The British-American filmmaker, an obsessively punctual and tea-loving perfectionist who is known for combining inventive, intellectual romp with an emphasis on realism, was named best director by the Academia.
“To the academy, I will just say that cinema is just over 100 years old. I mean, imagine being there for 100 years in painting or theater. We don’t know where this incredible journey is headed. But knowing that they think I’m a “an important part means a lot to me,” said the filmmaker upon receiving the statuette.
It is the high point so far of a career that has taken Nolan from darling of artistic productions (Memento), becoming savior of superheroes (the trilogy of Batman starts) to rare purveyor of original science fiction (The Origin, Interstellar) in a market plagued by sequels.
Opportunities
Nolan, 53, has come close to Oscar glory in the past, especially with his mind-blowing 2017 epic. Dunkirk.
But the director, sometimes criticized by critics as a master technician and genre filmmaker rather than a true visionary auteur, had never won an Oscar before Oppenheimer, who dominated Sunday’s gala with seven statuettes.
Born in 1970, the son of a British advertising editor and an American flight attendant, Nolan had a particularly transatlantic childhood.
After seeing Star Wars and a new release of 2001: Space Odyssey In movies when he was seven, Nolan quickly began making movies on his father’s old Super 8 camera.
Nolan studied at boarding school, then opted for a degree in English literature at University College London, which he chose partly for its filming facilities.
There he formed a film partnership with his future producer and wife, Emma Thomas, with whom he moved to Los Angeles after graduating.
Nolan rose to fame at age 30 with Memento, an avant-garde, intelligent and sinuous crime film, with a non-linear narrative that has become its trademark. It was a festival hit and earned him his first Oscar nomination, for screenplay.
“Proud”
His big debut as a big-budget director was Insomnia (2002), starring Al Pacino as a Los Angeles police officer sent to Alaska to investigate a murder.
Veteran director Steven Soderbergh had recommended Nolan to Warner Bros., and later revealed details of a conversation he had with Pacino on the film’s set. “I can tell you right now, at some point in the near future, I’m going to be very proud to say that I was ‘in a Christopher Nolan movie,'” Pacino told Soderbergh.
The success of the film allowed Nolan to propose his gritty realistic vision for the new Batman films that the studio was planning.
Batman starts It gave rise to a trilogy of films directed by Nolan, with Christian Bale in the role of the masked man.
The second part, Batman: The Dark Knight, is frequently considered the best superhero film ever made. It was the first to raise $1 billion and the first to generate an Oscar for acting, the posthumous statuette that went to Heath Ledger as the villainous Joker.
Third, Batman: The Dark Knight Riseswon less praise, but became the biggest commercial success of his career, which has already accumulated more than 6,000 million at the box office.
In the middle, Nolan launched The big tricka period thriller about the duel between two magicians – played by Bale and Hugh Jackman -, and The origin.
Nuclear
The origina wildly ambitious thriller in which Leonardo DiCaprio and Marion Cotillard jump between linked dream worlds, cemented Nolan’s reputation as a unique Hollywood filmmaker who could command big budgets and complete creative control for original films, and even how to generate profit.
It won four Oscars, including one for stunning visual effects, and gave Nolan his first individual nomination since Memento.
His next original science fiction production, Interstellar, He won another Oscar for visual effects and began his collaboration with the esteemed theoretical physicist Kip Thorne.
Afterwards, the director looked into the past with Dunkirk, A tense account of the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Allied troops from a beach in northern France during World War II.
The film gave him his first nomination for best director, and its setting in the 1940s foreshadowed Oppenheimer.
His next film, Tenet, another ambitious science fiction production, brought him interest in nuclear destruction.
But it was the reading of American Prometheusthe 2005 Pulitzer-winning biography of the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, which set him on the path that would ultimately bring him Oscar glory.
FUENTE: AFP
