The Exacting, Expansive Mind of CHRISTOPHER NOLAN In an industry where status means not having to care about the value of other people’s time, Nolan never keeps anybody waiting. At 10 a.m. sharp, he was greeted at the Bow Tie Cinema on 23rd Street in Chelsea by Adam Cole, who had flown over from Los Angeles with the film print, which had its own ticket. Cole, who has been Nolan’s postproduction coordinator for the last two films, had been there since 7 in the morning. He was wearing a bow tie, only slightly askew; this might have been an understated homage to this particular theater — one of only 240 or so nationwide that would be projecting the movie on actual film rather than digitally — or might merely have been an expression of the odd sartorial discipline that all of Nolan’s collaborators seem to share, their shirts tucked in like barracks bedsheets. (Brad Grey, the chairman and C.E.O. of Paramount Pictures, told me the set of “Interstellar” was the best-dressed set he ever visited. “Everyone was in suits and ties, and I thought, Who are these folks, everyone talking very nicely to each other, all civilized?”) Nolwan’s own look accords with his strict regimen of optimal resource allocation and flexibility: He long ago decided it was a waste of energy to choose anew what to wear each day, and the clubbable but muted uniform on which he settled splits the difference between the demands of an executive suite and a tundra. The ensemble is smart with a hint of frowzy, a dark, narrow-lapeled jacket over a blue dress shirt with a lightly fraying collar, plus durable black trousers over scuffed, sensible shoes. In colder weather, Nolan outfits himself with a fitted herringbone waistcoat, the bottom button left open. A pair of woven periwinkle cuff links and rather garish striped socks represent his only concessions to whimsy or sentimentality; they have about them the sweet, gestural, last-minute air of Father’s Day presents. Despite the civilized and civilizing exterior, Nolan was a little anxious that morning. He is comfortable with the fact that his filmmaking practice rests on the expertise of his team — he calls himself a jack-of-all-trades and emphasizes the “master of none” — but film projection, the final gate before the audience, was a dying art, and there were fewer and fewer people around he could trust. Like most theaters, the Bow Tie now shows most of its movies in digital projection, which Quentin Tarantino has called “TV in public.” Over the last 10 years, Nolan has emerged, along with Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, as one of Hollywood’s most visible advocates for film, with its exacting texture and granularity of hue, over the Styrofoam flatness of digital. Nolan is a gestalt thinker and entertainer, and he thinks that it’s technical details like these, even the ones we register only unconsciously, that make the theatrical experience a vivid and continuous dream: “At the movies, we’re going to see someone else put on a show, and I feel a responsibility to put on the best show possible.” Nolan was at the Bow Tie to optimize the show. The theater hadn’t projected film in some time, so Paramount had called in their New York head of technical operations to get everything in order. “They’ve only got one rack of sub,” Cole said, indicating that the sound system perhaps wasn’t ideal for such low-end sounds as roars and booms, of which this film has its share. Nolan wanted to screen Reels 2 and 3 (of an eight-reel movie) for the rocket launch — “Interstellar” takes place largely in space — whose rumble might correspondingly suffer. “But you can’t just start with the rocket launch or you’ll blow everybody’s ears out.” You have to start with Reel 2, he exposited, which is full of the informative dialogue that brings the audience up to speed. We navigated in the descending dark toward Nolan’s preferred seats, third-row center, swinging briefly by “ A lthough many of Christopher Nolan’s movies happen simultaneously in the past, present and future, he almost never works on weekends. He made an exception, though, on a Saturday early this fall, while he was in New York on the sort of errand almost no director takes up, or has to take up, these days: He was visiting theaters to make sure they were properly prepared to project his new movie, “Interstellar.” The final cut of the movie had been delivered, as is characteristic for him, ahead of schedule, back in June, and he was rapidly running out of tasks within his control before the premiere. But you can’t just start with the rocket launch or you’ll blow everybody’s ears out. “ ...he’d be more than happy to check out every seat in every theater in the country. Nolan’s assistant of four years, Andy Thompson, to wordlessly exchange an empty takeaway cup of tea for a fresh thermos. (“Andy can get me tea on a glacier,” Nolan said, with a sort of puzzled appreciation.) Nolan seemed comfortable as he settled in, if a little apprehensive about the screen, which was recently installed. “When I first walked in, I worried that perhaps the screen had been hung just a little too high, but these headrests are very nice.” The screen was silver, designed for 3-D movies, and he worried his peak whites would go gray. The face of Matthew McConaughey, who stars in the film, materialized on the screen in front of us. “Those whites are O.K. Not bad. This is encouraging.” Nolan did not settle in for long. Soon I was chasing him as he darted around the dark theater with a swift but moseying gait, moving from one corner to the next, monitoring the clarity of the sound from multiple vantages. The most important thing, he said, was the volume; he wanted a lot of simple power, and all of it coming right out of the screen. He didn’t put a lot of surround in the mix, because he didn’t want a lot of distraction from the sides. (Outer space, he pointed out dryly, is not known for its ambient murmurs.) He seemed content. This was not, he told me later, a chore. It seemed as if, had he enough time, he’d be more than happy to check out every seat in every theater in the country. An emotional McConaughey rocketed into the firmament, and the broad, cascading rumble pleased Nolan, who expects things to live up to his expectations and is nonetheless pleasantly surprised when they do. After the liftoff, the film hovers in a long, gauzy silence, of the kind he acknowledges having learned from Stanley Kubrick, whose “2001” has been a monument for him. “There’s supposed to be a tense feeling of having no air.” But, he went on, the quality of silence would vary from theater to theater; here you’d hear the rumble of air-conditioning, there the rustle of popcorn or coats. The house lights came up, and Nolan found Cole in the back of the theater. “Did you get the dimensions of the screen?” he asked. Cole had been able to recite the number of seats in the theater off the top of his head but couldn’t recall the dimensions. “When you get a chance, before you leave,” Nolan said. “Doesn’t have to be now. But I want it as a frame of reference.” “When you have planets and stars, you never want to make people feel as though the screen is too small,” Nolan told me. “Otherwise they’ll worry there’s nothing off-screen.” N olan, whose eight movies over 14 years have together generated just more than $3.5 billion in revenue, puts an extraordinary amount of time and effort into engineering believably ample worlds. He tries to build maps the size of the territory, whole cities from the ground up in disused airship hangars (as he’s done for four of his movies at a former R.A.F. facility outside London), even if he’s going to shoot just a few street-corner scenes. Sue Kroll, the president of worldwide marketing for Warner Bros., told me she once got actually lost in the ersatz rain falling on an ersatz Gotham. Nolan learned the value of such sweep from Ridley Scott. The genius of “Blade Runner,” he told me, is that “you never feel like you’ve gotten close to the edge of the world.” Nolan’s movies require this thick quotient of reality to support his looping plots, which accelerate in shifting time signatures, consume themselves in recursive intrigue and advance formidable and enchanting problems of interpretation. “Memento,” the Sundance favorite that brought him instant acclaim at age 30, is a noir thriller with the chronology of reverse-spliced helix. “Insomnia,” the only one of his nine films for which he did not receive at least Memento - 2000 a share of the writing credit, was somewhat more straightforward — a moody, tortured psychological thriller — but its real trick was to gain him access to studio work and studio budgets. “The Prestige,” a Victorian dueling-magician drama, is a clever bit of prestidigitation, as well as a canny commentary on film and technology (Nolan on digital filmmaking can sound a lot like Ricky Jay on David Copperfield). “Inception” was a heist movie that took place in a series of nested dreamscapes. Nolan’s Batman movies, though basically linear in structure, resonated broadly as shadowy political allegories. themselves to the limbo of Nolan’s expansive, febrile imagination. The IMDB F.A.Q. about the meaning of the end of “Inception” makes “Infinite Jest” look like a pamphlet on proper toaster installation. The Internet has become lousy with intersecting wormholes tunneled by warring pro-Nolan factions. Part of the reason his work has done so well at the box office is that his audience members — and not just his fans, but his critics — find themselves watching his movies twice, or three times, bleary-eyed and shivering in their dusky light, hallucinating wheels within wheels and stopping only to blog about the finer points. These blogs pose questions along the lines of “If the fact that the white van is in free-fall off the bridge in the first dream means that, in the second dream, there’s zero gravity in the hotel, then why is there still normal gravity in the third dream’s Alpine fortress?????” That his films manage to be both mainstream blockbusters and objects of such cult appeal is what makes Nolan a singular, and singularly admired, figure in Hollywood. He is commonly found sharing discriminating sentences of praise with James Cameron on the one hand and Paul Thomas Anderson on the other; he has been anointed, without any apparent campaigning on his own behalf, the successor of both Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick. His loyalists have consistently and strenuously defended him against critics who claim that although he may be a masterful technician, he’s not a visionary or true auteur. Regardless of the visionary question, however, it’s pretty much impossible to think of a film that grossed more than a billion dollars and is better than “The Dark Knight” — or, to think of it in the way that Nolan prefers, a better film that was seen, so many times over, by so many people. Most people, of course, don’t take their Nolaniana to such extremes. But there are enthusiasts out there who lose It’s also hard to see how “Interstellar” won’t make another billion-plus dollars and thus deepen Nolan’s mys- To hear Nolan tell it, however, the film’s true origin story begins much earlier, when Nolan was 7; his father, a British advertising copywriter, took him to see, within the span of about a year, the initial release of “Star Wars” and a theatrical rerelease of “2001.” The age of 7, perhaps not coincidentally, was also the year in which he started to make his own movies, on a Super 8 he borrowed from his dad. Those two movies — one that helped inaugurate the auteur-driven New Hollywood, and one that inadvertently ushered in the era of the reinvigorated, blockbuster-based studio system — have remained his touchstones, and “Interstellar” represents his opportunity to repay his debt to both of them at the same time. Jonah, when he came to visit the set and saw the spaceships, said to him, “Of course we’re doing something like this; this was our whole childhood.” Nolan’s film is set roughly two generations hence, in a grim, shrunken, retrograde era. The plot revolves around the relationship between an iconoclastic space pilot named Cooper, played by McConaughey, and his bright, stubborn daughter, played in her youth by Mackenzie Foy. (“That lovely little girl is going to be a star,” Michael Caine told me.) Armies and technology have been NOLAN Interstellar Set tique as the one studio director who’s not a studio hack, as the solitary Hollywood icon who somehow does enormous, surprising, profitable things his own way. The movie had its origins in 2006, as a collaboration between a theoretical physicist, Caltech’s Kip Thorne, and an independent producer, Lynda Obst. The project was at Paramount, and Nolan’s brother Jonathan — who goes by Jonah — was hired to write the screenplay; Spielberg was attached as director. But by 2011, the project became available, and Nolan signed on to rewrite (he and his brother have been collaborating on scripts since “Memento”) and direct, as long as the project could be a joint venture with Warner Bros., Nolan’s longtime studio home. Insomnia - 2002 rendered immaterial, and a delusional “caretaker” generation is barely getting by, for the moment, on subsistence agriculture. Cooper was trained as a pilot and an engineer before the great regression, and the broader attenuation of our human drive, forced him into farming. Caine’s Professor Brand, Cooper’s old mentor and now the head of a much-reduced, fly-by-night NASA, persuades him to fly off into the unknown. Future NASA is led by six people around a conference table, one more instance of the professional tranquillity that acts as a necessary prelude and backdrop to his subsequent lunacy. That’s as much as you get from the trailers, which feature McConaughey’s exhortation to new greatness over stock space-age footage and makes the movie look like so much “Apollo 13” schmaltz. But in fact that covers only the first 20 minutes of an almost three-hour film, the balance of which resembles a George Lucas interpretation of a Borges story. As far as sci-fi goes, it’s closer to Soderbergh’s “Solaris” than to Tarkovsky’s. But even after everything goes satisfyingly bananas, the movie remains grounded in a basic humanism. “Someone, an adult,” Nolan told me, “once told me that the meaning of ‘2001’ was that going into outer space is like going deep into yourself.” He smoothed the folds of his waistcoat and considered that for a second. “I don’t think that’s what it’s about. In fact I have no idea what ‘2001’ is really about. But I tried to make a film now that would be like that, a quest film like ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.’ ” The depth and solidity of the relationship between Cooper and his daughter, Murphy, and the swift, sure strokes with which it is realized — she’s the sidekick who makes sure he remembers his bolt-cutters — is what differentiates “Interstellar” from Nolan’s other movies, where the human relationships can feel like an afterthought. Nolan needed the Cooper-Murphy relationship to coalesce because for “Interstellar” to work as an exhortative, inspirational work, it had to make sure that its monumental aspect (ad astra per aspera!) functioned in concert with its sentimental one (we must love one another or die). The stakes feel high enough, in other words, that only the most gnarled sort of cellar troll wouldn’t feel ennobled by the movie’s refrain, Caine’s recurring invocation of Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” I n California, his waistcoat retired, Nolan peered across a glassed-in conference room in a nondescript postproduction facility, empty except for the lucid, yellowless midmorning Burbank sunlight, at a blank expanse of laminate table, punctuated only by two unopened, sweaty, almost botanical bottles of Perrier. With his cleft chin, widow’s peak, graying blond spill of wispy forelock and rinsed blue eyes, Christopher Nolan is not without a glint of the deranged engineer; he has the affect of a Victorian barrister with a sideline in flying contraptions. His teeth are tanned a chestnut gradient, not by cigarettes but by tea. Caine, who has worked with Nolan on six movies, told me: “He always has a flask of tea in his pocket. No matter how hot it is, he has a big overcoat with a pocket big enough for his tea, and he quietly sips it. At a certain point, I thought, There must be something better than tea in there. I asked him, ‘You’ve not got vodka in there, have you?’ He said no, just tea.” hood was apportioned between London it over 25½ days on a budget of $4.5 and Chicago. Jonah, who is six years million. younger, told me that his very earliest memories were The film went on to gross of his older brother making stop-motion space odysseys, $113 million worldwide and painstaking processes of tweaking the gestures of ac- showed Warners he could tion figures. They went to the handle the demands of a movies constantly, and Jonah recalls that they brooked no studio movie distinction between the arty and the mainstream; they’d After that, when he came across go to Scala Cinema Club in London the script of “Insomnia,” a remake of a to see “Akira” or a Werner Herzog film Norwegian psychological thriller, Warone month and then go to the Biograph ner Bros. had the option. Nolan was inin Chicago to see “The Commitments” terested but couldn’t get a meeting. His the next. (When Jonah was 13 or 14, agent, Dan Aloni, called Steven SoderNolan gave him two Frank Miller vol- bergh, an early fan of “Memento.” Soumes, “Batman: Year One” and “The derbergh told me that he “just walked Dark Knight Returns,” which the two across the lot and said to the head of revered.) Nolan went to an English production, ‘You’re insane if you don’t boarding school with a military inflec- meet with this guy.’ My sense even then tion and then on to University College was that he didn’t need our help except London, where he read English litera- to get in the door.” Everything happened ture. He chose U.C.L. because of its film very quickly. Nolan made the film on a facilities, which included a Steenbeck budget of $46 million, and Soderbergh editing suite. He and Emma Thomas, and George Clooney signed on as exhis wife, began dating in their first year. ecutive producers. Soderbergh visited Together they ran a film society, screen- the set in Alaska. “I got there and was ing 35-millimeter films to make money having a conversation with Al Pacino: so members could shoot 16-millimeter ‘How do you feel? How’s it going?’ Al shorts. said, ‘Well, I can tell you right now, at Nolan made his first film, “Following,” on $6,000 over the course of a year, shooting perhaps 15 minutes of footage each Saturday. It’s a very clever con-man/murder drama that owes more than a little to Hitchcock, with a sliced-up, rearranged chronology that prefigures “Memento.” Emma moved to Los Angeles, for her job with the production company Working Title, and Nolan, who was having trouble raising money in the clubby world of English filmmaking, soon followed. He and Jonah discussed the idea for “Memento” on their road trip from ChiFollowing - 1998 cago to Hollywood. They went on to film some point in the very near future I’m going to be very proud to say I was in a Christopher Nolan movie.’ ” The film went on to gross $113 million worldwide and showed Warners he could handle the demands of a studio movie. “Chris is legendary for being prepared, being on time, on schedule,” Soderbergh told me. “We both have this attitude of approaching it with a sense that you have a responsibility to the people who pay for these things to do what you say you’re going to do and do it efficiently.” (Brad Grey, the president of Paramount, praised Nolan for his “fiscal responsibility,” like a parent proud of a child for not blowing all of his allowance on comic books.) NOLAN Nolan’s collected, tranquil mien has about it something of an achievement, because he spent his childhood shuttling around. He was born in London in 1970, to an English father — who spent time shooting commercials in Los Angeles and returned home with stories about the Beverly Hills Hotel — and an American mother, who had worked as a flight attendant. His child- “ “ It was easy to understand Caine’s suspicion that something more surreal and mischievous had to be afoot. It felt peculiar, after a week steeped in Nolan’s filmic multiverse, to discover that our conference-room surroundings — the kind of functional, placid, slightly uncanny atrium that often appears in his work as a veneer of normalcy — maintained their steady state around us, rather than folding out of themselves into a labyrinthine Mandelbrot sandwich. The paneled glass enclosing us neither shattered with the gunfire of psychical mercenaries nor slid away to reveal a locked safe protecting a manila envelope whose contents itemized the dark heart of Nolan’s character. Nolan, however, does not find himself electrifying and does not take his own life as relevant to his work. He had taken me along on technical errands in New York and Burbank because he sees his most important work in the details of technique, in the decisions to shoot as much as he can on IMAX (“David Lean dragged 65-millimeter cameras into the desert” while shooting “Lawrence of Arabia,” he told me, “and I don’t know why we shouldn’t have similar aspirations”) and to record his score’s piano on a beautiful instrument in an airy room.