Top 91 Christopher Nolan Quotes
#1. I never considered myself a lucky person. I'm the most extraordinary pessimist. I truly am.
Christopher Nolan
#2. I always thought the joy of reading a book is not knowing what happens next. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)
Christopher Nolan
#3. 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
Christopher Nolan
#4. You're never going to learn something as profoundly as when it's purely out of curiosity
Christopher Nolan
#5. The quality of racing continues to excel with starters increasing to 1496,.
Christopher Nolan
#6. I've never read Joseph Campbell, and I don't know all that much about story archetypes.
Christopher Nolan
#7. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#8. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#10. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#11. I just love photographing things and putting them together to tell a story.
Christopher Nolan
#12. Heist movies tend to be a bit superficial, glamorous, and fun. They don't tend to be emotionally engaging.
Christopher Nolan
#13. I remember the initial genesis quite clearly. My interest in dreams comes from this notion of realizing that when you dream you create the world that you are perceiving, and I thought that feedback loop was pretty amazing.
Christopher Nolan
#14. Revenge is a particularly interesting concept, especially the notion of whether or not it exists outside of just an abstract idea.
Christopher Nolan
#15. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)
Christopher Nolan
#16. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#17. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#18. You never quite know what you're going to come back to and figure out how to make it work. You never quite know where that desire to finish something, or return to something in a fresh way, is going to come from. Every time I finished a film and went back and looked at it, I had changed as a person.
Christopher Nolan
#19. Every Great Story deserves a Great Ending and
'The Dark Knight Rises' is our Attempt to give that GREAT story, a GREAT ENDING.
Christopher Nolan
#20. The only job that was ever of interest to me other than filmmaking is architecture.
Christopher Nolan
#21. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#22. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#23. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#24. There are points where you worry that you might be putting too much in and alienating the audience. But, funnily enough, some of those fears aren't correct.
Christopher Nolan
#25. I will miss the Batman. I like to think that he'll miss me, but he's never been particularly sentimental.
Christopher Nolan
#26. It's certainly difficult to balance marketing a film and putting it out there to everybody with wanting to keep it fresh for the audience.
Christopher Nolan
#27. The atmosphere and the environment that you get on a Chris Nolan film that he and Emma [Tomson] create is one where you feel very safe and very confident and able to experiment with characters. It's a great place to be as an actor.
Christopher Nolan
#28. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#29. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#30. Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)
Christopher Nolan
#31. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#33. I think for me when you look at the idea of being able to create a limitless world and use it almost as a playground for action and adventure and so forth, I naturally gravitate towards cinematic worlds, whether it's the Bond films and things like that.
Christopher Nolan
#34. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#35. I like films where the music and the sound design, at times, are almost indistinguishable.
Christopher Nolan
#36. How could you understand? Do you know what it is to be a lover? To be half of a whole?
Christopher Nolan
#37. People want to see something that shows them you can do what you say. That's the trick.
Christopher Nolan
#38. Movie logistics never really allow you to do anything but shoot the way the budget dictates.
Christopher Nolan
#39. I've done really well so far in my career by trusting the audience to be as dissatisfied with convention as I am, as a film-goer. You want to go see a film that surprises you in some way.
Christopher Nolan
#40. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#41. But I know the rage that drives you. That impossible anger strangling the grief, until the memory of your loved ones is just poison in your veins. And one day you catch yourself wishing the person you loved had never existed, so you'd be spared your pain.
Christopher Nolan
#42. I think there's a vague sense out there that movies are becoming more and more unreal. I know I've felt it.
Christopher Nolan
#43. We shouldn't be chasing other movies, but stay true to the tone of Man of Steel.
Christopher Nolan
#44. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#45. If I could steal someone's dream myself, I'd have to go for one of Orson Welles.
Christopher Nolan
#46. It's not that often that you get to have a large commercial success and then have something that you want to do that you can excite people about.
Christopher Nolan
#47. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#48. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#49. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#50. Every film should have its own world, a logic and feel to it that expands beyond the exact image that the audience is seeing.
Christopher Nolan
#51. Restfully reassured by his new friends, Joseph now nominated God in a new light, 'Man is God hesitant and God is Man hesitantly trying to help.
Christopher Nolan
#52. I think there are advantages to different scales of filmmaking. You wouldn't want to do just one thing.
Christopher Nolan
#54. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#55. A camera is a camera, a shot is a shot, how you tell the story is the main thing.
Christopher Nolan
#56. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#58. The best actors instinctively feel out what the other actors need, and they just accommodate it.
Christopher Nolan
#59. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#60. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#61. I like films that continue to spin your head in all sorts of different directions after you've seen them.
Christopher Nolan
#62. If you're going to perform inception, you need imagination. You need the simplest version of the idea-the one that will grow naturally in the subject's mind. Subtle art.
Christopher Nolan
#63. Batman and Superman are very different characters but they're both iconic and elemental. Finding the right story for them both is the key.
Christopher Nolan
#64. We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt. - Cooper, Interstellar
Christopher Nolan
#65. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#66. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#68. Film is the best way to capture an image and project that image. It just is, hands down.
Christopher Nolan
#69. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#70. Bruce Wayne/Batman: 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 that the world hadn't ended.
Christopher Nolan
#71. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#72. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#73. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#74. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#75. When I look at a digitally acquired and projected image, it looks inferior against an original negative anamorphic print or an IMAX one.
Christopher Nolan
#76. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#77. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#78. There's very few directors I think in this industry that would pitch to a studio that they wanted to do a multi-layered almost at times existential high action, high drama surreal film that's sort of locked in his mind. And then have an opportunity to do that.
Christopher Nolan
#79. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#80. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#81. I want to be surprised and entertained by a movie, so that's what we're trying to do for the audience. Obviously, we also have to sell the film.
Christopher Nolan
#82. It's always a fun collaboration with my brother. I'm very fortunate to be able to work with him. There's an honesty to collaboration. There's a lack of a gender or ego in our conversations. And so you can really throw anything around.
Christopher Nolan
#83. I've always been a movie guy, movies have been my thing. I love movies, all kinds of movies.
Christopher Nolan
#84. To be honest, I don't enjoy watching movies much when I'm working. They tend to fall apart on me a bit.
Christopher Nolan
#85. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#86. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#87. I try to be as efficient as possible because in my process, I think that actually helps the work. I like having the pressure of time and money and really trying to stick to the parameters we've been given.
Christopher Nolan
#88. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#89. 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.
Christopher Nolan
#90. I think for me, what I'm doing on set is I'm watching things happen as an audience member and trying to just look at, what's the image we're photographing, how will that advance the story and what will the next image be.
Christopher Nolan
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