Christopher Nolan

A candid conversation with the filmmaker on the through-lines that bind his sprawling canon — from Memento to the Dark Knight trilogy to his new World War II epic

The gateway to the Los Angeles compound of Christopher Nolan, director-screenwriter of such cosmic brain-twisters as Inception, Interstellar and the Dark Knight trilogy, is a bit of an illusion, a false front. Visible from the tree-lined street is a gated, late-1930s Spanish-style home with a generic economy car squatting in the driveway. With the right lighting, the location could serve as one of those ostensibly benign and potentially lethal southern California backdrops in Memento, Nolan’s noirish 2000 thriller about a man with faulty short-term memory who struggles to find his wife’s murderer. Nolan once resided here, but now it serves as his post production facility; the garage contains his editing suite. Exit the building’s rear doors and the bottom drops out as dramatically as one of the trapdoors in The Prestige, Nolan’s 2006 tale of two rival magicians. A rambling expanse of green gives way to another head spinning shift: Nolan’s primary residence, a much larger and more modern setup that recalls the bold serenity of a Frank Lloyd Wright design.

“You can tell a lot about people from their stuff”, observes a character in Following, Nolan’s self financed 1998 feature film debut. Indeed: Inside the soaring structure, light-suffused but somehow hushed and Batman moody, the living room is done up in cool, muted tones and furnished with low-slung chairs. Connecting shelves neatly lined with books reach the ceiling. A large framed photo of Stanley Kubrick’s empty director’s chair, a gift from Interstellar star Matthew McConaughey, occupies a place of honour. The abode, like the 46-year-old writer-director-producer who inhabits it, along with his wife, producer Emma Thomas, exudes good taste, intelligence, confidence — and a certain mysterious formality.