100 Quotes by Christopher Nolan

I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)

I always thought the joy of reading a book is not knowing what happens next. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Every film should have its own world, a logic and feel to it that expands beyond the exact image that the audience is seeing.

Every great story deserves a great ending

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'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.

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

What drew me to Batman in the first place was Bruce Wayne's story, and that he's a real character whose story begins in childhood. He's not a fully formed character like James Bond, so what we're doing is following the journey of this guy from a child who goes through this horrible experience of becoming this extraordinary character. That, for me, became a three-part story. And obviously the third part becomes the ending of the guy's story.

A hero can be anyone. Even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a young boy's shoulders to let him know that the world hadn't ended.

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

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.

You always have to be very aware that the audience is extremely ruthless in its demand for newness, novelty and freshness.

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.

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.

I would never say someone's else's film isn't 'a real film.' The quote is inaccurate.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

To me, the most interesting approach to film noir is subjective. The genre is really all about not knowing what's going on around you, and that fear of the unknown. The only way to do that effectively is to really get into the maze, rather than look at the maze from above, so that's where I sort of come at it.

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.

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.

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

Movie logistics never really allow you to do anything but shoot the way the budget dictates.

People want to see something that shows them you can do what you say. That's the trick.

I believe movies are one of the great American art forms and the shared experience of watching a story unfold on screen is an important and joyful pastime. The movie theatre is my home, and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me.

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

The most stressful and difficult part of steering a large movie is that you are taking on the responsibility of communicating with a very wide audience. You can't ever hide behind the notion of, 'Okay, they just don't get it,' or, 'Certain people just don't get it.' You have to be mindful of the size of your audience, and you have to communicate in a way that lets them in.

The thing you fail to grasp is that people are not basically good. We are basically selfish. We shove and clamour and cry for adoration, and beat down everyone else to get it. Life is a competition of prattling peacocks enraptured in inane mating rituals. But for all our effacing and self-importance, we are all slaves to what we fear most. You have so very much to learn. Here. Let me teach you.

To me, any kind of filmmaking that's reactive is not going to be as good as something more inventive and original.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Heist movies tend to be a bit superficial, glamorous, and fun. They don't tend to be emotionally engaging.

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.

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

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.

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.

I think the films Insomnia and Memento share all sorts of thematic concerns, such as the relationship between motivation and action, and the difficulty of reconciling your view of the story with the supposed objective view of that story.

Period films to me are very often alienating to the audience. There's very often a formality. A staunchy quality to them that comes from the misenscene. It also comes from the performances of the actors, because they're acting Victorian which really means that they're just acting the way they've seen previous actors act Victorian.

George Lazenby is no one's favorite James Bond, but for me the anonymity at the center of this lavish production only serves to reveal the Bond machine firing on all cylinders: superb editing and photography, incredible score, great setpieces. The most romantic in the series, and it actually has, of all things, a tragic ending.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

As far as the dreams go, really I would only point to there are times in my life where I experienced lucid dreaming, which is a big feature of Inception - the idea of realizing you're in a dream and therefore trying to change or manipulate it in some way. That's a very striking experience for people who have it.

When you start really thinking about the potential of the human mind and its ability to create an entire world while you're sleeping, I come away feeling like our minds are not remotely understood by science.

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

What I try to do is write from the inside out. I really try to jump into the world of the film and the characters, try to imagine myself in that world rather than imagining it as a film I'm watching onscreen. Sometimes, that means I'm discovering things the way the audience will, with character and story.

It's difficult to keep anything fresh for an audience these days. With technology being what it is people seem to know everything there is to know about a film before you've even made it.

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.

"Every Great Story deserves a Great Ending and

'The Dark Knight Rises' is our Attempt to give that GREAT story, a GREAT ENDING."

Yes, to me that's one of the most compelling fears in film noir and the psychological thriller genre - that fear of conspiracy. It's definitely something that I have a fear of - not being in control of your own life. I think that's something people can relate to, and those genres are most successful when they derive the material from genuine fears that people have.

What I love about IMAX is with its extraordinary resolution and color reproduction it's a very rich image with incredible detail. It lends itself wonderfully to huge shots with much in the frame. Thousands of extras and all the rest.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Say you have a headline like "Mountain Bike Stolen," and then you read the story, read another story about it the next day, and then the next week, and then the next year. News is a process of expansion, the filling in of detail, and making narrative connections - not based on chronology, but based on features of the story. There are narrative connections made between props, between characters, between situations, and so forth.

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.

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.

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

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

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 structural notions to me always have to be worked out very carefully in the script stage. Whatever a particular structure is. Whether it's chronological or non-chronological. To me that's always about what point of view are we trying to address in the film?

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.

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.

The quality of racing continues to excel with starters increasing to 1496,.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.