ดเลยแข็งแรงในด้านการเล่าเรื่องแตกต่างจากหนังยุโรปที่มีความอิสระสูง
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แต่โนแลนก็ไม่ใช่คนที่ชอบแต่ผู้กำกับอเมริกาและการทำหนังตลาดเท่านั้นเรายังไม่รู้ว่าเค้าชอบหนัง Andrei Tarkovsky, Terrence Malick, David Lynch แถมต้นทางการทำหนังทั้งหมดของโนแลนยังเป็นวรรณกรรมในยุควิคตอเรียนอีกด้วย วรรณกรรมในยุคยุควิคตอเรียน ส่งผลกับโนแลนอย่างมากไม่ว่าจะเป็นในแง่ของเนื้อหาและแนวคิดที่วนเวียนอยู่ในยุคนั้นแล้วเค้าก็ยืนหยัดที่จะหยิบยกความเป็นยุควิคตอเรียนมาใช้
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สุดท้ายตามที่สัญญากันไว้เราจะพูดถึงเรื่องที่เราเกลียดโนแลนเรามักจะบอกเสมอว่าเราสามารถเกลียดโนแลนได้โดยที่ไม่ต้องมีเหตุผลแต่ความจริงแล้วมันมีเหตุผลที่หนักแน่นแล้วมันก็ถูกกลั่นกรองมาแล้วเป็นอย่างดีเราถึงได้เกลียดหนังเขา
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ก่อนอื่นต้องขยายคำว่าเกลียดก่อน การเกลียดของเราคือการเกลียดที่ตัวหนัง เกลียดเทคนิคบางประการที่เขาใช้ เกลียดความกร���หายในความสมบูรณ์แบบซึ่งในจุดนี้เราเกลียดหนังโนแลนเทียบเท่ากับงานของ Stanley Kubrick แต่ถามว่าเราชอบหนังคูบริกไหมก็ต้องตอบว่าชอบ ชอบเพราะมันส่งอิทธิพลต่อสิ่งอื่นและเราก็รู้ข้อจำกัดของมันในทางเดียวกันแต่ไม่เคยปฏิเสธความสามารถหรือความทรงอิทธิพลของหนัง ไม่เคยปฏิเสธภาษาหนังชั้นครูของเค้าในทางเดียวกันหนังของโนแลนก็เหมือนกัน
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เราไม่ค่อยชอบความสมบูรณ์แบบในการเล่าเรื่องเท่าไหร่ อันนี้เป็นความรู้สึกส่วนตัวเพราะเราไม่ได้ชอบหนังอเมริกันที่เล่าเรื่องชัดเจนขนาดนั้น แล้วหนังโนแลนมันเป็นหนังที่เดาโครงสร้างเรื่องออกทั้งหมด ไม่ใช่ว่าเราดูมันรู้เรื่องนะแต่เรารู้ว่าพอมาถึงจุดหนึ่งหนังมันต้องมีการหักมุมแบบนี้ มันต้องเล่าแบบนี้ มันต้องทำแบบนี้แล้วโนแลนก็ทำเหมือนจริงทุกเรื่อง เพราะฉะนั้นคำว่าเกลียดของเรามันกลั่นกรองมาแล้วจากการศึกษาจากการดูมันไม่ใช่การเกลียดลอยๆ ถึงแม้ว่าเราจะแซะเค้าบ่อย แล้วก็คงแซะไปตลอดชีวิต 5555 เป็นคนชั่ว จบ
January 25, 2023
Chris Nolan has been my favorite director since the late 2000s, and I’ve put insane hours into watching, analyzing, and learning more about his films. Nolan himself has often been borderline reclusive - he mostly let’s his work speak for itself.
That’s why this book is such a treat. Each of his movies get their own chapter dedicated to them, and the book goes deep into what influenced them. These influences aren’t rip offs, they generally aren’t even noticeable. This book helped me understand that Nolan wants to take an influence he loved and take it further, do something that’s never been done before. His ambition can make flaws more apparent, but his work is better off as a whole.
And so I can say quite easily that more is revealed about Nolan private life than all other public information that was previously released, and that his life experiences have shaped his films more than anyone realized. The story isn’t written on his career (well I guess it kinda is here), as he’s just 50 years old and his filmography will likely double in size. This book made me more excited about his existing work and the work that is still to come.
That’s why this book is such a treat. Each of his movies get their own chapter dedicated to them, and the book goes deep into what influenced them. These influences aren’t rip offs, they generally aren’t even noticeable. This book helped me understand that Nolan wants to take an influence he loved and take it further, do something that’s never been done before. His ambition can make flaws more apparent, but his work is better off as a whole.
And so I can say quite easily that more is revealed about Nolan private life than all other public information that was previously released, and that his life experiences have shaped his films more than anyone realized. The story isn’t written on his career (well I guess it kinda is here), as he’s just 50 years old and his filmography will likely double in size. This book made me more excited about his existing work and the work that is still to come.
February 20, 2021
I have so enjoyed reading this book, The Nolan Variations by Tom Shone, which my brother bought me for Christmas, taking my time to read it properly, revisiting many of Nolan's films and watching the special features on the DVDs as I went. I enjoyed going off and looking at the artwork of Escher, discovering the beautiful stories of Jorge Luis Borges, listening to new pieces of music, and making a list of the other art I need to look up or revisit in the future. I'm just gutted the experience has finished. If you like Christopher Nolan films and the art of cinema you seriously need to get this book.
November 14, 2020
Great book not just about Christopher Nolan, or even his movies, but the inspirations behind the stories, and the ideas that they spring from or nod back to.
January 10, 2022
Finally a book on film that perfectly balances insight with intellectualism. Shone's encounters with Nolan are just as interesting as the background he gives to his films, and he presents the reader with new lenses to view Nolan's films from.
January 22, 2024
There is a final figure interwoven among all the others, hidden in plain sight but present in every frame. That figure is Christopher Nolan."
Wonderful and delightful. I loved this.
This book is the culmination of a few years of interviews with Nolan, and successfully delves into the craft and methods of his work. It doesn't solely focus on the person of Nolan, nor does it try to be a tell-all about each movie (though I did learn many interesting things). Instead, it celebrates and explores the ideas and inspirations behind each of his films. This book reminded me of the things I love best about his films, even putting to words things I intuited but never knew how to articulate about them.
Each chapter focuses on one of his films, but speaks of it conceptually (time, space, chaos, dreams, emotion), and the book expounds on Nolan's main themes throughout his career (exile, memory, identity, abandonment).
Really liked the emphasis on the films, art, novels and especially music that were formative to Nolan. Was particularly interested in his creative partnership with Hans Zimmer and how fundamental music is in shaping his work, not as something that is applied "like a coat of paint at the end", but is "deep in the structure of what's going on."
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The reason I love Nolan's movies, and why I love the sci fi/fantasy genre he often operates in, is because of its capacity for enchantment. Today's world feels small- we all know the latest news, and everyone has opinions about everything. But the stories I love best remystify the future, give a sense of wonder and promise something more. And I'm not sure of a storyteller who embodies this more than Nolan, who says himself," I make films that are huge endorsements of the idea that there's more to our world than meets the eye."
Excellent book that was just a lot different than anything I've read before. Would definitely recommend!
Wonderful and delightful. I loved this.
This book is the culmination of a few years of interviews with Nolan, and successfully delves into the craft and methods of his work. It doesn't solely focus on the person of Nolan, nor does it try to be a tell-all about each movie (though I did learn many interesting things). Instead, it celebrates and explores the ideas and inspirations behind each of his films. This book reminded me of the things I love best about his films, even putting to words things I intuited but never knew how to articulate about them.
Each chapter focuses on one of his films, but speaks of it conceptually (time, space, chaos, dreams, emotion), and the book expounds on Nolan's main themes throughout his career (exile, memory, identity, abandonment).
Really liked the emphasis on the films, art, novels and especially music that were formative to Nolan. Was particularly interested in his creative partnership with Hans Zimmer and how fundamental music is in shaping his work, not as something that is applied "like a coat of paint at the end", but is "deep in the structure of what's going on."
~~~~
The reason I love Nolan's movies, and why I love the sci fi/fantasy genre he often operates in, is because of its capacity for enchantment. Today's world feels small- we all know the latest news, and everyone has opinions about everything. But the stories I love best remystify the future, give a sense of wonder and promise something more. And I'm not sure of a storyteller who embodies this more than Nolan, who says himself," I make films that are huge endorsements of the idea that there's more to our world than meets the eye."
Excellent book that was just a lot different than anything I've read before. Would definitely recommend!
March 20, 2024
Okładka nie kłamie - jest to faktycznie gratka dla fanów Nolana. Chronologiczny przelot przez jego filmografię, wzbogacony o konteksty i komentarze reżysera oraz współpracowników. Chociaż czasami przejścia do kolejnych rozdziałów wydają się być trochę na siłę, to jednak jest tu dużo wartości dodanej.
Poza wzbogaceniem wiedzy o samych filmach i reżyserze było też dużo uwag o samym procesie twórczym, a także masa tytułów książek i filmów, do nadrobienia.
Czego chcieć więcej?
Poza wzbogaceniem wiedzy o samych filmach i reżyserze było też dużo uwag o samym procesie twórczym, a także masa tytułów książek i filmów, do nadrobienia.
Czego chcieć więcej?
February 8, 2021
What I think this does, so much better than I could have hoped, is paint Nolan first and foremost as a collaborator and not as a singular genius making films on his own.
A really fantastic deep dive on one of our most successful and distinctive living directors.
A really fantastic deep dive on one of our most successful and distinctive living directors.
February 6, 2021
Engaging, ingenious, entertaining. As a portrait of a filmmaker qua filmmaker, this lives up to the tradition established by "Hitchcock/Truffaut."
February 1, 2022
As someone who began this book already high on Nolan's films, I walked away even more impressed by his approach to being a director. Not only did this book make me more appreciative of one of my favorite directors, but Shone writes about film in such a way that recaptures my appreciation for the art form as a whole.
This book is not necessarily a biography in the typical sense; everything Shone explores relating to Nolan's story is interwoven in his process of explaining how Nolan directs his movies. For example, Shone explores the fact that Nolan split time growing up between boarding school at Haileybury in England and the suburbs of Chicago. However, he only explores this interesting dynamic in his life so as to help the reader understand the ideas explored in movies such as the Dark Knight (filmed in Chicago, depicting self actualization and independence) pitted against certain key aspects of movies like Inception (with cities folding in on themselves, perhaps a nod to Nolan's upbringing in boarding school, wherein a student is under constant scrutiny & the feeling of imprisonment). Nonetheless, Shone does a great job of shying away from "deifying" Nolan while still painting him in a very positive, warm light. My favorite part of this book was perhaps the little conversations between the author and Nolan wherein one can get a glimpse into how Christopher Nolan thinks, acts, converses, questions, and dreams. It also humanizes a figure who seems to be viewed as the epitome of a genre he created, rather than a human being with a family.
Loved this book and would recommend to someone who knows nothing about film and a cinephile alike.
This book is not necessarily a biography in the typical sense; everything Shone explores relating to Nolan's story is interwoven in his process of explaining how Nolan directs his movies. For example, Shone explores the fact that Nolan split time growing up between boarding school at Haileybury in England and the suburbs of Chicago. However, he only explores this interesting dynamic in his life so as to help the reader understand the ideas explored in movies such as the Dark Knight (filmed in Chicago, depicting self actualization and independence) pitted against certain key aspects of movies like Inception (with cities folding in on themselves, perhaps a nod to Nolan's upbringing in boarding school, wherein a student is under constant scrutiny & the feeling of imprisonment). Nonetheless, Shone does a great job of shying away from "deifying" Nolan while still painting him in a very positive, warm light. My favorite part of this book was perhaps the little conversations between the author and Nolan wherein one can get a glimpse into how Christopher Nolan thinks, acts, converses, questions, and dreams. It also humanizes a figure who seems to be viewed as the epitome of a genre he created, rather than a human being with a family.
Loved this book and would recommend to someone who knows nothing about film and a cinephile alike.
March 4, 2021
Quite good!
March 22, 2022
“Don’t try to understand it… Feel it.”
April 27, 2024
This was well researched and put together. If you’re a fan of Nolan or film in general you should definitely check it out.
May 4, 2023
So, what is this? Is it “that rare thing: a superb book about a living film-maker. Erudite, complex, labyrinthine and mind-expanding.” Well, you’ll have to read it yourself to find out: those are Sam Mendes’ words on the cover of the dust jacket. Not mine. As, indeed, the book is not mine, being the highly valued copy of Rory Wilson. It is to be respected, a form of talismanic guide to the art of film, which, per Nolan himself, is the truly shared art experience including empathy throughout the whole audience. A bible to a master. So, no mucking with this one: a serious read. Although, just to be clear, it is no novel.
The first question: is space just out there, or is it intuited, a priori, by thinking people, the sapiens? How do we orient ourselves in terms of space? (pg4)
Dunkirk – Nolan thought about having no script. “… the relationship between a written screenplay and a finished film is very inadequate. A script is not a great model of what a finished film is going to be.” (pg13/14)
Nolan has obsessions or “fascinations” that float in mid-air like an Alexander Calder mobile, obsessions that connect and reconnect with each other. (pg16) I was secretly pleased to read that Calder allusion.
Nolan’s dad worked on commercials, becoming a consultant on launching brands, Cadbury’s Starbar for example (pg21), and again, like in my short story below “All You Need is …” I’m fascinated by Nolan pitching up where I trod and feared to tread.
As a child, he lived for three years in Chicago (pg24), another connection for me as it was the place … ah well, just another story not for the telling here, and watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which I said for a long while, to my older children, was my favourite movie.
A moving film for me was Lindsay Anderson’s If … (1969), as it raised the possibility of rebellion in real time, using real weapons, bit it was a one liner, the what if, with no real definitive outcome for the participants, a little recognition of love, but no long-term satisfaction of longing. (pg34) If that was as good as it got, a one-night stand, there was more to be sought. “plenty more fish in the sea,” as my Granny used to say.
And, what a coincidence, again, believe it or not, and don’t worry, ‘cos I’ll do that worrying for you, Nolan went to Paris where he was watching the editing of a nature film (pg35) and I’m minded of 1969 when I turned down making such films (yet another story, ask if you want to know). Nolan also references L.P. Hartley’s The Go Between, the cause of one of my (many) errors, on a par with pronouncing pseudo as if it was suedo, in the school outdoor shoe changing room one morning long ago, when I also theorised that Hartley was a model for David Herbert Lawrence, learning me the lesson to check the published dates, never to be forgotten. The words, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” were embodied by Harold Pinter to the start of the film. (pg37) Ominous words for Nolan. The pull of the past on the present was tyrannical and misguided. (pg38)
And visiting the Scala cinema in King’s Cross with his brother Jonah, (pg35) I’m minded that from 2014 to 2017 we lived on Keystone Crescent, a cobbled crescent at the southern end of the Caledonian Road, right across from the Scala, by then a nightclub and being renovated.
At school, Nolan experienced keeping time, to the timetable, carried over into his working life habits, and in his art class saw the combined psychological and structural fractures embodied in M.C. Escher’s prints, both limitless and claustrophobic (pg39) (my friend from the University of Sussex, Dr Stevi Draper, now at Glasgow, did some work with Escher) and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets “Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the Rose Garden.” Makes you think, doesn’t it? For myself, I go to the opening pome in Lacunae “As decisions have to be made / I have made mine / yet my actions are indecisive.” (Pome of … )
And then a contradiction: from the above-mentioned quality of sharing in the film as an art form, the recognition in discussing Nicholas Roeg’s films (some of my favourites and Kate worked for his son) there is Nolan stating baldly that “all films are of their time,” (pg41) and the ability to transcend time withers, or just hangs in the audience’s memory, not carried forever. I suppose that requires a constant renewal of the film stock to get that shared empathy of the moment. Nolan’s memory is jogged when visiting his relatives in Santa Barbara and coming across a laser disc of Nicholas Roeg’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth, starring David Bowie. (pg41) A wonderful film. I recall having a laser disc player on moving to Glasgow in 1993 and the quality of that particular disc was fantastic. Film is now widely available, but like music on streaming channels like Spotify, the quality is reduced and we have substituted quantity for quality.
Memory is entwined with imagination, the present tense, and a fantasy past. (pg42)
This is Rory’s book, and I’m minded of its significance when I read Nolan on public school: “People who go to public school [Note Bene: in the English tradition such schools are open to the public but are private in terms of having to pay – they are not state schools], when they leave, they either join the establishment and carry on talking the way they talk, or they kind of throw it all away.” (pg52). The sense of being of two nations is very strong and, as Rory, I think, would agree, to grow up you have to “shed a lot of that public-school entitlement nonsense.” (pg52) The snake shedding a skin to know who you are, go with it or change, is both biblical and daunting often resulting in lost, as in no longer relevant, friendships.
Another good point for Rory: “I was able to learn by doing,” (pg54) in speaking of his time at the film society. A definition of an education, as compared with learning. “Everything you do as a filmmaker is about point of view. Where you put the camera.” (pg57)
Nolan reads Raymond Chandler who said, “follow the verbs,” and had Marlowe in The Big Sleep walk, not a thing easily done in Los Angeles, but walk he did, (pg61) and I’m reminded of a Calder-like character walking from Huddleston Road in Tufnell Park to Smithfield and realising that he’s losing his sense of smell as the blood no longer smells, when he knows full well that it does.
When Nolan and Emma’s flat is broken into in Camden, Nolan sees it as “intimacy and inappropriate intimacy,” (pg65) “with someone you will never see or know.” In 1978 or 1979 our Huddleston Road house was broken into, access via the flat-roofed extension and jewellery was laid out and not taken, and the police (this was back in the days when the police actually visited to investigate the crime scene, and didn’t just give you a crime number over the phone to give to the insurance company) said that we were lucky that it was a professional, a discriminating professional, not taking our things (not quite true, I lost the Swiss knife my sister bought for me when I was twelve and she’d been on a school skiing trip, together with the black-faced watch my dad had given to me when I was 18 and going to university) and, more importantly, not despoiling and leaving a mess, a far more intimate crime.
Nolan’s father gave him a typewriter for his twenty-first birthday, on which he wrote the script for Following. (pg66) My dad gave me a typewriter when I was twenty-one, in exchange for surrendering my BSA .22 Meteor air rifle when I married. I already wrote pomes [for the explanation of pomes and not poems, please ask). I’d already used my mother’s typewriter [see the description in Lacunae of the John Lennon look alike machine] for transcribing pomes. But I was never creative on a typewriter: that had to wait for word processing. What I will say, is that if you seek brevity, the typewriter is your machine.
You’ll notice that my interest in taking notes is centred on relevance, and of even more importance the relevance to me and mine, mine as in family and friends, the latter often shed, but memorialised herein. So, when the book moves into analysis of Nolan’s films, that makes for a great read, but reduces the scope for commentary.
I do love that the word discombobulation (pg78,88) regularly occurs, a word I’ve savoured and used since my childhood.
A quote that passes through Hans Zimmer, from Ridley Scott but attributed by Nolan to James Joyce (spoiler alert: my next read is the 100-year anniversary edition of Ulysses – from which you can discern my love of Joyce’s writing): “Sentimentality is unearned emotion.” (pg101) What does that really mean? I should appreciate your views. I think I know what I think, and it is on a par with how mad I got with Love Story for successfully playing on my emotions to make me cry, when it wasn’t great filming just soppy old sentimentality.
“Of course, if you forgot everything, you would no longer exist,” said Jorge Luis Borges, (pg102) and that is why I was so concerned about my mother (see the first page of Lacunae) as she existed in the end without any quality of life, deaf, blind, unable to read and no memories. Death was a blessing.
In considering Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket Nolan refers to “That dehumanising effect of shaving the heads.” (pg120) I’m minded that my interest lies in drawing allusions, as shown in my comments herein, and thus I think of Rory’s rendition of P.I.T.S. (his next film at the planning stage – watch this space, as they say). Tom Shone comments, more than once, that you can get Nolan to talk about his themes, but not about himself in his films. I see Rory in that comment. Equally, it’s good to learn that Nolan had his own heroes, David Lean and Lawrence of Arabia and John Huston’s The Man Who Would be King (pg131) both of which influenced his own filming. Both movies I love and can watch again and again. Lawrence drives me to write often, “All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.” (Seven Pillars of Wisdom) Dare to be dangerous. That’s my advice. But be prepared for the consequences. The death of the Cut Complex left me very poor but indomitable. As we read on, the stories of the films conceived and made are rattling good, needing no more than the enjoyment they engender and no commentary.
And so, to David Bowie, playing Tesla in The Prestige. Always the one, with great fame from music to film, he fell to earth, and creates mystique with his own history, and the creator of Bowie Bonds, a genius in a way (ask if you want to know), and Nolan says, “I’ve worked with a lot of very big stars and they’ve all become regular people in my mind, because you get to know them when you work with them. Bowie’s the one exception, the only one who was just as elusive at the end of working with him as he was at the start. … He was being perfectly friendly, I mean a very lovely guy, but he just carries this weight of everything he has achieved.” (pg160) Now that doesn’t quite sound like the English accented Nolan in my mind. Perhaps that shows how little of Nolan himself is divulged in the book. Also, doesn’t he miss a trick here in looking at Bowie in the round. Where big star actors have fame thrust upon them, and they’re keen to show that they are still ordinary people underneath the glitter, Bowie had always sought to be different and carefully wrapped himself in layers of difference. He made himself different. Right down to planning his own death.
And now, time to take a pause before we engage with David Hockney. (pg161) Hockney has been a part of my life since I was a kid at school. I do like his artwork but it’s his intermingling in my life that gives him that special place and why I always want to see more. I went to Bradford Grammar School (BGS), all boys at the time, and at great sacrifice to my parents. Today, some £30 per term doesn’t seem like much but in my first full time labouring job for the waterboard, I earnt £7-12s-3d per week. That’s when money was money. At university I would cash a cheque for 10/-d on a Friday and have enough to eat out, go to the cinema and the pub, a full weekend of entertainment. When I first taught, as an assistant lecturer, I was paid a salary of £1,485 per annum, and bought a detached two-bedroom cottage for £1,800. Life was affordable. It’s all so messy these days. I’ve recently updated my LinkedIn page and was surprised to be sent a large number of young (well young to me) girls to consider following, and I had vague thoughts of Calder’s writing fame getting out and about, when I realised that these are the current alumni of BGS, now open to all. Good thing, I’m sure. When I was at BGS, English lessons on Shakespeare were held in the Library, and presided over by Kenneth H. Grose, who had books published on the subject, and before him a flask of tea, rumoured to be flavoured with more than a smidgen of whisky, and he called us all girls, the term applicable to all pre-pubescent children in Shakespeare’s time, although I think he was actually insulting us as we were all definitely pubescent, some more than others, with heavy beards to prove it. Now, around the end of the library where we congregated on tables abutting his desk, there were pictures on the wall of boys swimming nude under water. Strange you might think now, but there was a swimming pool in the school, and wearing a costume was forbidden, much to the joy of Mr Newbank, some form of geriatric swimming teacher who was held up on exposure charges but, fortunately for him, some distance from Bradford. Maybe it was all rumour but his reputation for only recognising boys once they were naked preceded him. But here’s the thing: those paintings were at the hand of an under 16-year-old David Hockney, another BGS alumni. The school was very academic and only interested in exams, and by that, I mean exam successes, but Mr Grose recognised Hockney’s talent and encouraged him to move to Bradford Art School, which was the best thing for Hockney. That was many years before I sat in the library, and I now wonder what happened to those early Hockney pictures. That question, over refreshments, as Red Jane used to say, led to the suggestion that we should take care of Hockney, keep him in a cupboard, and wheel him out to do a painting from time to time as economic needs needed. That was a sort of northern joke. Anyways, when my daughter, Kate, was working at Egg Pictures for Jodie Foster in the late 1990s, she thought it would be nice to gift Jodie a copy of The Boy Hidden in an Egg print, and asked if I could help. Of course, I said, I knew Jonathan Silver, who renovated Salt Mill in Saltaire, from school, and I would call him. Big mouth. I did call. Only to be told that Jonathan had just died of cancer. Whilst I did know Jonathan, clearly not that well, and he was two years older than me, a lifetime to schoolboys, and it was his younger brother Robin who was in my class. By way of displacing my chagrin, I ordered and duly received two copies of the print, such that Kate could give one and keep one. Turned out she kept both. Sorry to Jodie when she reads this.
The dominance of data and the collection of it by Google (pg163) is fairly pervasive in our thinking but I think that we all have a queasy doubt about its veracity, its failure to sink into history (there’s very little before 1990) and its wild overstatement of results, and although Google states millions of finds, some 19 pages is hard to exceed, which is very limited information. The rest is about hype and bragging rights. “Google are not as powerful as people think in terms of information collation. They’re more powerful than people realise in all kinds of areas, such as collecting data on your movements.” (pg163/164) We can add to that, recognising your interests from your searches and then trying to sell you items related to that search. Very selective and targeted advertising makes Google money. But can they replace libraries. No. They don’t approximate to real research. If you’re saving your novel in the cloud, as it would appear I now am, is it really safe? Loss of power will deny access. Warfare is always a destroyer, and the clouds can be evaporated with a hit to the earth-bound storage site, easily identified by their heat signatures, even when heating swimming pools (an excellent by-product by the way).
Rory has just been round for coffee and a chat, and has directed me to the picture of Tim Robbins head submerged in a bath (pg169) and pointed out the similarity to his film in post-production, C O E R C E, which is nearing completion and I posted some official stills for him on the Calder Facebook page and the Calder Patreon page. He’s done his own colour work. Looking good.
The Dark Knight is a brilliant evocation of bringing a movie to life on the page. Tom Shone excels at this. (pg175to188)
Emotion is important to give full meaning. Nolan considered having no script for Dunkirk, and it is centred on action and Rory showed me a short film about making the film and how important it was to Nolan to be right in the action, the action here being the actual filming, and his experiential involvement was the real emotion of the film, even surpassing the closed environment of Mark Rylance skippering his pleasure boat. Rory thinks that Tenet didn’t fully work with the audience as the fascination was again with the filming itself, getting trucks to go backwards on the freeway, rather than any emotional tag, and even more so that when his brother Jonathan (Jonah) doesn’t have any writing input the emotive factor is reduced. This is highlighted by Nolan himself talking on the subject of Inception: “I don’t remember what changed exactly, but at some point, I remember telling Emma about it and I realised that no, it was his wife. It was like, Oh, of course, and then I finished the script very quickly after that. The script finally worked, because suddenly you understood the emotional stakes. I hadn’t known how to finish the script emotionally. I think I had to grow into it.” (pg207)
If you want to read to the end of this review: please ask. Thank you
The first question: is space just out there, or is it intuited, a priori, by thinking people, the sapiens? How do we orient ourselves in terms of space? (pg4)
Dunkirk – Nolan thought about having no script. “… the relationship between a written screenplay and a finished film is very inadequate. A script is not a great model of what a finished film is going to be.” (pg13/14)
Nolan has obsessions or “fascinations” that float in mid-air like an Alexander Calder mobile, obsessions that connect and reconnect with each other. (pg16) I was secretly pleased to read that Calder allusion.
Nolan’s dad worked on commercials, becoming a consultant on launching brands, Cadbury’s Starbar for example (pg21), and again, like in my short story below “All You Need is …” I’m fascinated by Nolan pitching up where I trod and feared to tread.
As a child, he lived for three years in Chicago (pg24), another connection for me as it was the place … ah well, just another story not for the telling here, and watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which I said for a long while, to my older children, was my favourite movie.
A moving film for me was Lindsay Anderson’s If … (1969), as it raised the possibility of rebellion in real time, using real weapons, bit it was a one liner, the what if, with no real definitive outcome for the participants, a little recognition of love, but no long-term satisfaction of longing. (pg34) If that was as good as it got, a one-night stand, there was more to be sought. “plenty more fish in the sea,” as my Granny used to say.
And, what a coincidence, again, believe it or not, and don’t worry, ‘cos I’ll do that worrying for you, Nolan went to Paris where he was watching the editing of a nature film (pg35) and I’m minded of 1969 when I turned down making such films (yet another story, ask if you want to know). Nolan also references L.P. Hartley’s The Go Between, the cause of one of my (many) errors, on a par with pronouncing pseudo as if it was suedo, in the school outdoor shoe changing room one morning long ago, when I also theorised that Hartley was a model for David Herbert Lawrence, learning me the lesson to check the published dates, never to be forgotten. The words, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” were embodied by Harold Pinter to the start of the film. (pg37) Ominous words for Nolan. The pull of the past on the present was tyrannical and misguided. (pg38)
And visiting the Scala cinema in King’s Cross with his brother Jonah, (pg35) I’m minded that from 2014 to 2017 we lived on Keystone Crescent, a cobbled crescent at the southern end of the Caledonian Road, right across from the Scala, by then a nightclub and being renovated.
At school, Nolan experienced keeping time, to the timetable, carried over into his working life habits, and in his art class saw the combined psychological and structural fractures embodied in M.C. Escher’s prints, both limitless and claustrophobic (pg39) (my friend from the University of Sussex, Dr Stevi Draper, now at Glasgow, did some work with Escher) and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets “Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the Rose Garden.” Makes you think, doesn’t it? For myself, I go to the opening pome in Lacunae “As decisions have to be made / I have made mine / yet my actions are indecisive.” (Pome of … )
And then a contradiction: from the above-mentioned quality of sharing in the film as an art form, the recognition in discussing Nicholas Roeg’s films (some of my favourites and Kate worked for his son) there is Nolan stating baldly that “all films are of their time,” (pg41) and the ability to transcend time withers, or just hangs in the audience’s memory, not carried forever. I suppose that requires a constant renewal of the film stock to get that shared empathy of the moment. Nolan’s memory is jogged when visiting his relatives in Santa Barbara and coming across a laser disc of Nicholas Roeg’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth, starring David Bowie. (pg41) A wonderful film. I recall having a laser disc player on moving to Glasgow in 1993 and the quality of that particular disc was fantastic. Film is now widely available, but like music on streaming channels like Spotify, the quality is reduced and we have substituted quantity for quality.
Memory is entwined with imagination, the present tense, and a fantasy past. (pg42)
This is Rory’s book, and I’m minded of its significance when I read Nolan on public school: “People who go to public school [Note Bene: in the English tradition such schools are open to the public but are private in terms of having to pay – they are not state schools], when they leave, they either join the establishment and carry on talking the way they talk, or they kind of throw it all away.” (pg52). The sense of being of two nations is very strong and, as Rory, I think, would agree, to grow up you have to “shed a lot of that public-school entitlement nonsense.” (pg52) The snake shedding a skin to know who you are, go with it or change, is both biblical and daunting often resulting in lost, as in no longer relevant, friendships.
Another good point for Rory: “I was able to learn by doing,” (pg54) in speaking of his time at the film society. A definition of an education, as compared with learning. “Everything you do as a filmmaker is about point of view. Where you put the camera.” (pg57)
Nolan reads Raymond Chandler who said, “follow the verbs,” and had Marlowe in The Big Sleep walk, not a thing easily done in Los Angeles, but walk he did, (pg61) and I’m reminded of a Calder-like character walking from Huddleston Road in Tufnell Park to Smithfield and realising that he’s losing his sense of smell as the blood no longer smells, when he knows full well that it does.
When Nolan and Emma’s flat is broken into in Camden, Nolan sees it as “intimacy and inappropriate intimacy,” (pg65) “with someone you will never see or know.” In 1978 or 1979 our Huddleston Road house was broken into, access via the flat-roofed extension and jewellery was laid out and not taken, and the police (this was back in the days when the police actually visited to investigate the crime scene, and didn’t just give you a crime number over the phone to give to the insurance company) said that we were lucky that it was a professional, a discriminating professional, not taking our things (not quite true, I lost the Swiss knife my sister bought for me when I was twelve and she’d been on a school skiing trip, together with the black-faced watch my dad had given to me when I was 18 and going to university) and, more importantly, not despoiling and leaving a mess, a far more intimate crime.
Nolan’s father gave him a typewriter for his twenty-first birthday, on which he wrote the script for Following. (pg66) My dad gave me a typewriter when I was twenty-one, in exchange for surrendering my BSA .22 Meteor air rifle when I married. I already wrote pomes [for the explanation of pomes and not poems, please ask). I’d already used my mother’s typewriter [see the description in Lacunae of the John Lennon look alike machine] for transcribing pomes. But I was never creative on a typewriter: that had to wait for word processing. What I will say, is that if you seek brevity, the typewriter is your machine.
You’ll notice that my interest in taking notes is centred on relevance, and of even more importance the relevance to me and mine, mine as in family and friends, the latter often shed, but memorialised herein. So, when the book moves into analysis of Nolan’s films, that makes for a great read, but reduces the scope for commentary.
I do love that the word discombobulation (pg78,88) regularly occurs, a word I’ve savoured and used since my childhood.
A quote that passes through Hans Zimmer, from Ridley Scott but attributed by Nolan to James Joyce (spoiler alert: my next read is the 100-year anniversary edition of Ulysses – from which you can discern my love of Joyce’s writing): “Sentimentality is unearned emotion.” (pg101) What does that really mean? I should appreciate your views. I think I know what I think, and it is on a par with how mad I got with Love Story for successfully playing on my emotions to make me cry, when it wasn’t great filming just soppy old sentimentality.
“Of course, if you forgot everything, you would no longer exist,” said Jorge Luis Borges, (pg102) and that is why I was so concerned about my mother (see the first page of Lacunae) as she existed in the end without any quality of life, deaf, blind, unable to read and no memories. Death was a blessing.
In considering Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket Nolan refers to “That dehumanising effect of shaving the heads.” (pg120) I’m minded that my interest lies in drawing allusions, as shown in my comments herein, and thus I think of Rory’s rendition of P.I.T.S. (his next film at the planning stage – watch this space, as they say). Tom Shone comments, more than once, that you can get Nolan to talk about his themes, but not about himself in his films. I see Rory in that comment. Equally, it’s good to learn that Nolan had his own heroes, David Lean and Lawrence of Arabia and John Huston’s The Man Who Would be King (pg131) both of which influenced his own filming. Both movies I love and can watch again and again. Lawrence drives me to write often, “All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.” (Seven Pillars of Wisdom) Dare to be dangerous. That’s my advice. But be prepared for the consequences. The death of the Cut Complex left me very poor but indomitable. As we read on, the stories of the films conceived and made are rattling good, needing no more than the enjoyment they engender and no commentary.
And so, to David Bowie, playing Tesla in The Prestige. Always the one, with great fame from music to film, he fell to earth, and creates mystique with his own history, and the creator of Bowie Bonds, a genius in a way (ask if you want to know), and Nolan says, “I’ve worked with a lot of very big stars and they’ve all become regular people in my mind, because you get to know them when you work with them. Bowie’s the one exception, the only one who was just as elusive at the end of working with him as he was at the start. … He was being perfectly friendly, I mean a very lovely guy, but he just carries this weight of everything he has achieved.” (pg160) Now that doesn’t quite sound like the English accented Nolan in my mind. Perhaps that shows how little of Nolan himself is divulged in the book. Also, doesn’t he miss a trick here in looking at Bowie in the round. Where big star actors have fame thrust upon them, and they’re keen to show that they are still ordinary people underneath the glitter, Bowie had always sought to be different and carefully wrapped himself in layers of difference. He made himself different. Right down to planning his own death.
And now, time to take a pause before we engage with David Hockney. (pg161) Hockney has been a part of my life since I was a kid at school. I do like his artwork but it’s his intermingling in my life that gives him that special place and why I always want to see more. I went to Bradford Grammar School (BGS), all boys at the time, and at great sacrifice to my parents. Today, some £30 per term doesn’t seem like much but in my first full time labouring job for the waterboard, I earnt £7-12s-3d per week. That’s when money was money. At university I would cash a cheque for 10/-d on a Friday and have enough to eat out, go to the cinema and the pub, a full weekend of entertainment. When I first taught, as an assistant lecturer, I was paid a salary of £1,485 per annum, and bought a detached two-bedroom cottage for £1,800. Life was affordable. It’s all so messy these days. I’ve recently updated my LinkedIn page and was surprised to be sent a large number of young (well young to me) girls to consider following, and I had vague thoughts of Calder’s writing fame getting out and about, when I realised that these are the current alumni of BGS, now open to all. Good thing, I’m sure. When I was at BGS, English lessons on Shakespeare were held in the Library, and presided over by Kenneth H. Grose, who had books published on the subject, and before him a flask of tea, rumoured to be flavoured with more than a smidgen of whisky, and he called us all girls, the term applicable to all pre-pubescent children in Shakespeare’s time, although I think he was actually insulting us as we were all definitely pubescent, some more than others, with heavy beards to prove it. Now, around the end of the library where we congregated on tables abutting his desk, there were pictures on the wall of boys swimming nude under water. Strange you might think now, but there was a swimming pool in the school, and wearing a costume was forbidden, much to the joy of Mr Newbank, some form of geriatric swimming teacher who was held up on exposure charges but, fortunately for him, some distance from Bradford. Maybe it was all rumour but his reputation for only recognising boys once they were naked preceded him. But here’s the thing: those paintings were at the hand of an under 16-year-old David Hockney, another BGS alumni. The school was very academic and only interested in exams, and by that, I mean exam successes, but Mr Grose recognised Hockney’s talent and encouraged him to move to Bradford Art School, which was the best thing for Hockney. That was many years before I sat in the library, and I now wonder what happened to those early Hockney pictures. That question, over refreshments, as Red Jane used to say, led to the suggestion that we should take care of Hockney, keep him in a cupboard, and wheel him out to do a painting from time to time as economic needs needed. That was a sort of northern joke. Anyways, when my daughter, Kate, was working at Egg Pictures for Jodie Foster in the late 1990s, she thought it would be nice to gift Jodie a copy of The Boy Hidden in an Egg print, and asked if I could help. Of course, I said, I knew Jonathan Silver, who renovated Salt Mill in Saltaire, from school, and I would call him. Big mouth. I did call. Only to be told that Jonathan had just died of cancer. Whilst I did know Jonathan, clearly not that well, and he was two years older than me, a lifetime to schoolboys, and it was his younger brother Robin who was in my class. By way of displacing my chagrin, I ordered and duly received two copies of the print, such that Kate could give one and keep one. Turned out she kept both. Sorry to Jodie when she reads this.
The dominance of data and the collection of it by Google (pg163) is fairly pervasive in our thinking but I think that we all have a queasy doubt about its veracity, its failure to sink into history (there’s very little before 1990) and its wild overstatement of results, and although Google states millions of finds, some 19 pages is hard to exceed, which is very limited information. The rest is about hype and bragging rights. “Google are not as powerful as people think in terms of information collation. They’re more powerful than people realise in all kinds of areas, such as collecting data on your movements.” (pg163/164) We can add to that, recognising your interests from your searches and then trying to sell you items related to that search. Very selective and targeted advertising makes Google money. But can they replace libraries. No. They don’t approximate to real research. If you’re saving your novel in the cloud, as it would appear I now am, is it really safe? Loss of power will deny access. Warfare is always a destroyer, and the clouds can be evaporated with a hit to the earth-bound storage site, easily identified by their heat signatures, even when heating swimming pools (an excellent by-product by the way).
Rory has just been round for coffee and a chat, and has directed me to the picture of Tim Robbins head submerged in a bath (pg169) and pointed out the similarity to his film in post-production, C O E R C E, which is nearing completion and I posted some official stills for him on the Calder Facebook page and the Calder Patreon page. He’s done his own colour work. Looking good.
The Dark Knight is a brilliant evocation of bringing a movie to life on the page. Tom Shone excels at this. (pg175to188)
Emotion is important to give full meaning. Nolan considered having no script for Dunkirk, and it is centred on action and Rory showed me a short film about making the film and how important it was to Nolan to be right in the action, the action here being the actual filming, and his experiential involvement was the real emotion of the film, even surpassing the closed environment of Mark Rylance skippering his pleasure boat. Rory thinks that Tenet didn’t fully work with the audience as the fascination was again with the filming itself, getting trucks to go backwards on the freeway, rather than any emotional tag, and even more so that when his brother Jonathan (Jonah) doesn’t have any writing input the emotive factor is reduced. This is highlighted by Nolan himself talking on the subject of Inception: “I don’t remember what changed exactly, but at some point, I remember telling Emma about it and I realised that no, it was his wife. It was like, Oh, of course, and then I finished the script very quickly after that. The script finally worked, because suddenly you understood the emotional stakes. I hadn’t known how to finish the script emotionally. I think I had to grow into it.” (pg207)
If you want to read to the end of this review: please ask. Thank you
August 30, 2023
Brilliant, couldn't put it down.
January 18, 2021
A bit fanboyish, but still an interesting dive into the works of one of the more preeminent directors working today.
February 15, 2024
Amazing! Simply amazing.
February 13, 2021
Learned a lot about one of my favorite filmmakers. Very interesting behind the scenes stuff. There should be something like this for Paul Thomas Anderson.
February 5, 2024
Christopher Nolan has been my favorite movie director for over a decade now. Whenever a new Nolan movie is announced, it immediately jumps to the top of my list of most highly anticipated releases. I suppose it is my fascination with grand-scale visuals, science fiction, playing with time, and twisty, ambiguous stories which makes me a prime candidate for being a Nolan fan, as these are exactly the things (among a few others) that Nolan himself is fascinated with. So, of course, I had to read Tom Shone’s The Nolan Variations when I discovered it.
In The Nolan Variations, Shone provides a brief biography of Christopher Nolan’s early life, before Nolan became a professional filmmaker, and then goes on to examine Nolan’s filmography in chronological order. Most of this is done through interviews and discussions between Nolan and Shone and which are often given verbatim. This means that, as readers, we get a huge amount of first-hand information from Nolan himself about his ideas, processes, inspirations and fascinations as a writer and director as well as his interpretations of his own work. This is all supplemented with extensive background information and interviews with other people, including several of Nolan’s collaborators.
While The Nolan Variations does deal with some of the backgrounds of production and all its different stages, I would not compare it to a making-of. Usually making-ofs of movies focus on how those movies were made, whereas this book deals more with the question of why they were made. Why was Nolan drawn specifically to these stories? Why did he write and shoot them the way he did? You might get some answers to these questions from watching interviews with Nolan, but (as far as I’m aware) there is no other single source that provides such comprehensive answers as The Nolan Variations does.
I really only have two issues with this book. First, at times it bothered me a little bit how Shone included his own interpretations of Nolan’s movies and drew connections between the director’s life and his work that Nolan himself didn’t even always agree with. This was interesting when it happened in discussions with Nolan, as it usually served as a prompt for the director to provide his own interpretation or view on the matter, but it bothered me in a few places where Shone just did it as part of his narration. I suppose that’s where you notice that Shone is a film critic rather than a biographer. Second, I just would have loved there to be even more! Nolan’s movies are so complex and fascinating that I think there would have easily been enough to discuss for more than 20 to 30 pages per movie. I suppose this just shows how interesting this book really is, as there are few others where I would have liked them to be longer rather than shorter.
So, if you’re a fan of Christopher Nolan’s movies and are interested in his thoughts and some background on each of them, then The Nolan Variations is definitely for you. Just make sure you’ve watched all of his movies from Following to Tenet before reading this book. All of their plots are discussed in detail and spoiled completely and if there’s one thing that’s certain with a Nolan movie, it’s that you don’t want to go in knowing how it ends.
In The Nolan Variations, Shone provides a brief biography of Christopher Nolan’s early life, before Nolan became a professional filmmaker, and then goes on to examine Nolan’s filmography in chronological order. Most of this is done through interviews and discussions between Nolan and Shone and which are often given verbatim. This means that, as readers, we get a huge amount of first-hand information from Nolan himself about his ideas, processes, inspirations and fascinations as a writer and director as well as his interpretations of his own work. This is all supplemented with extensive background information and interviews with other people, including several of Nolan’s collaborators.
While The Nolan Variations does deal with some of the backgrounds of production and all its different stages, I would not compare it to a making-of. Usually making-ofs of movies focus on how those movies were made, whereas this book deals more with the question of why they were made. Why was Nolan drawn specifically to these stories? Why did he write and shoot them the way he did? You might get some answers to these questions from watching interviews with Nolan, but (as far as I’m aware) there is no other single source that provides such comprehensive answers as The Nolan Variations does.
I really only have two issues with this book. First, at times it bothered me a little bit how Shone included his own interpretations of Nolan’s movies and drew connections between the director’s life and his work that Nolan himself didn’t even always agree with. This was interesting when it happened in discussions with Nolan, as it usually served as a prompt for the director to provide his own interpretation or view on the matter, but it bothered me in a few places where Shone just did it as part of his narration. I suppose that’s where you notice that Shone is a film critic rather than a biographer. Second, I just would have loved there to be even more! Nolan’s movies are so complex and fascinating that I think there would have easily been enough to discuss for more than 20 to 30 pages per movie. I suppose this just shows how interesting this book really is, as there are few others where I would have liked them to be longer rather than shorter.
So, if you’re a fan of Christopher Nolan’s movies and are interested in his thoughts and some background on each of them, then The Nolan Variations is definitely for you. Just make sure you’ve watched all of his movies from Following to Tenet before reading this book. All of their plots are discussed in detail and spoiled completely and if there’s one thing that’s certain with a Nolan movie, it’s that you don’t want to go in knowing how it ends.
February 3, 2023
If you could trade positions with anyone in life who would it be? After reading this book, the answer for me is obviously Christopher Nolan. He combines art with science to executive grand visions and has complete creative control over his work. That is a thing of beauty.
I love when a biographer has a personal relationship with their subject matter and this book does not disappoint. I found Nolan's parries of Shone's attempts to do psychoanalysis of Nolan's films very funny and ultimately adds an extremely human aspect to the book. Shone includes many quotes and conversations at length with Nolan which really paint a beautiful picture of his mind. He additionally tracks down the inspirations for all of Nolan's works and details them fully from the paintings of Francis Bacon to the impossible mathematics of Ozma Problem to Soviet Brutalism architecture to the early 20th century German director Fritz Lang.
Often times when watching a movie, it is easy to think that someone is more or less transferring the script to the screen methodically, more as an engineerings process than a creative work. Both are true of Nolan, but he draws inspiration from works of art, literature, mathematics and old films very intentionally. He subjects the cast and crew to screenings of old films in which to draw inspiration for the current film before every production.
What shocked me most about Nolan is how obsessed he is in every part of filmmaking from editing to scoring to acting to lighting to special effects and to location. He has strongly founded and sometimes immovable opinions about how to shoot. When I think of most filmmakers they usually have one or two box office bombs, it is frankly amazing that throughout his entire life and 11 major pictures, he has only had triumphant successes.
The framing of the book by film through the development of Nolan's own journey is insanely great. It takes an army to make one of his films and Nolan stands as the thought leader who is able to ask a lot of the people he works with because of his grand vision.
"No Rolls-Royce, no gold watch, no diamond cuff links, none of that; he still has the same watch he always had, still wears the same clothes. You wouldn’t know he’s the director. Very quiet, very confident, very calm. No bombast at all. Just standing there in his long coat whatever the weather, with a flask of tea in the pocket. I asked him once, ‘Is that vodka in there?’ ‘No, it’s tea.’ He’ll drink it all day. It’s how he solves problems.”
"We’re living in a post-modern, post-industrial world with decaying infrastructure. Many feel disenfranchised. Seclusion is difficult. Privacy is impossible. Our lives are porous. We swim in a sea of interconnectedness and data. He directly deals with these intangible but very real anxieties."
I love when a biographer has a personal relationship with their subject matter and this book does not disappoint. I found Nolan's parries of Shone's attempts to do psychoanalysis of Nolan's films very funny and ultimately adds an extremely human aspect to the book. Shone includes many quotes and conversations at length with Nolan which really paint a beautiful picture of his mind. He additionally tracks down the inspirations for all of Nolan's works and details them fully from the paintings of Francis Bacon to the impossible mathematics of Ozma Problem to Soviet Brutalism architecture to the early 20th century German director Fritz Lang.
Often times when watching a movie, it is easy to think that someone is more or less transferring the script to the screen methodically, more as an engineerings process than a creative work. Both are true of Nolan, but he draws inspiration from works of art, literature, mathematics and old films very intentionally. He subjects the cast and crew to screenings of old films in which to draw inspiration for the current film before every production.
What shocked me most about Nolan is how obsessed he is in every part of filmmaking from editing to scoring to acting to lighting to special effects and to location. He has strongly founded and sometimes immovable opinions about how to shoot. When I think of most filmmakers they usually have one or two box office bombs, it is frankly amazing that throughout his entire life and 11 major pictures, he has only had triumphant successes.
The framing of the book by film through the development of Nolan's own journey is insanely great. It takes an army to make one of his films and Nolan stands as the thought leader who is able to ask a lot of the people he works with because of his grand vision.
"No Rolls-Royce, no gold watch, no diamond cuff links, none of that; he still has the same watch he always had, still wears the same clothes. You wouldn’t know he’s the director. Very quiet, very confident, very calm. No bombast at all. Just standing there in his long coat whatever the weather, with a flask of tea in the pocket. I asked him once, ‘Is that vodka in there?’ ‘No, it’s tea.’ He’ll drink it all day. It’s how he solves problems.”
"We’re living in a post-modern, post-industrial world with decaying infrastructure. Many feel disenfranchised. Seclusion is difficult. Privacy is impossible. Our lives are porous. We swim in a sea of interconnectedness and data. He directly deals with these intangible but very real anxieties."
May 25, 2021
Engrossing book about Nolan and his movies, for his fans only. This is a truly remarkable biography of sorts, more of his movies than of the filmmaker, though of course they blend. A tour de force.
One of the great treats of this book is the sheer knowledge of film, art, music and literature that Nolan and Shone share. One of the joys is to see how Borges, for example, influenced many of Nolan’s films. I copied the short story titles down and will read them. I wrote the titles of everything mentioned that I hadn’t yet read, seen or heard, so that I can now do so. Reading this book is encyclopedic, as Nolan’s brain is. I also hoped to watch each movie after reading its chapter, but I have to bring the book back. But I did it for Insomnia, and got more out of it having first read about it. Borges’s influence, and that of other movies, brought out a lot.
Another interesting thing is that reading it didn’t make me like his films any better, especially the ones I don’t much like, such as Tenet. The ending of Inception still annoys me, though I understand better why Nolan left it that way. Obviously, he likes the audience to think, and decide from their own perspective, which is why the top neither stands nor falls. It’s up to us to decide if we think he’s still dreaming or not. But Nolan points out that it doesn’t matter because Cobb has already stopped caring if he’s dreaming or not. He’s with his kids, and that’s all he cares about. Hadn’t considered that.
And reading about the germination of the ideas for each of these movies was a blast. All of those other movies and music and artwork and literature! A little bit of each, and there’s the theme or story. Really interesting to see how much he borrows and stirs.
If you’re looking for some juice about Pacino, Robin Williams, Bale or any of the other actors he’s worked with a ton of times, forget it. All you’ll get is a throwaway sentence about how Nolan might think of Michael Caine as a good luck charm. That’s it. And, yeah, Nolan works incredibly closely with his wife, his brother and whomever the film’s composer and cinematographer are, but you should’ve already known that. I didn’t know how inexpensive his films were, or how much less than you’d expect that he uses CGI. He’s really old school.
So, yeah, fascinating stuff, if you’re interested in the intellectual mind of this particular filmmaker.
One of the great treats of this book is the sheer knowledge of film, art, music and literature that Nolan and Shone share. One of the joys is to see how Borges, for example, influenced many of Nolan’s films. I copied the short story titles down and will read them. I wrote the titles of everything mentioned that I hadn’t yet read, seen or heard, so that I can now do so. Reading this book is encyclopedic, as Nolan’s brain is. I also hoped to watch each movie after reading its chapter, but I have to bring the book back. But I did it for Insomnia, and got more out of it having first read about it. Borges’s influence, and that of other movies, brought out a lot.
Another interesting thing is that reading it didn’t make me like his films any better, especially the ones I don’t much like, such as Tenet. The ending of Inception still annoys me, though I understand better why Nolan left it that way. Obviously, he likes the audience to think, and decide from their own perspective, which is why the top neither stands nor falls. It’s up to us to decide if we think he’s still dreaming or not. But Nolan points out that it doesn’t matter because Cobb has already stopped caring if he’s dreaming or not. He’s with his kids, and that’s all he cares about. Hadn’t considered that.
And reading about the germination of the ideas for each of these movies was a blast. All of those other movies and music and artwork and literature! A little bit of each, and there’s the theme or story. Really interesting to see how much he borrows and stirs.
If you’re looking for some juice about Pacino, Robin Williams, Bale or any of the other actors he’s worked with a ton of times, forget it. All you’ll get is a throwaway sentence about how Nolan might think of Michael Caine as a good luck charm. That’s it. And, yeah, Nolan works incredibly closely with his wife, his brother and whomever the film’s composer and cinematographer are, but you should’ve already known that. I didn’t know how inexpensive his films were, or how much less than you’d expect that he uses CGI. He’s really old school.
So, yeah, fascinating stuff, if you’re interested in the intellectual mind of this particular filmmaker.
April 24, 2023
Rounding this 4.5 rating up to a 5 because I love all things Christopher Nolan. It wasn't until a few years ago that I connected most of my favorite movies to this incredible director. I just don't pay attention to names like that. But pattern recognition finally won out and I found my way to this book. I'm now working on the last few of his films I haven't seen.
This book is such a good deep-dive on Christopher Nolan and his films. Each film gets its own chapter and included interesting stories, inspirations, and connections. As a person who has re-watched most of his films to an obsessive degree (I watched Tenet 4 times in one weekend) and youtube analysis on top of that, I wasn't expecting to learn so much. If you love his films, read this book.
Most interesting lines:
The best chapter was 3 - Time.
I love that Christopher Nolan uses the word "fascinating" a lot because that's one of my most-used words. Tom Shone includes a partial list of things Nolan described as "fascinating" in the introduction along with the etymology of the term and I felt like both Shone and Nolan's kindred spirit. I also felt a connection to Nolan's TCK life.
Ch 1 - Structure
-compared the art of cinematic montage with Japanese hieroglyphs where the combination of two hieroglyphs of the simplest series is more than the sum of the two parts - it creates a third meaning
-"as if they were buildings but strangers to their own hearts, summoned by the siren's song of home, but nagged by the fear that they may never be able to return or unable to recognize themselves once they do."
-"I'm the product of two cultures and I've grown up two places and I think that makes you think about the concept of home a little differently because it's not as simple as geography necessarily"
Ch 12 - Knowledge
-"to know it's true nature is to lose...we're trying to do with inversion what we couldn't do with the atomic bomb, uninvent it, divide and contain the knowledge. Ignorance is our ammunition."
-"there was no way before photography to see reverse imagery or even imagine that it exists and that to me is what makes Tenet the absolute most cinematic film I have ever been able to put together. It can exist only because of a camera."
This book is such a good deep-dive on Christopher Nolan and his films. Each film gets its own chapter and included interesting stories, inspirations, and connections. As a person who has re-watched most of his films to an obsessive degree (I watched Tenet 4 times in one weekend) and youtube analysis on top of that, I wasn't expecting to learn so much. If you love his films, read this book.
Most interesting lines:
The best chapter was 3 - Time.
I love that Christopher Nolan uses the word "fascinating" a lot because that's one of my most-used words. Tom Shone includes a partial list of things Nolan described as "fascinating" in the introduction along with the etymology of the term and I felt like both Shone and Nolan's kindred spirit. I also felt a connection to Nolan's TCK life.
Ch 1 - Structure
-compared the art of cinematic montage with Japanese hieroglyphs where the combination of two hieroglyphs of the simplest series is more than the sum of the two parts - it creates a third meaning
-"as if they were buildings but strangers to their own hearts, summoned by the siren's song of home, but nagged by the fear that they may never be able to return or unable to recognize themselves once they do."
-"I'm the product of two cultures and I've grown up two places and I think that makes you think about the concept of home a little differently because it's not as simple as geography necessarily"
Ch 12 - Knowledge
-"to know it's true nature is to lose...we're trying to do with inversion what we couldn't do with the atomic bomb, uninvent it, divide and contain the knowledge. Ignorance is our ammunition."
-"there was no way before photography to see reverse imagery or even imagine that it exists and that to me is what makes Tenet the absolute most cinematic film I have ever been able to put together. It can exist only because of a camera."
August 20, 2021
Since bursting onto the film scene in the early 2000s, director Christopher Nolan has become an institution in and of himself behind the camera. From mind-benders like Memento & The Prestige, epics like Interstellar, & his Dark Knight trilogy, his name now comfortably rests amongst the likes of Spielberg, Hitchcock, and the like. Even with all that success, however, Nolan is still a bit of a mysterious figure in that he normally avoids the spotlight (interviews, press, etc.) and prefers to concentrate on his work. As such, the access that author Tom Shone gets in "The Nolan Variations" is largely the draw here.
Basically, this book follows a series of interviews/conversations that Shone was somehow granted with the iconic director. It goes in chronological order from his childhood in England to Following, Memento, and everything up to Tenet. These are basically never-before-heard thoughts from Nolan about his own life and works.
Of course, those interviews alone cannot fill an entire weighty tome like this, so Shone takes many of Nolan's statements and expands upon them, drawing from other artistic (or even philosophical) realms to help break down each Nolan film or life situation. If one is not a die-hard Nolan fan (like myself), this is where you might catch yourself skimming a bit, as the tangents can stray a bit far afield from "Nolan stuff". Much like a Nolan film itself, ironically, you'll take from it about as much mentally energy as you put into it.
Overall, the simple fact that this is the most comprehensive piece ever done on Nolan's oeuvre was enough to garner 5 stars from me. If you've watched multiple Nolan films and love his work, there's much to take from Shone. More casual fans might be a bit overwhelmed by the deep-dive approach, but still likely to take at least something away knowledge-wise.
Basically, this book follows a series of interviews/conversations that Shone was somehow granted with the iconic director. It goes in chronological order from his childhood in England to Following, Memento, and everything up to Tenet. These are basically never-before-heard thoughts from Nolan about his own life and works.
Of course, those interviews alone cannot fill an entire weighty tome like this, so Shone takes many of Nolan's statements and expands upon them, drawing from other artistic (or even philosophical) realms to help break down each Nolan film or life situation. If one is not a die-hard Nolan fan (like myself), this is where you might catch yourself skimming a bit, as the tangents can stray a bit far afield from "Nolan stuff". Much like a Nolan film itself, ironically, you'll take from it about as much mentally energy as you put into it.
Overall, the simple fact that this is the most comprehensive piece ever done on Nolan's oeuvre was enough to garner 5 stars from me. If you've watched multiple Nolan films and love his work, there's much to take from Shone. More casual fans might be a bit overwhelmed by the deep-dive approach, but still likely to take at least something away knowledge-wise.
February 26, 2024
Jakże się ucieszyłem, że ta książka nie okazała się typową biografią z rozpisanymi etapami życia bohatera typu urodził się...pobierał edukację w latach...tylko historią o procesie twórczym każdego z filmów Christophera Nolana, który dziś pozostaje jednym z najbardziej cenionych reżyserów, osiągnąwszy sukces artystyczny i komercyjny. Większośc z nas widziała przynajmniej jeden z jego filmów, czy to będzie trylogia o Batmanie czy moja ulubiona Incepcja. Tu możemy dowiedzieć się jak powstawały, czym były obciążone i jakie rzeczy w czasie kręcenia obrazów są dla Nolana ważne, jak na przykład dobranie odpowiedniej muzyki czy stworzenie odpowiedniego planu zdjęciowego. Także dobór właściwych osób zaangażowanych w produkcję. W końcu jak powstawały wizje na scenariusz. Książka, która jest wywiadem rzeką, mimo że autor się od tego odżegnuje, pokazuje nam Nolana rzeczywiście jako reżysera wyobraźni, zgodnie zresztą z podtytułem. Dostajemy obraz człowieka perfekcyjnego, dla którego ważny jest każdy szczegół podczas pracy, bo wie on że wszystko przekłada się na efekt końcowy. Nolan jawi się też jako wizjoner i prawdziwy znawca kina, czerpiący z klasyków jak Hitchcock, pozostając przy tym dalej twórcą na wskroś oryginalnym i niepowtarzalnym. Artystą który wyrósł z kina noir i który nie boi się sięgać po różne tematy, jak film wojenny, sportretowanie superbohatera znanego z komiksów czy, by jeszcze raz wspomnieć Incepcję, totalnie odjechanego pomysłu, zanurzającego się w krainę snów, bynajmniej nie w ujęciu freudowskim. Czyta się to wspaniale i każe spojrzeć na dobrze znane filmy z zupełnie innej perspektywy. Cieszmy się zatem, że współczesna popkultura ma kogoś takiego i wyczekujmy jego następnych filmów. Jestem przekonany, że będą wspaniałe. Książkę serdecznie polecam!!!
Za książkę dziękuję @wydawnictwoznakpl
Za książkę dziękuję @wydawnictwoznakpl
January 22, 2023
What I leaned about Christopher Nolan:
He doesn’t have an e-mail account
He doesn’t own a cellular
He shoots all his own second-unit photography
He uses the word Fascinating a lot.Here is a partial list of the things he found fascinating throughout his Variations interviews:
The imagery of blurred heads in the paintings of Francis Bacon
The absence of heroics in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia
The orphaning of Howard Hughes
Kubrick’s use of miniatures in 2001: A Space Odyssey
The moment in Heat where De Niro’s gang slashes the vacuum-sealed bag of money
The work of Jorge Luis Borges
Brando’s recital of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” at the end of Apocalypse Now
Pink Floyd: The Wall
The work of Industrial Light & Magic
His father’s work in advertising for Ridley Scott
The illusion of scale in movies
Gothic architecture
Einstein’s thought experiments involving separated twins
The “great game” in Southeast Asia between the British Empire and Russia
Wilkie Collins’s novel The Moonstone
The way morality is expressed through architecture in Murnau’s Sunrise
The fact that nobody understands how iPads work
The work of David Lynch
The way GPS satellites factor in the effects of relativity
Wikipedia
A nature documentary he watched unspool backward at age sixteen
The hydrofoil
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