"I've always loved films. I started making films when I was seven years old and I haven't stopped. I never really thought about doing anything else. What I love are films that create their own particular geography, a particular world and emerse you in it for a couple of hours. I have always been a huge fan of Ridley Scott and certainly when I was a kid. Alien, Blade Runner just blew me away because they created these extraodinary worlds that were just completely emersive. I was also an enormous Stanley Kubrick fan for similar reasons. As I got older, I got more interested in films that I had not grown up with - sort cinema people like Nicolas Roeg, Syney Lumet and John Frankenheimer." - Christopher Nolan
According to IMDb and other sources, these are some of Nolan's favorites (some with quotes). I thought it would be interesting to read comments on these films, the filmmakers and anything else regarding this topic.
2001 - A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
When Nolan made Batman Begins he reportedly showed Blade Runner to the cast and crew and told them, "This is how we're going to make Batman.". Also note that he included Rutger Hauer in the cast for Batman Begins.
Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)
Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)
"Marvellous escapist entertainment on a grand scale."
The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston, 1975)
"When I look at the films that have really influenced me, most of them are box office failures: Blade Runner, The Man Who Would Be King—a terrific movie—but there's no correlation between my favorite films and box office success."
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (Peter R. Hunt, 1969)
"George Lazenby is no one's favorite James Bond, but for me the anonymity at the center of this lavish production only serves to reveal the Bond machine firing on all cylinders: superb editing and photography, incredible score, great setpieces. The most romantic in the series, and it actually has, of all things, a tragic ending."
The Hitcher (Robert Harmon, 1986)
"As a teenager I never questioned the logic of this 80's chiller, but now it seems mind-bendingly arbitrary plot-wise. However, it does feature the criminally underappreciated Rutger Hauer in his finest and most influential Euro-psycho performance this side of Blade Runner."
Topkapi (Jules Dassin, 1964)
"I've no idea what the critical consensus is on this one, but as style-over-substance movies go, this is fabulously entertaining. I love it not just for its often imitated dangling-from-the-ceiling heist sequence but also for Peter Ustinov's incredible comic performance."
The Black Hole (Gary Nelson, 1979)
"Even to a nine-year-old Star Wars fanatic this seemed pretty uneven, but some of the special effects still impress, and it boasts one of the most unexpectedly weird climaxes in cinema history. I actually had to rent it as an adult just to check that I hadn't made up the whole ending."