The Big 9: Christopher Nolan’s Gang

They call it the garage gang.

All the planning for The Batman Trilogy and beyond started in Christopher Nolan’s garage. And what happened in the garage, stayed in the garage. Anyone who wanted to see the script — studio heads, producers, anyone — had to come in person. (The exception to this was Sir Michael Caine, who asked to see a script and had Nolan show up at his house, hand him the script, and sit there and wait while he read it to decide if he wanted to be in the series or not.)

The team works together so flawlessly that Nolan, much like other director-producers, returned to them when he wanted to make more movies. This is another reason it is easy to trace consistent styles across Nolan’s movies –his team stayed the same:

• Emma Thomas: Producer

 Christopher Nolan’s wife and producing partner:

“The garage was fantastic,” she said. “It was just brilliant having David Goyer in one room working on the script, while Nathan [Crowley] was in another room coming up with the look of the film. There was a synergy having them both in the same place, with Chris flitting between the two. It advanced our progress considerably. It felt very normal for us, as well, because that’s how we’d always worked…so this felt like a very organic, natural thing for us. The only difference was that instead of a low-budget, independent film, we were doing Batman.

• Chuck Roven: Producer

“I call him a producer-spoiler,” said producer Chuck Roven. “It’s very rare that you work with a director who has a vision and then does everything to execute that vision the way he’s told you he’s going to. Chris always did what he said he was going to do—or killed himself trying to do with he said he was going to do.”

• David S. Goyer: Screenplay and Story

When Nolan first contacted Goyer about working on Batman Begins, he was in the midst of his first feature-film directing assignment, Blade: Trinity and very busy. Nolan persisted, their visions coincided, and Goyer said yes. He worked on Batman Begins in the mornings and his own film in the evenings until it finished. A lasting relationship was formed, and Goyer helped Nolan storyboard the rest of the trilogy and then went on to work on Man of Steel. 

• Jonathan “Jonah”Nolan: Screenwriter

Christopher Nolan’s brother and co-screenwriter. The brothers worked together on Following, Memento, The Prestige, and all the Batman movies. Seven drafts into Batman Begins, Jonathan joined as an extra brain on task. Most of Nolan’s work would not have been possible without him; it is important to credit him where credit is due. Way to go, Jonah!

• Wally Pfister: Cinematographer

Pfister actually worked with Nolan on every one of his filmed minus Following. Their minds work together, and it is his eye that provided some of the stunning camera angles and shots that made Batman special (see: rooftop flying scene, car flip, hospital explosion).

• Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard: Composer

The trilogy was the first time Zimmer and Howard had worked together. Nolan gave them free-reign, working the music into the story as it was being written rather than waiting for a finished product to slap it onto. The result was happy composers with more freedom than is usually allowed them, and seamless connections between the music and story.

“I believe a composer has the duty to inspire his director—not just vice versa,” said Zimmer. “The more toys I could give him to play with at an early stage, the better it would be for him.”

• Lindy Hemming: Costume Designer 

Hemming worked on all three Batman films, faced with finding the balance between comic-book brightness and the realistic and edgy world that Nolan had created. She was responsible for redesigning the bat suit as well as the Joker’s crazy makeup so that it wasn’t too crazy. Hemming also credited her garage gang days for their help:

“I became an honorary member of the “garage gang” and I loved it,” Hemming said. “It was wonderful to have those early months before it actually kicked into high gear. Later, when Chris was preoccupied with other things, I could still keep working on ideas I’d gleaned educing that development time. Even if things changed later, I still had that basic ‘I remember what we talked about from the garage, which was underneath everything.’

• Richard King : Sound Designer 

Nolan prefers filming on-set dialogue rather than using ADR, so King had to work with him on the first day of shooting till the end. He was responsible for things like mixing out the natural sounds of outdoor shoots and making sure all the fake weapons sounded like real weapons.

“He has the best ears of anyone I’ve ever met,” said King of Nolan. “He will hear something in the mix that nobody else hears –and then when we isolate the sound, we find that he was right. He’s like that with everything, really.”

• Nathan Crowley: Production Designer 

Crowley was in charge of designing the new aesthetic for the trilogy: he came up with the Batmobile “tank” design, weapons design, Batpod, Gotham’s look and more. He had to balance the old, familiar Gotham feel with a newer look, something that reboots often fail at doing. I would argue that his contribution to the dark but sharp sets added much of Gotham’s magic to Nolan’s series. His work is incredible, and he’s also worked with Nolan on five films. (Remember that Nolan has only directed 10 films, and and this is a lot more impressive)

[All information for this post came from the fantastic book The Art And Making of The Dark Knight Trilogy by Jody Duncan Jesser and Janine Pourroy. I highly recommend it; it taught me most of what I know about Nolan. If you’re interested in learning more about his team, this is where you should start!]

Recognizing Nolan’s Film Style: Part 2:

Last time I mentioned the roots of Nolan’s films: his super-boss status as director, producer and screenwriter and his dark, “neo-noir” style. Let’s move on a bit and think about the structure and themes of his films. 

Directors who independently produce films frequently have to use budget as a checkmark throughout filming. The theory is it is very difficult to be innovative, experimental, or show offbeat themes when the money of powerful studio executives is at risk. With less money at stake, there is more creative freedom, hence the draw to independent films. 

Martin Scorsese settled on a “do one for them, one for me” policy, but Nolan has taken the riskier approach—he does what he wants with his experimentation no matter the size of the film, effectively upsetting this status quo. It means a lot that Nolan’s method hasn’t failed him yet. Studios have learned to trust his judgement; after The Dark Knight, he’s pretty much earned the right to do whatever he likes. That’s one huge reason why Nolan’s style is so traceable — it didn’t matter if he was doing an independent film like The Prestige or a massive blockbuster like Inception. He followed the same rules, even as basically as plot. 

Film scripts contain three main parts: script, narrative and character. If all three are simple, the movie falls flat; if all three are complex, the film may be too difficult for audiences to focus on. Nolan delivers a two-part complex, one-part simple structure, with character often representing the simple part. 

Nolan’s films star obsessive protagonists with troubled pasts, consumed with the need for justice or to avenge the death of a loved one. Memento’s Leonard Shelby hunts the man who raped and murdered his wife; Inception’s Cobb has lost his wife and tries to return to his children; Insomnia’s cop Dormer loses his partner; Batman’s Bruce Wayne lost his parents and then his lover Rachel to the mobsters of Gotham; The Prestige’s protagonists both suffer the loss of their wives in the game of tricks they play with their lives. These losses often lead to psychological handicaps that further plague their characters, such as Leonard’s short-term memory loss, Dormer’s insomnia, Wayne’s bat phobia, and Cobb’s inability to grasp reality.

Price and Dawson explain this rather succinctly:

“What emerges is a portrait of a man cast adrift in a world where nothing is certain and reality is often an abstract concept, forever in flux. The fact that all cling to selective memories with such resolve indicates that for this director the only thing in this world that is real is what we decide to accept into our conscience. Actuality is far less important than the way in which we absorb, interpolate and remember, and it is this ‘created reality’ that truly matters.”

It’s a concept frequently explored in films in general. The idea that you can change the world by simply believing it to be different. A powerful, dangerous, intoxicating notion. What do you think of this idea of “created reality”? Do you cling to memories more often than the truth of the world around you? Let’s hear it in the comments! 

 

10 Stunning Christopher Nolan Directing Facts

The extra mile sets Christopher Nolan’s films apart from those of his colleagues. And very often, it comes straight down to how a movie is filmed. Here are 10 reasons why his directing style is different:

• Nolan’s left handed. Cool? Cool. Moving on.
• He didn’t go to film school, either. Everything Christopher Nolan knows, he taught himself. Curiosity is the best teacher, after all.
• Christopher Nolan has never done a re-shoot. Think about that for a moment. Think about how David Yates reshot the epilogue of HP7.2, or the many weeks Peter Jackson spent reshooting the Hobbit to turn it into a trilogy. Think about how complicated some of the stunts and shots were in the Batman movies. Yeah. That was all done in one go.

• Shoots on film, not digital. In a world where everything is increasingly becoming digital, he has experienced some pressure to switch, but he’s adamant about his medium.  “It’s cheaper to work on film, it’s far better looking, it’s the technology that’s been known and understood for a hundred years, and it’s extremely reliable,” said Nolan. “We save a lot of money shooting on film and projecting film and not doing digital intermediates. In fact, I’ve never done a digital intermediate.”
• Doesn’t believe in 3D. Nolan says the whole point of photography is that it’s three dimensional. Until the industry can figure out how to do it right, he will stick with film and the occasional IMAX.
• Also doesn’t believe in CGI. Anything that can be actually filmed, miniature or real, is done that way. Nolan even tried to do the thousand bats swamp at the end of Batman Begins with real bats at first. When that didn’t work out, he stuck a dead bat on a stick and tossed it around so that his team could get an idea of what a bat looks like in flight for their CGI swarm.
• Only storyboards action scenes. Where some directors prefer to plan most things out, Nolan likes to leave room for improvisation.
• Follows one of the most basic rules of photography: don’t use zoom lenses! If you have a huge beautiful camera, move it closer to the subject!
• Uses only one camera unit for dramatic sequences. Most directors prefer two or even three units in different spots so that they can get different angles, etc. Nolan prefers to have minimal shots so he can choose the ones he wants himself, which brings me to my next point:
• He can memorize shots and edit entire film sequences in his head. Filming with only one unit, minimal takes and real stunts makes the editing process fairly simple, even on huge films like Batman. Well, it’s simple to Christopher Nolan, at least.

The Miracle of Memento

Christopher Nolan’s first feature length film, Following, was made with little more than Nolan’s own personal skill. He took part in a film club while at University College London, where he honed the guerilla techniques he would later use in all of his films. Having never gone to an official film school, Nolan had no choice but to become personally involved with every aspect of filmmaking.

“Being self-taught gave me a very organic approach to understanding all the different bits of the craft,” Nolan said in an interview with DGA. “I’m interested in every different bit of filmmaking because I had to do every bit of it myself—from sound recording and ADR to editing and music.”

So let’s examine Following and Memento with this knowledge. Following was filmed only on weekends for a solid year. Nolan used his friends as actors (in their own clothes as costumes), natural lighting, black and white film, and as many other budget-slimming techniques he could muster. When it showed at international film festivals to relative acclaim, Nolan used that opportunity to ask for donations for his next film.

Following had a budget of about $6,000 and grossed about $43,000.

Memento had a budget of about $9 million and grossed $25 million.

After Memento–Nolan’s second ever film–he was invited to join the Director’s Guild of America, an honor not usually bestowed upon up-and-coming filmmakers.

They felt like he earned it.

Introducing Me: The Backstory

I suppose it would be good for you to know who’s running this blog. This is me!

This is the most recent picture of myself I could find, from when I was in New Orleans in December.

I’m a freshman at the University of Florida. I’m currently studying journalism but am considering branching out. All I know is that I love to write, and love telling stories.

Movies factor into this category. Movies, like books, newspaper articles, and videos, are all stories. The people who produce them have their own stories. There are backstories to every story; there are secrets to be discovered and shared.

This blog will focus on the backstory of Christopher Nolan and his team. Their films are stories worth watching. The stories behind the films are, in my opinion, even more fascinating.

In the words of the Joker: here…we….go.