2001 Meet the nominees
Nolan's peak experience was Memento's close-up where the protagonist reveals how frustrating it is not being able to remember things. "I had something I was happy with, and I asked [lead actor Guy Pearce] are you OK with it? He said, 'No,' so we did one more take. It was one of those moments where the actor is so in the moment that it was completely real for him. Suddenly, you realize with the right actor, the right role and the right time, you can have a lot of fun and not be all controlling. The other time would be shooting the reverse sequence for real. In the end, I found myself on my hands and knees blowing the shell casing out of the shot, and we just ran it backward."
Nolan found pre-production and casting to be quite different from his pervious indie film experiences. "I would always watch movies and notice how weak many of the secondary characters were, but I've found there's a certain amount of luck involved to getting a performance out of them in the take you want to use. The reality is they wait around all day to get 20 minutes at the end of the day, and you have to concentrate on the main actor's performance."
Without hesitation, Nolan said that for him both the best and worst thing about directing was finishing a film.
2008 Meet the nominees
Christopher Nolan spoke about the opening to The Dark Knight, where the world is introduced to the Caped Crusader’s arch nemesis, The Joker [Heath Ledger]. "The problem we faced is that we were introducing a very iconic character that the audience is already very familiar with, in a totally different incarnation. The whole thinking behind the opening was to aggressively present Heath's portrayal in a sequence that would excite the audience and show them the way we were reinterpreting the character in a context more like a conventional action film as opposed to a superhero comic. So we tried to construct a sequence that would be overpowering to the audience, and not allow them to reject Heath's portrayal. We wanted to conceal who he was and let his body language start to show that there was something different about this character wearing the mask. We wanted to make the statement that what Heath was going to be doing was going to be new and different, but still true to the iconography."
2010 Meet the nominees
Nolan spoke about the challenges he faced in bringing Inception’s dream worlds to film. "What I felt I hadn’t seen done in a film was treating the dream world with a sense of reality, so that while you’re in the dream you think it’s real, which is one of the story points. We went to six different countries and staged a lot of things in-camera, even when we get into the more fanciful worlds like limbo for example. The clip you just saw was kind of a mish-mash of 2001 and Citizen Kane scrambled together. When I think of dreams, I tend to relate it to movies. I’m a big film fan, but I think a lot of people are and it seemed likely to me that you could reference those things and they would have a resonant quality even if the reference wasn't explicit.'
Here's the links, i suggest you guys read up on the other directors process as well. It's a pretty interesting read. The last link has snippets of past DGA nominees taking about a particular craft within their process of filmmaking.
http://www.dga.org/Awards/History/2010s ... eFilm.aspx
http://www.dga.org/Awards/History/2000s ... -Film.aspx
http://www.dga.org/Awards/History/2000s ... ature.aspx
http://www.dga.org/Craft/DGAQ/All-Artic ... y-MTN.aspx
