Christopher Nolan about IMAX
Christopher Nolan shoots his movies one camera and doesn’t believe in 3D. Excerpts from an interview resource DGA read below.
- When did you realize that the direction - your destination?
"To be honest, I've always made films, and never stopped doing it, starting with experiments on puppet animation, which are conducted with the help of the Super 8 camera of my father. In my understanding, all of this - a continuum, a set of closely related events in film and I never changed this hobby. I usually wandered around with a camera, but not graduated from high school on this profile. I studied English literature in college and was intended for academic excellence, while continuing to make films. I took my first feature film "Following" with the help of friends and sponsoring it from my own pocket. We were all busy at work all week, so going on the weekends throughout the year, taking 15 minutes of raw material every Saturday for two or three takes of each scene, with the result, about 5 minutes, ready for the film material. Then, in 1998 we went to a film festival in San Francisco (San Francisco Film Festival) and the studio Zeitgeist Films invited to speak to our distributor, that really helped me in the future to do the project "Memento" . I was hired as director, in my truck lay millions of dollars, and at my disposal were hundreds of people. "
- You are a longtime fan of detective novels, which are often used flashbacks. Hence the love of your non-linear narrative?
"Well, I was influenced a couple of things. When I was 16, I read a novel by Graham Swift's" The Water ", which co-existed in an incredible way and different times of the parallel measurements, and it was absolutely coherent and comprehensible. About the same while I watched on television music video of Alan Parker's "The Wall", which used similar methods of playing with imagination, memories, dreams, dreams are superimposed on the other. All of this firmly lodged in my head, along with detectives James Ellroy, Jim Thompson, as well as the films in the style of noir, such as stunned me, "Out of the Past" by Jacques Turner. Then, it is unclear how, in my hands was a script to unreleased still rolling, "Pulp Fiction" and I was absolutely fascinated by what Tarantino has done. "
- For your early movies you yourself have written script, filmed, mounted, even doing decorations. The only thing you did - you did not play. How do you work with actors? What have you learned from them in the early stages of their work?
"I try to provide them with everything necessary in the process of filming. Perhaps this is not what they think, and, indeed, is that they get something contrary to their desires, but I really try to be different and adapted to each actor. I'm trying to build them the conditions under which they would feel comfortable trying to help them show their talent to the maximum extent. "
"My uncle, John Nolan - an actor, he starred in several of my films. When I started working on the "Following", he studied acting, so I asked him what I need to know. He gave me a couple of books of Stanislavsky, one of which was "An Actor work on himself," and said they would give me ideas about the basics of acting. "
- How scary was the leap from "Insomnia" with a budget of $ 45 million to "Batman Begins," with a budget three times bigger?
"I do not know whether anyone else experiences similar to my mind, but the difference between filming "Following" with a group of friends, who stars in their own clothes and eating sandwiches, cooked by my mother, and 4 million of somebody's money given to me to "Memento" with hundreds of people, and there is the biggest jump I ever did, bit like the way you learn to swim at depth: no matter how much beneath you to the bottom - 2 feet or 10, or you'll drown, or not. "
"The difference between "Insomnia" and "Batman Begins" was mostly in the large-scale scenes. And "Batman” was my first film in which there were so many visual effects. Otherwise, for me the process of shooting remains the same: you stand and stare to the place where will the next scene. Everything else disappears. "
- Why do you prefer to shoot a camera?
"I use multiple cameras, when shoot tricks, for dramatic action, I take a camera. Working with one camera means that I have seen every frame while shooting a scene, because my attention is not distributed across multiple machines. So, I see everything when shooting live, look through the evening dailies. If you shoot multiple cameras, you have accumulated a lot of footage and you have at the end of the day to start from scratch. "
- Did you shoot all of your big-budget films with IMAX cameras?
"We have not filmed on IMAX "Inception” because it tried to convey more realistic dreams, and not the wonderful nature, so we used a handheld camera and filmed it spontaneously. As for the "Dark Knight" and "The Dark Knight 2: The Legend Continues", just in these cases, the large size of the IMAX frame is the best conveys the drama of the situation. Thus, the choice of camera depends on what movie you want to shoot. But in any case, as a director, is trusted by a large budget, I feel a responsibility to the audience to shoot, using the technology of the highest quality that will help and make a film the way I want it to be turned. "
- While many of your fellow directors, working on the set, dressed in casual clothes, you prefer light or dark suit jacket with pants. Why do you "wear it"?
"I went to public school where we wore uniforms, and I used to use all the pockets in my jacket. (Laughs) I'm just in this user-friendly. I do not like to think, what would I wear this, so every day I wear the same thing . In short, I dress like going to work in the office. It's easier. "