Christopher Nolan
Christopher Edward Nolan CBE (/ˈnoʊlən/; born 30 July 1970) is an English-American filmmaker known for making personal, distinctive films within the Hollywood mainstream. His directorial efforts have grossed more than US$4.7 billion in theatres worldwide and garnered a total of 34 Oscar nominations and ten wins.
Born and raised in London, Nolan developed an interest in filmmaking from a young age. After studying English literature at University College London, he made his feature debut with Following (1998). Nolan gained international recognition with his second film, Memento (2000), for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He transitioned from independent to studio filmmaking with Insomnia (2002), and found further critical and commercial success with The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005–2012), The Prestige (2006), and Inception (2010), which received eight Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. This was followed by Interstellar (2014) and Dunkirk (2017), the latter of which earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Director.
Nolan's films are typically rooted in epistemological and metaphysical themes, exploring human morality, the construction of time, and the malleable nature of memory and personal identity. His work is permeated by mathematically inspired images and concepts, unconventional narrative structures, practical special effects, experimental soundscapes, large-format film photography, and materialistic perspectives. He has co-written several of his films with his brother Jonathan, and runs the production company Syncopy Inc. with his wife Emma Thomas.
Nolan has received many awards and honours. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2015, and in 2019, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his services to film.
Nolan was born in Westminster, London, and grew up primarily in Highgate. His father, Brendan James Nolan, was a British advertising executive who worked as a creative director. His mother, Christina (née Jensen), was an American flight attendant who would later work as an English teacher. Nolan's childhood was split between London and Evanston, Illinois, and he has both British and US citizenship. He has an older brother, Matthew, and a younger brother, Jonathan, also a filmmaker. Growing up, Nolan was particularly influenced by the work of Ridley Scott, and the science fiction films 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Star Wars (1977). He began making films at age seven, borrowing his father's Super 8 camera and shooting short films with his action figures. These films included a stop motion animation homage to Star Wars called Space Wars. He cast his brother Jonathan and built sets from "clay, flour, egg boxes and toilet rolls." 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 From the age of eleven, he aspired to be a professional filmmaker. In his teenage years, Nolan started making films with Adrien and Roko Belic. Nolan and Roko co–directed the surreal 8 mm Tarantella (1989), which was shown on Image Union, an independent film and video showcase on the Public Broadcasting Service.[note 1][20]
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). Opting out of a traditional film education, he pursued "a degree in something unrelated ... because it gives a different take on things." He chose UCL specifically for its filmmaking facilities, which comprised a Steenbeck editing suite and 16 mm film cameras. Nolan was president of the Union's Film Society, and with Emma Thomas (his girlfriend and future wife) he screened 35 mm feature films during the school year and used the money earned to produce 16 mm films over the summers.
After earning his bachelor's degree in English literature in 1993, Nolan worked as a script reader, camera operator, and director of corporate videos and industrial films. In 1995, he began work on the short film Larceny, which was filmed over a weekend in black and white with limited equipment and a small cast and crew. 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. He filmed a third short, Doodlebug (1997), about a man chasing an insect around a flat with a shoe, only to discover when killing it that it is a miniature of himself. Nolan and Thomas made their first attempt at a feature in the mid-90s, an "arty" student angst film called Larry Mahoney, which was scrapped and never released. During this period in his career, Nolan had little or no success getting his projects off the ground; he later recalled the "stack of rejection letters" that greeted his early forays into making films, adding "there's a very limited pool of finance in the UK. To be honest, it's a very clubby kind of place ... Never had any support whatsoever from the British film industry."
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