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Christopher Nolan is the finest postmodernist director of our time. He made his directorial debut with the Following, in 1998. His second feature, Memento, was a box office success and established him as a well recognized name among cinephiles.
In recent years, Christopher Nolan's popularity has grown steadily. Especially after The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception, and Oppenheimer. His œuvre consists of 12 films including Interstellar, Dunkirk and Tenet, and has a worldwide gross over $5 billion — making him one of the highest grossing film directors of all time.
Why Do People Love Christopher Nolan's Movies So Much?
Nolan's complex story structure, less use of CGIs, deep-rich color palette and documentary-style lighting brings new experiences to the audience. Which is why, Christopher Nolan is considered one of the greatest living directors by many.
[Wanna know more about his filmmaking style? Read my post on what's so good about Nolan movies.]
As a side note, do you know Christopher Nolan using a smartphone is as rare as Samuel L. Jackson not using the word "motherf**ker" in Pulp Fiction?
"It's about the level of distraction," Nolan once said, as reported by CNBC. "If I'm generating my material and writing my own scripts, being on a smartphone all day wouldn't be very useful for me," he further added.
The 15 Best Christopher Nolan Quotes
Kicking off this list of best Christopher Nolan quotes with his words on leadership:
1. "As a director, I'm sort of a human lens through which everyone's efforts are focused. A big part of my job is making decisions about how all the great talent that I'm working with blends into a single consciousness."
2. " A hero can be anyone, even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat on a young boy’s shoulders to let him know the world hadn’t ended."
3. " You’re never going to learn something as profoundly as when it’s purely out of curiosity."
4. " I don't actually tend to do a lot of research when I'm writing. I do know because I think a lot of what I find you want to do with research is just confirming things you want to do. If the research contradicts what you want to do, you tend to go ahead and do it anyway. "
5. " You need time. And that doesn’t mean necessarily even working full-time on it itself; it means time to throw some ideas together and then let them sit, go off and do something else, come back and see what still feels right and everything."
6. " The real truth of that is that much as you want to believe that it’s you being on top of everything, you’re actually relying massively on the people around you. "
7. " I sometimes think how strange it is that I’ve got to do exactly what I want, and that is difficult to cope with. You have to remind yourself every few weeks: I’m making this film and this is exactly what I want to do. And suddenly you’re happy again. "
8. " We all lie to ourselves to be happy. "
9. " The audience knows the truth, the world is simple. It’s miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you could make them wonder. And then you got to see something very special. "
10. " It’s most important to just throw yourself into it, just putting everything into the project that you’re working on. "
11. " My real interest is point of view. Deciding what’s the point of view we’re trying to express, who’s eyes are we seeing the story through? "
12. " There's a point where we just let the music take over everything. "
13. " I always find myself gravitating to the analogy of a maze. Think of film noir and if you picture the story as a maze, you don't want to be hanging above the maze watching the characters make the wrong choices because it's frustrating. You actually want to be in the maze with them, making the turns at their side, that keeps it more exciting ... I quite like to be in that maze. "
14. " Sometime, when you start thinking too much what an audience is going to think, when you’re too self-conscious about it, you make mistakes. "
15. " Yeah, it's odd when you look back at your own work. Some filmmakers don't look back at their work at all. I look at my work a lot, actually. I feel like I learned something while looking at stuff I've done in terms of what I'm going to do in the future, mistakes I've made and things at work or what have you. "
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed reading these 15 best Christopher Nolan quotes.
Which one is your favorite? Let me know in the comments.