Christopher Nolan

Some men just want to watch the world burn, but unlike the Joker, Christopher Nolan wants to add creativity and entertainment to it. Christopher is a British-American writer and director responsible for some of the popular movies people know and love today. He has filmed many types of movies, ranging from science fiction to realistic war movies. His amazing work with exceptional detail in the soundtracks and visual sights makes his movies pop and succeed so well. His in-depth storytelling also brings the movie to life and entangles the viewer in the world of the movie. 

Christopher Nolan was born in England in 1970. At the age of seven, Christopher was heavily influenced by  Star Wars and began filming his action figures with his dad's camera. As he grew up, he studied at Haileybury and Imperial Service College and later transitioned to University College in London. While at university, he filmed two shorts, DoodleBug and Larceny, which won an award at the Cambridge Film Festival. Throughout college, he was unable to create a following and gain reputation, nor was he able to get funding for films or be picked up by a production company. His dedication to filming eventually brought upon his first feature film, Following. 

Nolan has a very creative directing style that sets him apart from other directors. He always inserts context at crucial points in the film, enough to show the importance of it, but not enough to spoil the big ending. Along with that, he does alot of cross-cutting between multiple time frames to give an understanding of where you are in the film but holding back how you got there, enhancing the “on the edge of your seat” vibe. In my personal opinion, his films are set apart the most by his amazing one-off soundtracks. In all of his most popular movies, he called upon Hans Zimmerman to create the music, incorporating large band ensembles to provoke strong emotions to the viewer and enhance the movie scenes drastically. Most of his films are Science Fantasy, but he has filmed other war movies like Dunkirk. 

Interstellar is one of his most popular films that he has been a part of. This film features an extremely complex and deep plot, filled with adventure, drama, and high tension. On the surface, this movie seems to incorporate the theme of a father's love for his daughter, but Nolan really has a deeper theme, who we are as humans and what will be left of us. Most of this movie is based in space, or in other dimensions. To emphasize the size of space, and how small we are as humans, he uses many extreme wide shots where the space ship is just a tiny blob. One scene in particular that I want to analyze is when the crew first lands on Miller’s planet. As the ship is drifting into the atmosphere and the never-ending ocean, there is no music, just the sound of rushing wind. Along with that, the camera cuts to multiple shots of a camera wildly panning over a never-ending body of water, a violently shaking spacecraft, and shaky close-up shots of the weary astronauts as they plummet into who knows where. This landing scene lasts for over twenty seconds, creating a high tension atmosphere of crashing or not making it with only a few shots cut together. Another scene is the tesseract scene. Here, cooper has made it out of a wormhole, which was just blackness rushing all around him, his ship flashing and going haywire, all of the cameras are shaking violently to give the feeling of no control. Finally, he ejects into nothingness, literally nothingness, the close-up shots of his face show his worry. Again, there is no sound adding to the suspense as he eventually begins to fall extremely fast toward a foreign object, using close up shots of his face to add emotion and lard wide-angle shots of the foreign object. Eventually, he falls into the tesseract, the camera is shaking, putting the camera in his point of view, there is nothing but flashes of lights, quick camera angle changes from his feet, to his face to wide-angle shots of him falling violently and out of control again add to the intensity and tension, as well as moves the viewer further away from what they know as reality and strips them of the knowledge of where they are. 

All in all, Nolan brings alot to the table with his dramatic styling and creative plots. All his movies have a similar feel to them which shows his consistency as a director and prooving his individual style. I’ve watched many of his movies at least three times(per movie) and have watched interstellar more than 6 times. The music he puts to his scenes really adds a depth that other movies don't have. Often times I look forward to the music alone when a movie with his name as a director comes out.