Nolan's 'Interstellar' advice: Just enjoy the ride
WASHINGTON — Christopher Nolan loves when an audience connects with his films.
Yet, at the same time, just as he didn't expect moviegoers to know what it's like to be Batman to enjoy his Dark Knight trilogy, it isn't necessary to be a walking encyclopedia on wormholes, theoretical physics and the fifth dimension to dig his new Interstellar (opens Friday nationwide).
He likens it to watching a James Bond film. "Bond has to defuse a nuclear bomb. You don't actually need to know how he's defusing it — what you need to know is if he doesn't do it right, it's going to blow up," the filmmaker says over afternoon tea prior to a premiere at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.
"My films, if people go to them worrying about whether they'll understand and approach it like a crossword puzzle, they're not going to get as much out of it. You're meant to go along for the ride."
Nolan, 44, is known for his twisty and mind-bending oeuvre of movies, such as Memento and Inception.Interstellar is a complex beast with a former NASA pilot (Matthew McConaughey) getting back in the space saddle to jet off to another universe and hopefully save mankind. But it's also at its core a tale of a father's love for his daughter.
Though Nolan's films have clicked with audiences — The Dark Knight made $535 million in 2008 and has the fourth-largest domestic box-office take of all time — they haven't been as unanimously well-received by critics.
"Perhaps people can't connect emotionally with his characters or they feel visuals overwhelm the story," says The Hollywood Reporter's Scott Feinberg. With Interstellar, "he almost recognized that was a shortcoming of his earlier works and structured this one as a way to correct that."
But Nolan says it's always been important to him to find something personal in his movies, be it Alfred as a surrogate father for Bruce Wayne in the Batman films or an astronaut yearning to see his kids again in Interstellar. "By making something in the Hollywood-blockbuster language, it becomes very universal," he says.
Another signature Nolan move: launching whatever genre he's working in to new heights. He sees the rules of certain kinds of movies not as a restriction but as a catapult to new and better things.
His latest drew inspiration from "The Right Stuff, Star Wars, 2001," Nolan says. "They're there as part of everybody's shared idea of what science fiction can do, and you get to build on that. We try to stand on the shoulders of giants."
Interstellar is his first big movie following the ultra-popular Dark Knight trilogy, but he's not looking at this as his post-Batman period. It's hard to see any progression or continuity in Nolan's art because an essential part of his mindset is, as he puts it, approaching each new project like it's his Hollywood finale.
"There's pretty much nothing more devastating than when you show someone your new film and they go, 'That's cool. What's next?'" Nolan says with a laugh.
His honest answer to that question? "Not a clue. It's really very true, even true back when working on the Batman films: I really do view every film as the last one, and one day I will be right."