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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 29, 2017 14:57:51 GMT
Some interesting things on Nolan from a 2012 NYTimes article on his methods: www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/magazine/the-exacting-expansive-mind-of-christopher-nolan.htmlThe final cut of the movie had been delivered, as is characteristic for him, ahead of schedule, back in June-
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In an industry where status means not having to care about the value of other people’s time, Nolan never keeps anybody waiting.
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Brad Grey, the chairman and C.E.O. of Paramount Pictures, told me the set of “Interstellar” was the best-dressed set he ever visited. “Everyone was in suits and ties, and I thought, Who are these folks, everyone talking very nicely to each other, all civilized?”
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Nolan’s own look accords with his strict regimen of optimal resource allocation and flexibility: He long ago decided it was a waste of energy to choose anew what to wear each day, and the clubbable but muted uniform on which he settled splits the difference between the demands of an executive suite and a tundra. The ensemble is smart with a hint of frowzy, a dark, narrow-lapeled jacket over a blue dress shirt with a lightly fraying collar, plus durable black trousers over scuffed, sensible shoes. In colder weather, Nolan outfits himself with a fitted herringbone waistcoat, the bottom button left open. A pair of woven periwinkle cuff links and rather garish striped socks represent his only concessions to whimsy or sentimentality; they have about them the sweet, gestural, last-minute air of Father’s Day presents.
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He tries to build maps the size of the territory, whole cities from the ground up in disused airship hangars (as he’s done for four of his movies at a former R.A.F. facility outside London), even if he’s going to shoot just a few street-corner scenes. Sue Kroll, the president of worldwide marketing for Warner Bros., told me she once got actually lost in the ersatz rain falling on an ersatz Gotham. Nolan learned the value of such sweep from Ridley Scott. The genius of “Blade Runner,” he told me, is that “you never feel like you’ve gotten close to the edge of the world.”
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Nolan’s movies require this thick quotient of reality to support his looping plots, which accelerate in shifting time signatures, consume themselves in recursive intrigue and advance formidable and enchanting problems of interpretation. “Memento,” the Sundance favorite that brought him instant acclaim at age 30, is a noir thriller with the chronology of reverse-spliced helix. “Insomnia,” the only one of his nine films for which he did not receive at least a share of the writing credit, was somewhat more straightforward — a moody, tortured psychological thriller — but its real trick was to gain him access to studio work and studio budgets. “The Prestige,” a Victorian dueling-magician drama, is a clever bit of prestidigitation, as well as a canny commentary on film and technology (Nolan on digital filmmaking can sound a lot like Ricky Jay on David Copperfield). “Inception” was a heist movie that took place in a series of nested dreamscapes. Nolan’s Batman movies, though basically linear in structure, resonated broadly as shadowy political allegories.
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Part of the reason his work has done so well at the box office is that his audience members — and not just his fans, but his critics — find themselves watching his movies twice, or three times, bleary-eyed and shivering in their dusky light, hallucinating wheels within wheels and stopping only to blog about the finer points. These blogs pose questions along the lines of “If the fact that the white van is in free-fall off the bridge in the first dream means that, in the second dream, there’s zero gravity in the hotel, then why is there still normal gravity in the third dream’s Alpine fortress??”
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...there are enthusiasts out there who lose themselves to the limbo of Nolan’s expansive, febrile imagination. The IMDB F.A.Q. about the meaning of the end of “Inception” makes “Infinite Jest” look like a pamphlet on proper toaster installation. The Internet has become lousy with intersecting wormholes tunneled by warring pro-Nolan factions.
That his films manage to be both mainstream blockbusters and objects of such cult appeal is what makes Nolan a singular, and singularly admired, figure in Hollywood.
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Caine, who has worked with Nolan on six movies, told me: “He always has a flask of tea in his pocket. No matter how hot it is, he has a big overcoat with a pocket big enough for his tea, and he quietly sips it. At a certain point, I thought, There must be something better than tea in there. I asked him, ‘You’ve not got vodka in there, have you?’ He said no, just tea.”
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Jonah, who is six years younger, told me that his very earliest memories were of his older brother making stop-motion space odysseys, painstaking processes of tweaking the gestures of action figures. They went to the movies constantly, and Jonah recalls that they brooked no distinction between the arty and the mainstream; they’d go to Scala Cinema Club in London to see “Akira” or a Werner Herzog film one month and then go to the Biograph in Chicago to see “The Commitments” the next. (When Jonah was 13 or 14, Nolan gave him two Frank Miller volumes, “Batman: Year One” and “The Dark Knight Returns,” which the two revered.)
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He chose U.C.L. because of its film facilities, which included a Steenbeck editing suite. He and Emma Thomas, his wife, began dating in their first year. Together they ran a film society, screening 35-millimeter films to make money so members could shoot 16-millimeter shorts.
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After that, when he came across the script of “Insomnia,” a remake of a Norwegian psychological thriller, Warner Bros. had the option. Nolan was interested but couldn’t get a meeting. His agent, Dan Aloni, called Steven Soderbergh, an early fan of “Memento.” Soderbergh told me that he “just walked across the lot and said to the head of production, ‘You’re insane if you don’t meet with this guy.’ My sense even then was that he didn’t need our help except to get in the door.” ... Soderbergh and George Clooney signed on as executive producers. Soderbergh visited the set in Alaska. “I got there and was having a conversation with Al Pacino: ‘How do you feel? How’s it going?’ Al said, ‘Well, I can tell you right now, at some point in the very near future I’m going to be very proud to say I was in a Christopher Nolan movie.’ ”
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“Chris is legendary for being prepared, being on time, on schedule,” Soderbergh told me.
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Brad Grey, the president of Paramount, praised Nolan for his “fiscal responsibility,” like a parent proud of a child for not blowing all of his allowance on comic books.
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“The single-most important thing was the art of working in the studio system,” Nolan told me of his experience with “Insomnia.” “It takes time to learn how to take notes. In the corporate structure, the people giving you the notes are not responsible for the final product. You are. It’s not their job, it’s yours. When you’re taking notes, it’s possible that you’re having an interesting conversation with a very smart individual and everything they’re saying is correct. But they’re wrong. So you have to go back and approach it from a different angle.” He continues to treat executives as, essentially, representative filmgoers. At a development meeting — at, in other words, a conference-room table — before “The Dark Knight,” he had to explain the Joker’s motivations. “Execs are very good at saying things like, ‘What’s the bad guy’s plan?’ They know those engines have to be very powerful. I had to say: ‘The Joker represents chaos, anarchy. He has no logical objective in mind.’ I had to explain it to them, and that’s when I realized I had to explain it to the audience.”
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Greg Silverman, president of creative development and worldwide production, recalls that Nolan wanted to base Batman’s technology on real physics and that he wanted viewers to see Bruce Wayne doing hung-over push-ups and recovering from bruises.
For Nolan, everything — the acting, the plot, the effects, the film technology, the sound — has to contribute to the weft of a film’s internal logic. “I have a faith,” he said, “that any audience can tell the difference between something that’s consistent to rules versus something that’s totally made up and anarchic.”
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Nolan knows, however, that the natural target of the blockbuster is the lowest common denominator, and he’s had to build into his filmmaking practice personal safeguards against what he calls “chasing an audience.” In preparation for each film, he spends a week or two bashing out a little précis, on the same typewriter his father gave him when he was 21. (It appears as a prop in “Following.”) Often that précis doesn’t even talk much about the plot; it’s supposed to represent the feeling he wants to elicit, the texture of the fable. He keeps it in a file and returns to it from time to time to make sure he hasn’t lost touch with his original idea. He also doesn’t do traditional scored research screenings or focus groups, choosing instead to show his films to a handful of people at a time as he’s editing.
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Soderbergh told me he would be curious to know if Nolan ever had any desire to go back and make a film on the scale of “Memento.” I asked Nolan that, and he replied: “Hollywood, when it functions at its best, has a scope that’s unmatched. In the back of my mind, that scope was always something to aim for — never to the exclusion of other things, just a larger and larger canvas. At the budget level I’m able to work at, I really try to give the audience the most technically compelling experience I can give, with picture and sounds, something they haven’t seen before.”
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Cole, his postproduction coordinator, says he has worked on romantic comedies that had more effects in postproduction than “The Dark Knight Rises.” ... When Nolan accepted the Visual Effects Society’s inaugural Visionary Award in 2011, he said: “I know visual-effects people pride themselves on doing the impossible. I’d just like to encourage you to say no to the unreasonable.”
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Nolan is “a magnificent problem solver,” McConaughey wrote me via email. “It can be the biggest action sequence in the film,” he continued, and “everyone can think it’s going to take two days to shoot, and before the smoke has cleared before lunch on the first day, he’s marching off to the next shot.”
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Hathaway immediately followed up with a second anecdote: On the set of “The Dark Knight Rises,” she had to stand on a scaffolding that was going to fall nine or 10 stories. Nolan reassured her. “It looks high,” he said, “but it doesn’t get up to a really considerable speed.” Hathaway asked how he knew. “Well,” Nolan said, “I did it myself.”
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Nolan is known for making movies that hold themselves open to various interpretations, but it’s an effect that can be created only when the director knows, in his own mind, exactly how he sees it. For the director’s commentary on “Memento,” Nolan recorded three different, equally plausible interpretations of the final scene that the DVD serves at random to viewers. But he insists he has a full, definitive interpretation that he keeps to himself. “The only way to be productively ambiguous,” he told me, “is that you have to know the answer for you — but also know why, objectively speaking. If you do something unknowable, there’s no answer for the audience, because you didn’t have an answer. It becomes about ambiguity for ambiguity’s sake. There has to be a sense of reality in the film. If you don’t have rules, then what I’m doing would be formless. I feel better with consistent rules.”
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Post by RhodoraO on Apr 2, 2017 13:12:57 GMT
A witty NYTimes opinion piece by Ross Douthat on comic book movies in general. It's from 2009 but seems even more relevant today: douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/prisoners-of-the-superhero-movie/Prisoners of the Superhero Movie MAY 10, 2010
Chris Orr, who’s taken his movie reviewing from The New Republic to The Atlantic, has a question about “Iron Man 2″:
What would happen to the Iron Man franchise if you took out all the “iron”—the slit-eyed helmet and headlamp breastplate, ruby-red gauntlets and metal mukluks, repulsor rays and boot-jets–and left just the man, billionaire daredevil Tony Stark, armed with nothing more than his wicked goatee, dagger-sharp irony, and impenetrable aura of self-love? (Many superheroes have made do with less.)
It’s a good question, but of course once you start asking questions like that it’s a pretty short leap to wondering why we couldn’t have a movie about a Tony Stark-like figure — say, a screwball comedy about a billionaire’s romance with his omnicompetent assistant, which is basically the best thing about the “Iron Man” franchise anyway — in which he isn’t a superhero at all. And from there, it’s an even shorter leap to questions like, “what kind of movies would a clean-and-sober Robert Downey, Jr. be making if he wasn’t already signed up for ‘The Avengers’ and ‘Iron Man 3’ and the sequel to last’s year ‘Sherlock Holmes’ (which was basically a superhero flick dressed up in Victoriana)”? Or “what kind of films might Jon Favreau/Bryan Singer/Sam Raimi/Christopher Nolan have directed if they hadn’t been sucked into the superhero vortex”? Or “wouldn’t it have been nice to see a Heath Ledger/Christian Bale confrontation in which they weren’t saddled with the grim conventions of the comic-book blockbuster?” Or … well, you get the idea.
Sometimes I try to imagine what the 1970s would have been like if comic-book movies had dominated the cinematic landscape the way they do today. Francis Ford Coppola would have presumably gravitated toward the operatic darkness of the Batman franchise, casting first Al Pacino and then Robert De Niro as Italian-American Bruce Waynes. Martin Scorsese would have become famous for his gritty, angry take on the Incredible Hulk, with Harvey Keitel stepping into Bruce Banner’s shoes and Diane Keaton as his love interest. Dustin Hoffman would have been cast as Peter Parker opposite Cybill Shepherd’s Mary Jane in Peter Bogdanovich’s “Spiderman.” The Superman movies would have starred Warren Beatty instead of Christopher Reeves. Steven Spielberg would have directed “Iron Man” instead of “Jaws,” with Robert Redford playing Tony Stark and Julie Christie as Pepper Potts; George Lucas would have made an X-Men trilogy instead of “Star Wars,” with Marlon Brando as Professor Xavier opposite Jack Nicholson as Wolverine. Gene Hackman, Dennis Hopper, Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider would have been known to moviegoers primarily for their turns as supervillains. And Terence Malick — well, O.K., Malick probably would have still made “Badlands” and “Days of Heaven,” and then disappeared for 20 years.
If this revision of the ’70s sounds like a cinematic paradise, you probably liked “The Dark Knight” a whole lot more than I did. If it doesn’t, I recommend Matt Zoller Seitz’s comprehensive thrashing of a decade’s worth of comic-book movies in Salon, which includes this neat precis of where the superhero genre has ended up:
The comic book film has become a gravy train to nowhere. The genre cranks up directors’ box office averages and keeps offbeat actors fully employed for years at a stretch by dutifully replicating (with precious few exceptions) the least interesting, least exciting elements of its source material; spicing up otherwise rote superhero vs. supervillain storylines with “complications” and “revisions” (scare quotes intentional) that the filmmakers, for reasons of fiduciary duty, cannot properly investigate; and delivering amusing characterizations, dense stories or stunning visuals while typically failing to combine those aspects into a satisfying whole.
In other news, “Iron Man 2″ grossed $133.6 million over the weekend. So get ready for more of the same.
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Post by RhodoraO on Apr 2, 2017 13:31:47 GMT
Here is the current link to the salon.com article referenced in the above op-piece: www.salon.com/2010/05/06/superhero_movies_bankrupt_genre/Superheroes suck! From Spidey to Batman to Iron Man, comic-book movies are Hollywood's most bankrupt genre. And I say that as a fan MATT ZOLLER SEITZ MAY 6, 2010It's a very earnest think-piece from 2010. But I wonder what deplorable state of mind the writer must be now! At least he would be celebrating Logan. Some relevant excerpts: The death of Rachel Dawes in “The Dark Knight” — a visually sloppy, exposition-choked saga that at least had the courage of its source material’s grim convictions — is a rare example of a superhero film daring to make its audience hurt. The norm is closer to the opportunism of Sam Raimi and company cherry-picking elements from the newsprint back story of Gwen Stacy — superimposing the circumstances of her shocking death in “The Amazing Spider-Man #121″ onto a routine cable car set piece involving Mary Jane in 2002’s “Spider-Man”; then shoehorning her into 2007’s “Spider-Man 3,” hinting at a different, perhaps equally upsetting demise, then letting her live. (That’s like ending a remake of “Old Yeller” with a freeze-frame of the title pooch frolicking in a meadow, surrounded by pups.)
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And in the 32 years since the release of ”Superman: The Movie,” what has the superhero genre given us? What’s the cream of the crop?
“The Dark Knight” and “Batman Begins” head up the list; whatever one thinks of their approach toward dramaturgy (director Chris Nolan’s M.O. is to have his characters deliver freshman psychology and philosophy dissertations while whirling the camera for no good reason and cutting every few seconds), they were true to the dark (at times ugly) essence of their source material. And they were confident enough to disgorge raw data at a stock-ticker pace and expect viewers to keep up. But neither film contains a moment as moving as Brendan Gleeson’s fight to keep his sanity after being infected in “28 Days Later,” or a cinematic flourish as wickedly clever as the twinned tracking shots in “Shaun of the Dead” that compare life in a pre- and post-zombie world. Where’s the heart in Nolan’s movies? Where’s the poetry? Where’s the soul?
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And as is the case with all “Batman” pictures — even the comparatively ballsier Nolan efforts — the title character is a yin-yang cardboard cutout, a recessive, numb, raspy-voiced bore. It doesn’t matter who plays Batman; the suit always swallows him up. Watch Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho” or Dieter Dengler in “Rescue Dawn” and you’d think he was the second coming of Gary Oldman. In Nolan’s Batman films, he just seems smug and cranky. (As Commissioner Gordon, a grayer, subtler Oldman acts circles around Bale — which, given Bruce Wayne/Batman’s connect-the-dots psychology, is admittedly no great victory for anyone, including extras playing riot cops and waiters.)
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Post by RhodoraO on Jun 18, 2017 9:11:43 GMT
Adam West recently died. In his memory, LA city lit up the bat signal:
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