JOIN USTenet is about how time works in films: Christopher Nolan
Christopher Nolan, the British-American filmmaker who has directed such blockbusters as ‘The Dark Knight Trilogy’, ‘Interstellar’ and ‘Dunkirk’, is back with ‘Tenet’.
Starring John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki and Dimple Kapadia, it is being hailed as another of his ‘mind-bending’ masterpieces.
Excerpts:
Going back to ‘Memento’, many of your films deal with the constructs of time, and that’s certainly true of ‘Tenet’. What about time has held your interest for so long?
Well, as I like to say about time, I’ve always lived in it, so I’m fascinated by it. And in my work, I’ve always felt an interesting relationship between the process of watching a film and how films work, and the notion of time inside them and how they relate to time. So, for me, having narratives that in some way explore the relationship between the way we perceive time in everyday life and the way we perceive time in a movie theatre and watching a film… that’s always seemed an interesting place to play around.
I think for people, who’ve been following my work for a long time, right back to ‘Memento’, in some ways ‘Tenet’ will feel like a kind of apotheosis of some of the ideas I’ve been exploring. I mean, there is a sense in which the story of ‘Tenet’ makes literal things that I was doing structurally or metaphorically in earlier movies.
‘Tenet’ has a truly international cast encompassing American, British, French, Australian and Indian actors. Can you talk about your ensemble?
As far as the casting goes, John David was always going to have to be the centre of that. It’s very much an iconic presence at the centre of the film in the shape of the protagonist, and John is someone I’ve been interested in working with for some time, particularly after I’d seen him in Spike Lee’s ‘BlacKkKlansman’. But building out from there, he has to be the strong centre of a very international cast. We wanted the film to transcend national boundaries. It’s not about America per se, it’s about the survival of the entire human race. I wanted the stakes to be apparent and apparent in the breadth of nationalities. It really is the notion of using the diversity of the cast to express that the threat is a threat to the entire world.
So from Rob Pattinson playing an Englishman to Kenneth Branagh playing a Russian, to Elizabeth Debicki playing an Englishwoman to Dimple Kapadia playing an Indian woman, we were really trying to bring in a lot of different national identities into play. And in that way, just in travelling the world to shoot the film and as the story jumps around the globe, you’re constantly reminding the audience of the magnitude of the stakes — that this is a threat that affects the entire world.
Tell us about filming in India.
Every time I go to India, I’m struck by how unbelievably visual the place is. I had shot a couple of days in Jodhpur for ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ and wanted to go back and shoot a more substantial sequence, I had the opportunity to do that on ‘Tenet’. We shot in Mumbai, which is just one of the most extraordinary-looking cities in the world in terms of its architecture, the amazing people and the abundance of life on the streets there.
It’s a remarkable place with this extraordinary history, so, to be able to take the audience there, it seemed a very exciting setting. They have such a wonderful love of films and a highly developed film industry, it was really fun to collaborate with the local crews and learn about how they make films and cooperate with them in pulling off some remarkable things, including some of the first-ever aerial shots of Mumbai in a film. We were able to capture some really interesting things, shooting for a relatively short space of time in challenging conditions because it was monsoon, so when it rained it really rained.