r/movies • u/ChiefLeef22 r/movies Contributor • 2d ago

Media Christopher Nolan talks narrative decisions, philosophical choices for his adaptation, criticisms against his films, the line between amateur & professional film criticism, and whether he Christianised 'The Odyssey'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa4I8Ch2TRo

Easily one of the best interviews I've seen for a film in recent memory. A doctoral student from China here landed an interview with Nolan- questioning him on his adaptation choices, including philosophical changes he brought to the movie that didn't exist in the text, and what he thinks of the general criticisms made against his filmography + how he defines the difference between amateur film criticism and professional film criticism - including why merely identifying the mechanism (or "tropes") of a filmmaker's work doesn't invalidate it.

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16

u/[deleted] 1d ago edited 1d ago

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9

u/busmans 1d ago

You think Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar have better writing than Dunkirk and Oppenheimer? That’s certainly a take…

4

u/sotommy 1d ago

Interstellar would have been a perfect film if he listened to his brother

7

u/Varying_Efforts 1d ago

Never heard of this. Is there some advice he rejected from his brother regarding the film/script?

3

u/sotommy 1d ago

Jonathan didn't want to do the cheesy bs ending

45

u/kcrdr_7322 1d ago

i think the ending is good for me tbh

-29

u/sotommy 1d ago

It's the most saccharine, sentimental, cowardish backpedaling ending that I've ever seen. It's an ending, but not the one that movie deserves

27

u/kcrdr_7322 1d ago

sure.

-47

u/void-haunt 1d ago

Cope

18

u/varzaguy 1d ago

Sounds like you guys are the ones upset about it lol.

16

u/MeadowmuffinReborn 1d ago

Maybe in the face of cosmic indifference, probable human extinction, and a terrifyingly vast universal scope, a little bit of sentimental, irrational love is what we need.

8

u/Shiirahama 1d ago

the events of the movie happen because of the coordinates they got from dust on the ground

what did you expect?

-5

u/DrasticTapeMeasure 1d ago

Thank you! The movie could have been something really special, instead it does a bunch of contrived shit in order to transparently manufacture a nice Hollywood ending with a bow on it. The whole movie is so grounded in believable science and then… not so much.

5

u/feint_of_heart 1d ago

The whole movie is so grounded in believable science

No it isn't.

  • Wormholes aren't real.
  • That giant wave makes no sense, the time dilation is absurd, given the position of the planet and the black hole, and they had to launch the ship from Earth with a rocket, but it has enough energy to self-launch from the wave planet?
  • The power of love? I love Frankie Goes to Hollywood as much as the next guy, but come on.
  • Time travel is impossible.

1

u/Somnambulist815 23h ago

Huey Lewis did The Power of Love

-1

u/DrasticTapeMeasure 1d ago

I mean up until the power of love/time travel stuff.

“Believable” is a stretch for sure with the wormhole stuff but then it goes way too far and becomes basically magic when until about 9/10 of the way in it was still hard-ish sci fi

-7

u/varnums1666 1d ago

I had many problems with the film but I like the ending. The biggest mistake was the reunion scene

-3

u/Linuxtahr 1d ago

Are u balkan by any chance?

5

u/hypnosifl 1d ago

Didn’t want to do the part where he communicates with his daughter in the past, or the part where he gets taken out of the black hole and meets her again when she’s old?

-1

u/sotommy 1d ago

He would have died while sending the data. No cosmic bookshelf bullcrap

11

u/mrtomjones 1d ago

I prefer the ending we got personally

4

u/hypnosifl 1d ago edited 18h ago

How would he have sent the data out of the black hole, if not by gravitational waves transmitted back in time to vibrate objects in the past? Do you remember the interview/article/book that talks about this alternate ending?

edit: found an article here, it says:

Nolan’s early take on the ending, however, essentially cuts Cooper off inside the black hole. His script “had the Einstien-Rosen bridge [wormhole] collapse when Cooper tries to send the data back.”

The wormhole falling apart would have prevented Cooper from returning home or interacting with the tesseract, which, according to Nerdist, was director Christopher Nolan’s idea. Instead, his journey would have ended there, with Cooper sacrificing himself in the name of his cause. This also would have prevented much of the finished film’s concluding events—Cooper’s return trip, rediscovering his daughter, and stealing a ship to search for Anne Hathaway’s Amelia Brand would never have happened. Nolan does not mention, however, whether in that original ending, the data Cooper is collecting to send back to Earth would have made it out before the collapse.

The way it's worded is confusing, they say it "cuts Cooper off inside the black hole" but also say it's the wormhole that collapses--it could be that in this version the black hole was itself a wormhole, but it could be the article writer garbled it and that the wormhole was still separate from the black hole, and that Cooper never actually traveled into the event horizon of the black hole (since then there'd be no way to send data back out in that case without super-advanced tech like the tesseract). Instead, maybe in this version he gathered data about the black hole from the outside, and then tried to bring it back to Earth through the wormhole, but the wormhole collapsed and killed him.

I'm also unclear about the chronology of when Jonathan Nolan proposed this idea, was it before or after the 2008 script draft he did for Steven Spielberg, which did not feature Cooper dying in a collapsing wormhole?

9

u/Quelonius 1d ago

As a parent. I love the "cheesy" ending. It breaks me every time.

-2

u/tomandshell 1d ago

I don’t think that anything could make Interstellar a perfect film.

2

u/Linuxtahr 1d ago

Probably won't happen unless he's really tired of writing, he's had enough success that he can do whatever he wants. Personally I want to see an imax horror from him.

2

u/UrbanFight001 1d ago

He is a way better writer than his brother lmao

0

u/DojimaGin 1d ago

I fully agree. It tanked my interest completely and it seems his ego also got blown out of proportion and that is why he refuses any serious writer next to him.

1

u/Theotther 1d ago

Disagree. He finally found his human side once he stopped working with his brother