What makes a Christopher Nolan film? Decoding the Oppenheimer filmmaker's signature style

From psychological thrillers to superhero films, Christopher Nolan has ventured out into, and arguably mastered, several movie genres. In a career spanning almost 3-decades, the auteur has tackled interstellar travel, reverse entropy, the human subconscious, and more. 

His latest offering is Oppenheimer, which focuses on the late titular nuclear physicist and his role in creating the Atomic Bomb. It’s not the filmmaker’s first effort in bringing stories from real life to the big screen. In 2017, he made Dunkirk. It was based on World War II. Here’s the exploration of the director's filmography in an attempt to decode his trademark style.  

3 things you need to know: 

• Christopher Nolan has never won an Oscar, even though his films have received Academy Awards in other categories.
• The Dark Knight is his most commercially successful film.
• Nolan has shunned the use of excessive CGI in movies and has gravitated towards practical effects.

Recurring themes in Christopher Nolan films

Playing with audience's perception: Experience of time and memory 

Time and memory are elements Nolan often plays with. In Memento (2000), Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) plays a man suffering from short-term memory loss. He gets through his day with the help of details he had scribbled on notebooks and tattooed all over his body. The movie, to date, remains Nolan’s most studied piece for the interplay between time and memory. Nolan uses a non-linear narrative and abandons the chronology of events to deliver a mind-bending thriller.

(Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby in Memento | Image: christophernolan_officialpage/Instagram) 

This trend continued in the Al Pacino starrer Insomnia (2002), which begins as an exploration of guilt. After Detective Will Dormer (Al Pacino) accidentally shoots his partner, his memories and perception are distorted to the extent that he is not able to trust reality anymore. Memento features an unreliable narrator,  In Insomnia, Nolan plays with the perception of reality. 

Time and memory coalesce together in Inception (2010) and Nolan delves deeply into the concept. Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) steals information about his targets by embedding false memories in their subconscious. The flow of time within the subconscious changes so drastically that it is no longer possible to differentiate dreams and reality. 

(A poster for the Christopher Nolan story | Image: christophernolan_officialpage/Instagram)

Tenet (2021), Interstellar (2014), The Prestige (2006) and even The Dark Knight trilogy distort time and memory to mislead the viewers till the point Nolan has them where he wants. This tool builds anticipation and completely throws off the audience. The thrill quotient is thus multiplied.

A lesser-known fact is that Inception was initially a smaller part of the story that eventually became Tenet. The John Washington-Robert Pattinson film turns time into much more than a just theme — it is the only thing on which reality hinges. 

Building suspicion

Suspicion and betrayal have been explored in several Nolan films. Nolan had already warned against unfiltered trust, and how it could lead to manipulation. The same distrust helps in building towards the climax of Insomnia. The lack of objective reality is emphasised further in The Prestige, where what the audience is made to believe, isn’t the case. 

Both Interstellar and The Dark Knight Rises featured a natural switcheroo, where someone appearing to be an ally turns out to be the antagonist. While both Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight Rises (2013) showed this to be the case, The Dark Knight (2008) highlighted deception is necessary for Gotham’s own safekeeping.

(Christian Bale in The Dark Knight | Image: christophernolan_officialpage/Instagram)

Suspicion is turned on in one’s own subconscious mind in Inception. While several films of Nolan have depicted a suspicious nature in others, Inception turns the gun on its own head and builds suspicion on reality and its validity.

Just humans embracing their flaws

Nolan’s protagonists are often strong-willed and complex. Since Insomnia, Nolan's protagonists have been smart, borderline geniuses, who are motivated to meet their goals. However, their search for objective reality often comes with an extreme degree of negative emotion – The Dark Knight Rises shows a battered and broken Bruce Wayne struggling to rise against Bane, Interstellar shows Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) leaving his family behind to find a future for humanity in the stars. 

Most characters need objective grounding within a story. This is not the case in Nolan’s films. A perception of objective reality is what the characters want the most, and it’s exactly what they can’t have. While Tenet, Interstellar and Inception showcase this in technical ways, his earlier works explore the same through psychology. 

(A BTS photo from Tenet featuring Christopher Nolan and John David Washington | Image: christophernolan_officialpage/Instagram)

Nolan’s protagonists, struggling with a sense of reality, turn to their beliefs and look inwards. Their love, relationship and understanding grounds them against insurmountable odds. Nolan himself admitted, “The real truth of that is that much as you want to believe that it’s you being on top of everything, you’re actually relying massively on the people around you.” Nolan’s protagonists are, simply put, human, with all their gifts, faults, follies and charm. From Bruce Wayne to Cooper, they all find solace and willpower in that which they love. 

How Nolan crafts technical masterpieces

Nolan is regarded as a postmodern storyteller. While his films are visual spectacles, the use of CGI in them is minimal. Instead, real sets are created.  They are then enhanced using visual effects. Even the insides of the Black Hole in Interstellar were a set built in real-time. 

(A still from Interstellar featuring Anne Hathaway and Mathew McConaughey | Image: christophernolan_fans/Instagram)

Non-linear storytelling is also a major part of Nolan’s films. We’re shown points of past and future which coalesce together for a purpose. While films like Inception and Memento use this to provide information about the story at large, Tenet and Interstellar reveal a complex, interworking relationship of how both past and future affect the present reality. 

Composer Hans Zimmer, who has been a long-time collaborator of Nolan, often makes arrangements that emphasise upon the grandiosity, tension or calm of the moment. In Dunkirk (2017), Zimmer employs the Shephard Tone, a concept in music where two-half tones of constantly escalating notes accompany the most intense and high-stress sequences in the film. To build tension on the screen, Nolan uses crosscutting between wide shots and close-ups. This technique becomes most noticeable as the climax approaches.

(A still from Dunkirk featuring Cillian Murphy | Image: dunkirkmovie/Instagram)

To summarise, a quote from Nolan explains his style the best. “I always find myself gravitating to the analogy of a maze. Think of film noir and if you picture the story as a maze, you don’t want to be hanging above the maze watching the characters make the wrong choices because it’s frustrating. You actually want to be in the maze with the, making the turns at their side, that keeps it more exciting…I quite like to be in that maze.”