Christopher Nolan is a British-American film director, screenwriter and producer. Let’s see some amazing facts and trivia about him!
1.He was born on July 30, 1970.
2. His middle name is Edward.
3. He is one of the highest-grossing directors in history, and among the most successful and acclaimed filmmakers of the 21st century.
4. Christopher Nolan was born in London.
5. His English father, Brendan James Nolan, was an advertising executive, and his American mother, Christina, worked as a flight attendant and an English teacher.
6. His childhood was split between London and Chicago, and he has both British and American citizenship
7. He has an older brother, Matthew, and a younger brother, Jonathan
8. He began making films at age seven, borrowing his father’s Super 8 camera and shooting short films with his action figures.
9. Growing up, Nolan was a great admirer of Star Wars (1977), and around the age of eight he made a stop motion animation homage called Space Wars.
10. His uncle who worked at NASA, building guidance systems for the Apollo rockets, sent him some launch footage. “I re-filmed them off the screen and cut them in, thinking no-one would notice,” Nolan later remarked.
11. From the age of 11, he aspired to be a professional filmmaker.
12. When Nolan’s family relocated to Chicago during his formative years, he started making films with Adrien and Roko Belic.
13. He has continued his collaboration with the brothers, receiving a credit for his editorial assistance on their Oscar-nominated documentary Genghis Blues (1999).
14. Christopher Nolan also worked alongside Roko (and future Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffrey Gettleman) on documenting a safari across four African countries, organized by the late photojournalist Dan Eldon in the early 1990s.
15. Christopher Nolan was educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College, an independent school in Hertford Heath, Hertfordshire, and later read English literature at University College London (UCL).
16. He chose UCL specifically for its filmmaking facilities, which comprised a Steenbeck editing suite and 16 mm film cameras.
17. Christopher Nolan was president of the Union’s Film Society, and with Emma Thomas (his girlfriend and future producer) he screened 35 mm feature films during the school year and used the money earned to produce 16 mm films over the summers.
18. During his college years, Nolan made two short films. The first was the surreal 8 mm Tarantella (1989), which was shown on Image Union (an independent film and video showcase on the Public Broadcasting Service).
19. The second was Larceny (1995), filmed over a weekend in black and white with a limited cast, crew, and equipment. Funded by Nolan and shot with the society’s equipment, it appeared at the Cambridge Film Festival in 1996 and is considered one of UCL’s best shorts.
20. In 1998 Nolan directed his first feature, which he personally funded and filmed with friends.
21. Following depicts an unemployed young writer (Jeremy Theobald) who trails strangers through London, hoping they will provide material for his first novel, but is drawn into a criminal underworld when he fails to keep his distance.
22. The film was inspired by Nolan’s experience of living in London and having his flat burgled.
23. As a result of Following’s success, Nolan was afforded the opportunity to make his breakthrough hit Memento (2000).
24. The film was a box-office succes and received a number of accolades, including Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations for its screenplay, Independent Spirit Awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay, and a Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award nomination.
25. Memento was considered by numerous critics to be one of the best films of the 2000s.
26. In early 2003, Nolan approached Warner Bros. with the idea to make a new Batman film. Fascinated by the character and story, he wanted to make a film grounded in a “relatable” world more reminiscent of a classical drama than a comic-book fantasy. Batman Begins, the biggest project Nolan had undertaken to that point, premiered in June 2005 to both critical acclaim and commercial success.
27. Before returning to the Batman franchise, Nolan directed, co-wrote and produced The Prestige (2006), an adaptation of the Christopher Priest novel about two rival 19th-century magicians.
28. Christopher Nolan and Thomas served as executive producers on Transcendence (2014), the directorial debut of Nolan’s longtime cinematographer Wally Pfister.
29. In January 2013 it was announced that Nolan would direct, write and produce a science-fiction film entitled Interstellar.
30. The first drafts of the script were written by Jonathan Nolan, and it was originally to be directed by Steven Spielberg.
31. Christopher Nolan has described his filmmaking process as a combination of intuition and geometry.
32. Christopher Nolan has cited Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Nicolas Roeg, Sidney Lumet, David Lean, Ridley Scott, Terry Gilliam, and John Frankenheimer as influences.
33. Nolan’s habit for employing non-linear storylines was particularly influenced by the Graham Swift novel Waterland, which he felt “did incredible things with parallel timelines, and told a story in different dimensions that was extremely coherent”.
34. He was also influenced by the visual language of the film Pink Floyd – The Wall (1982) and the structure of Pulp Fiction (1994), stating that he was “fascinated with what Tarantino had done”.
35. Dante’s Inferno, the Labyrinth and the Minotaur served as influences for Inception.
36. For Interstellar he mentioned a number of literary influences, including Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott, The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.
37. Other influences Nolan has cited include figurative painter Francis Bacon, architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, graphic artist M. C. Escher and authors Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, Jim Thompson, Jorge Luis Borges, and Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities was a major influence on The Dark Knight Rises.
38. Nolan is married to Emma Thomas, whom he met at University College London when he was 19.
39. She has worked as a producer on all of his films, and together they founded the production company Syncopy Inc
40. The couple have four children and reside in Los Angeles.
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