How Christopher Nolan Writes and Directs a Movie | The Director's Chair

[Music from Christopher Nolan Movies] One of the things I love about directing is the multi-faceted nature of the challenge. The idea of a narrative that's a maze or labyrinth. Rather than being above that maze, and watching the characters make mistakes and wrong turns, you would enter into the maze, kind of looking over their shoulder, and make the wrong turns with them and find a blind alleys with them.

There's a feeling of reality. There's a feeling of being somewhere that matters. I approached the structure from very mathematical and geometrical point of view.

A lot of diagrams, lot of careful planning. So that was certainly the case with Memento. First way to draw it is, as I have like that.

That's basically the end of the movie. This stuff is the black and white stuff. This is color.

And what we do is we cut between the two, the whole way through. -You said we talked before. I don`t remember that.

- So we alternate scene here, scene there, scene there,scene there,scene there,scene there, and they meet towards the end of the film. [Heavy Breathing] The thing that I started to develop and I've carried on over since that there's most certainly is probably cross-cutting. I always trying intercut scenes.

Based on a concept from music called a shepherd progression or shepard tone. It's a series of ascending notes on a scale that by emphasizing in volume different elements of the scale, it can continuously go up, like a corkscrew effect or a barbershop hole. It's always rising.

As one storyline is peeking, and other one is building, and the third one is just starting out. -Full speed, Peter. Keep coming round.

Keep coming. Before he fires, he`s gotta drop his nose. I'll give you the signal.

-Now? -No, no, wait. Wait for him to commit to his line.

-You create a continuing rise in intensity, narratively. [Plane engine sounds] -Now. [Crowd cheering] -That's really an approach that I've carried on using through all my films.

As a director, you have to be able to not look at the shot as a two-dimensional picture, but look at where everything is in three-dimensional space. -And go easy on the poor chap. He does try so very hard.

-That's why I don't use a monitor on set to this day. I just say by the camera because I want to see where is the camera? Why is the camera?

Where it is? And then place the camera according to my idea of what the point of view is. I`d like to try and align the audience quite closely with the point of view of a character.

-Come on. -The use of inserts, something I've maintained it all my films. There is a form of narrative connection that's made through objects.

-Don't believe his lies. He is the one. Kill him.

I finally found him. -We also did it for technical reasons because one of the things you can do with very little time is you can shoot a really beautiful insert. You can soft light it from the side.

You can throw out the lens, you can get something that looks really really nice, very very quickly. My fascination with storytelling in films is all about that subjectivity. It's all about, whose point of view my seeing the story from.

Don't use zoom lenses. If you don't use zoom lenses, then you are having to physically move the camera, closer or further away to what you`re photographing. So there's a scene in the film where you make a telephone call, and I remember when you came in to sit down to do the scene, and you're pretty surprised where the camera was, because it was pretty close to your nose on a 75, but what I found is when we put the camera right there in your space, the performance is then exactly appropriate to somebody being that close and being so in your head.

-It really helps. Trish, listen, I`m. .

. -And I think, that was the right approach for me and set me on the path of always thinking about considering the point of view of the storytelling. -This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.

You truly are incorruptible, aren't you, huh? You won't kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness, and I won't kill you because you're just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever.

-One of the great joys as a director is constructing a world. On my films I try to shoot as much in-camera as possible. So trying to do these things for real.

There's nothing more dispiriting when you tell off to work in this just a green screen, the collectors in front of it. It's really - the magics not there. For example on Interstellar, we didn't use any green screens.

We built a set and we enhanced it with visual effects. -You've seen the time is represented here as a physical dimension. You have worked out that you can exert a force across space-time.

-Gravity to send a message. -Affirmative. -So try to use real locations, I've always preferred real locations.

[Music] If you can believe in it, if you can relate it to the textures of everyday life, you're taking the audience on a more extreme journey. -With no word from the Batman even as they mourn Commissioner Loeb, these cops have to be wondering, if the Joker will make good on his threat and in the albitrary column of the Gotham Times to kill the mayor. -Really everything you do, you learn from.

In terms of anytime you shooting something short film. You're always learning about your craft. It gives you confidence as a filmmaker.

I think really the only useful advice I ever got in terms of trying to figure out your way in to the film business and film industry is to get yourself a script and hang on to it. You have to play to your strengths, you have to do something that really excites you and what was different about that. It's that idea that screenplay, that concept that's so important.

And that was going to distinguish it, if you can do it successfully.