Christopher Nolan has made 13 films, won 18 Academy Awards, and grossed over $6 billion at the box office. Film school told him no thanks. In a new 60 Minutes interview with CBS News, the 55-year-old director sat down to talk about his most ambitious project yet: a big-screen adaptation of a nearly 3,000-year-old story that has survived longer than most civilizations.
The Man Who Makes the Impossible Expensive
Here's the short version of Christopher Nolan's career: he gets rejected, he makes it anyway, and then 10 years later everyone acts like they knew all along. Rejected by film school. Couldn't get a distributor for "Memento." Waited a full year to get that one into theaters. The screenplay everyone called confusing got nominated for an Oscar.
According to CBS News, Nolan has now made 13 films over 28 years, all of which he also wrote himself. That is not a normal thing. Most directors of his commercial scale have long since handed the writing to someone else and started focusing on golf and producing credits. Nolan writes. Then he films. Then he blows up a real building if the script calls for it, because, as the 60 Minutes piece makes clear, computer animation is a last resort for this man.
Film School Said No. Firecrackers Said Yes.
The rejection letter from film school apparently said nothing beyond "no thanks," which CBS News reports Nolan seemed mildly horrified to have on the record. His response to that rejection was to keep making movies on weekends with friends until the industry ran out of excuses to ignore him.
It started much earlier than that, though. Nolan's younger brother Jonathan, who is himself a Hollywood director, told 60 Minutes that his earliest memories are of Chris making movies in the basement. Their family had a Super 8 camera, and young Chris used it to shoot their take on Star Wars, blowing up some of Jonathan's toys with firecrackers. Chris was eight or nine. Jonathan was three or four. The toys were presumably not consulted.
"I think he's just always been captivated by the idea that you could take this device and use it as a portal into another universe," Jonathan told CBS News. "It was like a door." A door that, to his credit, Nolan has spent his entire adult life kicking wide open.
"Memento" and the Year Nobody Wanted a Masterpiece
In 1999, Nolan made "Memento," a mystery built around an amnesiac detective who tracks clues through tattoos on his own skin. It is, in retrospect, one of the most formally inventive American films of the last 30 years. At the time, distributors thought it was too confusing.
It sat for a year. According to CBS News, Nolan described the experience as "a lesson in humility" and "a lesson in patience." He said it diplomatically, because he is a very composed person. The subtext, if you've seen the movie and understand that it then got an Oscar nomination for its screenplay, is considerably less diplomatic.
His producer and wife, Emma Thomas, who met Nolan on the first day of college and has produced every single one of his films across their 26-year marriage, told CBS News that every rejection only made him more certain. "Every 'no' that he got just confirmed for him, even more, that he wanted to do this."
The Odyssey, or: Nolan Decides Homer Needed Better Cinematography
The new project is "The Odyssey," an adaptation of the nearly 3,000-year-old Greek epic about the soldier-king Odysseus, his Trojan horse gambit, and his decade-long fight to get home. It is Nolan's 13th film. CBS News reports he is treating it like his last, which is apparently how he treats all of them.
"I feel a real responsibility to try and get as much on screen for the audience as possible," Nolan told 60 Minutes host Scott Pelley. His stated goal with the film is to put the audience inside the Trojan horse. Literally inside it. On the deck of Odysseus's ship. The man wants you to smell the Bronze Age.
"You don't want the audience to watch the film; you want the audience to be in the film," Pelley said. "Very much," Nolan confirmed. This is either the most exciting thing you've heard about a summer blockbuster in years, or it is the exact premise of every IMAX experience at a science museum. With Nolan, it's probably closer to the former.
The Secret to Good Movies Is a Book About Super 8 Cameras
During the 60 Minutes interview, CBS News reports that Pelley noticed a book sitting on Nolan's desk titled "How to Make Good Movies," apparently written sometime in the 1950s and featuring a man with a Super 8 camera on the cover. Nolan admitted he had tried to tidy up before the crew arrived and had failed to hide it.
"That's the secret," Nolan said. Which is, genuinely, a more honest answer than most people in Hollywood would give. The director who collapsed an actual building for "The Dark Knight," who shot "Dunkirk" with real warplanes, who built a practical rotating hallway for "Inception," still has a dog-eared paperback about home movies sitting next to his keyboard. That is, strange as it sounds, not an affectation. It tracks completely.
The Dingo Take
Look, this is not a political story. Nobody's civil rights are being stripped. No one is looting a federal agency. In the current news environment, a profile of a talented director making an expensive movie about ancient Greece is practically a nature documentary about a calmer world.
But the Nolan story is worth paying attention to for exactly one reason: it is a sustained, 28-year argument against the people who tell you no. Film school said no. Distributors said no. Studio executives called his screenplays confusing. He kept going anyway, with a Super 8 camera and some of his little brother's toys and, eventually, a $100 million budget and a genuine obsession with making audiences feel things in their actual bodies. That's not an inspirational poster. That's just what stubbornness looks like when it's aimed at something worth doing.
The Odyssey comes out this summer. Whether it's any good remains to be seen. But if Christopher Nolan says he's going to put you inside a wooden horse outside the walls of Troy, the smart money says you're going to feel the splinters.
