Christopher Nolan Quotations

When you play a videogame, you could be a completely different person than you are in the real world, certain aspects of the way your brain works can be leveraged for something you could never do in the real world.

I don't particularly enjoy watching films in 3D because I think that a well-shot and well-projected film has a very three-dimensional quality to it, so I'm somewhat sceptical of the technology.

The best actors instinctively feel out what the other actors need, and they just accommodate it.

I've always been a movie guy, movies have been my thing. I love movies, all kinds of movies.

If I could steal someone's dream myself, I'd have to go for one of Orson Welles.

I have been interested in dreams, really since I was a kid. I have always been fascinated by the idea that your mind, when you are asleep, can create a world in a dream and you are perceiving it as though it really existed.

I think there are advantages to different scales of filmmaking. You wouldn't want to do just one thing.

We all wake up in the morning wanting to live our lives the way we know we should. But we usually don't, in small ways. That's what makes a character like Batman so fascinating. He plays out our conflicts on a much larger scale.

I've been interested in dreams since I as a kid and I've wanted to do a film about them for a long time.

Superheroes fill a gap in the pop culture psyche, similar to the role of Greek mythology. There isn't really anything else that does the job in modern terms. For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously.

For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously. He's not from another planet, or filled with radioactive gunk. I mean, Superman is essentially a god, but Batman is more like Hercules: he's a human being, very flawed, and bridges the divide.

One of the things you do as a writer and as a filmmaker is grasp for resonant symbols and imagery without necessarily fully understanding it yourself.

For the last 10 years, I've felt increasing pressure to stop shooting film and start shooting video, but I've never understood why. 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.

I made 'Batman' the way I made every other film, and I've done it to my own satisfaction - because the film, truly, is exactly the way I wanted it to be.

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.

I never considered myself a lucky person. I'm the most extraordinary pessimist. I truly am.

Revenge is a particularly interesting concept, especially the notion of whether or not it exists outside of just an abstract idea.

I have always been a huge fan of Ridley Scott and certainly when I was a kid. 'Alien', 'Blade Runner' just blew me away because they created these extraordinary worlds that were just completely immersive. I was also an enormous Stanley Kubrick fan for similar reasons.

Batman and Superman are very different characters but they're both iconic and elemental. Finding the right story for them both is the key.

The problem with big films is they snowball very rapidly and you can never pull back. It's a pipeline that needs to be fed.

The term 'genre' eventually becomes pejorative because you're referring to something that's so codified and ritualised that it ceases to have the power and meaning it had when it first started.

The thing with computer-generated imagery is that it's an incredibly powerful tool for making better visual effects. But I believe in an absolute difference between animation and photography.

By the time I was 10 or 11, I knew I wanted to make films.

The only job that was ever of interest to me other than filmmaking is architecture.

But 'Memento' was so successful, such a huge cult hit, almost on the scale of a large film. If that had happened, with all the acclaim, before the next job, I'd have found it very difficult to figure out what to do next.

When I look at a digitally acquired and projected image, it looks inferior against an original negative anamorphic print or an IMAX one.

In Hollywood there's a great openness, almost a voracious appetite for new people. In England there's a great suspicion of the new. In cultural terms, that can be a good thing, but when you're trying to break into the film industry, it's definitely a bad thing.

But, in each case, as a filmmaker who's been given sizable budgets with which to work, I feel a responsibility to the audience to be shooting with the absolute highest quality technology that I can and make the film in a way that I want.

Well, you always discover a lot in the editing room. Particularly the action, because you have to over-shoot a lot and shoot an enormous amount of material because many of the sequences have to be discovered in the editing and manipulation of it.

But I have been interested in dreams, really since I was a kid. I have always been fascinated by the idea that your mind, when you are asleep, can create a world in a dream and you are perceiving it as though it really existed.

You know when Hollywood does a great big blockbuster that really wraps you up in a world, and lets you believe in extraordinary things that move you in some way, in an almost operatic sensibility? That to me is the most fun I have at the movies.

As soon as television became the only secondary way in which films were watched, films had to adhere to a pretty linear system, whereby you can drift off for ten minutes and go and answer the phone and not really lose your place.

To be honest, I don't enjoy watching movies much when I'm working. They tend to fall apart on me a bit.

I've never read Joseph Campbell, and I don't know all that much about story archetypes.

I just love photographing things and putting them together to tell a story.

I think there's a vague sense out there that movies are becoming more and more unreal. I know I've felt it.

No, I've only ever done one film at a time.

I think there has been this increasing misperception that kids will not respond to something because it's also for adults. I think that often that tends to get underestimated.

I try not to have actors in mind when I write because the tendency then is to be influenced by either their last performance or your favourite of their performances.

But in the back of my mind I've always looked to the biggest-scale Hollywood movies. Because to me the most satisfying experience is of watching a movie, if it's done really well. And so that aspiration is always it for me, if I have the opportunity to do it.

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.

My approach with actors is to try and give them whatever it is they need from me. Direction to me is about listening and responding and realizing how much they need to know from me and how much they have figured out for themselves, really.

I'm taking a bit of a wait-and-see attitude towards 3D.

I'm very happy where 3-D is going, which is that it's becoming a choice - and thankfully, most people are still choosing 2-D.

I wouldn't consider doing a Batman sequel unless I felt like it could be a great film, a film even better than the one we already made. But I certainly couldn't do another one on such a large scale right after having finished this one. I'm very glad to be doing something completely different.

I didn't do a commentary on the DVD, which people were maybe surprised by. To be honest, my feeling is that commentaries are very tricky because I feel like the audience completes the film, and until a film gets out there you almost don't know exactly what it is that you've done. You have to do commentaries these days before the movie is even in theaters, so I wanted to hold off and instead just have them use the material that we generated during production to explain our intentions.

I have always been a big fan of the character and am more of a moviegoer than a comic book guy. There is always something about the character of Batman that is very elemental. There is a great, powerful myth to the character and romantic element...that draws from a lot of literary sources.

I think audiences get too comfortable and familiar in today's movies. They believe everything they're hearing and seeing. I like to shake that up.

Somehow he just really fit the bill and had that fire in his eyes that made you believe this guy could make himself fit into a superhero role,

I studied English Literature. I wasn't a very good student, but one thing I did get from it, while I was making films at the same time with the college film society, was that I started thinking about the narrative freedoms that authors had enjoyed for centuries and it seemed to me that filmmakers should enjoy those freedoms as well.

The film that really struck me was Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. That was a film I watched many, many times and found endlessly fascinating in it's density. I think the density of that film is primarily visual density, atmospheric, sound density, moreso than narrative density.

When you're dealing with the world of dreams, the psyche, and potential of a human mind, there has to be emotional stakes. You have to deal with issues of memory and desire.

Why do we Fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves back up.

It's very important that a film that intends to play tricks on the audience... has to play fair with the audience. For me, any time you're going to have a reveal in the film, it's essential that it have been shown to the audience as much as possible. What that means is that some people are going to figure it out very early on. Other people not til the end. Everybody watches the film differently.

I realized that if you're trying to reach an audience, being as subjective as possible and really trying to write from something genuine is the way to go. Really it's mostly from my own process, my own experience.

I will miss the Batman. I like to think that he'll miss me, but he's never been particularly sentimental.

I like films that don't have that unonimity of a response; that don't have consensus in the audience. What it is essentially for me is that if you go back and watch the film a second time, do you feel that you've been played fair with? Are all the clues in place? Indeed, sometimes these things are even overstated. Specifically, for that reason.

Particularly, the actors, to have analyzed the script in great detail from the point of view of their specific character. So that they have a handle on exactly where the character is in the chronology of things. In that sense the actors become your best check on the logic of the piece, and the way in which it all fits together. They become essential collaborators. The main thing is you have to work with very smart actors.

Film is the best way to capture an image and project that image. It just is, hands down.

Writing, for me, is a combination of objective and subjective approach. You take an objective approach at times to get you through things, and you take a subjective approach at other times, and that allows you to find an emotional experience for the audience.

I never meet anybody who actually likes the format, and it’s always a source of great concern to me when you’re charging a higher price for something that nobody seems to really say they have any great love for.

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.

For me, as a film goer, I like nothing more than to sit in the cinema, have the lights go down and not know what I'm about to see or unfold on-screen. Every time we go to make a film, we do everything we can to try to systematise things so we're able to make the film in private, so that when it's finished it's up to the audience to make of it what they will.

My most enjoyable movie going experiences have always been going to a movie theater, sitting there and the lights go down and a film comes on the screen that you don't know everything about, and you don't know every plot turn and every character movement that's going to happen.

I've been fascinated by dreams my whole life, since I was a kid, and I think the relationship between movies and dreams is something that's always interested me.

I like films where the music and the sound design, at times, are almost indistinguishable.

We shouldn't be chasing other movies, but stay true to the tone of Man of Steel.

Films are subjective - what you like, what you don't like. But the thing for me that is absolutely unifying is the idea that every time I go to the cinema and pay my money and sit down and watch a film go up on-screen, I want to feel that the people who made that film think it's the best movie in the world, that they poured everything into it and they really love it. Whether or not I agree with what they've done, I want that effort there - I want that sincerity. And when you don't feel it, that's the only time I feel like I'm wasting my time at the movies.

You musn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.

What I react against in other people's work, as a filmgoer, is when I see something in a movie that I feel is supposed to make me feel emotional, but I don't believe the filmmaker shares that emotion. They just think the audience will. And I think you can feel that separation. So any time I find myself writing something that I don't really respond to, but I'm telling myself, 'Oh yes, but the audience is going to like this,' then I know I'm on the wrong track and I just throw it out.

A camera is a camera, a shot is a shot, how you tell the story is the main thing.

I've always believed that if you want to really try and make a great film, not a good film, but a great film, you have to take a lot of risks.

I like films that continue to spin your head in all sorts of different directions after you've seen them.

You're never going to learn something as profoundly as when it's purely out of curiosity

I'm not really able to discuss it at the moment, but it's something I'm definitely interested in,