Everyone has their own takes on the works of filmmaker Christopher Nolan, and there’s no question the man is a major cinephile and knows a ton about the field with plenty of love for the art form.
That love is on full display in an extended new 19-minute video piece he’s done with French news outlet Konbini. In the clip, Nolan and his “Oppenheimer” star Cillian Murphy visit a DVD/Blu-ray store.
From there, it’s mostly Nolan talking about classic films he adores and which had major influences on his work, including plenty of mentions of films that were shown to cast and crew prior to working on a film.
The list is full of stone-cold bangers, most of which you probably have heard of as Nolan’s taste rarely delves into the obscure, the eccentric or the pretentious. Rather it’s a healthy mix of relatively mainstream cinema from various countries and across various decades.
There’s talk about how Milos Forman’s “Amadeus,” Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” and Sidney Lumet’s “The Hill” had big influences on “Oppenheimer”.
Also scoring shoutouts were Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “The Wages of Fear” and William Friedkin’s remake “Sorcerer”; Michael Mann’s “Heat”; David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia”; Hugh Hudson’s “Chariots of Fire”; Sidney Lumet’s “The Offence”; Terrence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line”; Mathieu Kassovitz’s “La Haine”; Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood”; Jerry Schatzberg’s “Scarecrow,” Frtiz Lang’s “Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent,” John Huston’s “The Man Who Would Be King,” Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane,” Nagisa Oshima’s “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” and Jim Sheridan’s “In the Name of the Father”.
There’s also gushing over Ken Loach, love for Tom Hardy and Christian Bale, and shoutouts to the “Chernobyl” and “Westworld” series. It also offers some insights into “Oppenheimer,” such as finally confirming the film’s color palette shift represents the shift in perspective between Murphy and Robert Downey Jr.’s characters.
Check out the full clip below.
