Film
Christopher Nolan
Director of Inception, Interstellar and Oppenheimer
Born 1970
Photo: Republic of Korea · CC BY-SA 4.0
«If you want to really try and make a great film, not a good film, but a great film, you have to take a lot of risks.»
Christopher Nolan makes large-scale films built around structural puzzles, from the reverse chronology of Memento to the nested dreams of Inception. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for Oppenheimer.
Key achievements
- Academy Award for Best Director, Oppenheimer, 2024
- Films have grossed over six billion dollars worldwide
Universities
London, Bloomsbury
Read English literature, choosing UCL specifically because it had Steenbeck editing tables and a film society with equipment.
Facts
- He chose his university for its film equipment rather than its English department, and ran the film society to get access to it.
- His first feature, Following, was shot at weekends over a year on a budget of about six thousand dollars.
- He insists on shooting on film and on doing effects physically, and had a real Boeing 747 crashed into a building for Tenet.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.