At the top of his game

After his big brother’s atomic bomb movie, Jonah Nolan blows up the world in Fallout, another milestone ina screen career he says he owes to reading the classics while living in New Zealand.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

Jonathan “Jonah” Nolan has quite the CV. Yes, he’s been a screenwriter on his brother Christopher Nolan’s films – his short story Memento Mori inspired his older sibling’s 2000 breakthrough Memento. He wrote The Prestige and was a writer on the Batman Dark Knight trilogy, and Interstellar. In television, he created the sci-fi surveillance drama Person of Interest and, with his wife, Lisa Joy, the big-budget HBO dystopian sci-fi western Westworld.

Also on his resume, somewhere, is “dairy farmer, Kaipara, New Zealand”.

On a Zoom call from Los Angeles, the London-born, US-raised Nolan tells the Listener he spent a college gap year on a cousin’s farm near Warkworth. If it wasn’t for the rural experience, all those screen credits might not exist.

He was halfway through a degree in international relations at a college in Chicago and decided it wasn’t the right path for him. Assisting with milking 800 head of dairy cows might help him figure himself out. It wasn’t the early mornings with the Holsteins, though, that did it, but the farmhouse book collection.

“It was a library of classics. They had the farmhouse [where] each book you opened, the spine kind of cracked. And I read Moby-Dick, which I’ve never been inclined to read otherwise. And I was like, ‘Oh, this is the shit.’ It’s a very cinematic book, much more cinematic than I expected. And I was like, ‘This is what I should be doing.’”

He went back to college in Washington DC, majored in writing, then a few years later, found himself jointly nominated with his brother for a best original screenplay Oscar for Memento.