Dragon_316ca wrote:As of January 2nd, Jeffrey Wells still haven't received his blu-ray screener: http://www.hollywood-elsewhere.com/2015/01/revealed/

To find out what it feels like to be a character in a Christopher Nolan movie, just talk to Christopher Nolan.

His films imagine the world as a grand, cosmic puzzle, waiting to be solved by someone with enough wits to make the parts click – from Memento’s Leonard Shelby, groping through the fog of his faulty short-term memory as he tries to reconstruct the murder of his wife, to Cobb, the dream-building corporate spy nesting mazes within mazes in Inception.

But after speaking with the director for a while, you realise these apples haven’t fallen all that far from the tree.

“I always wonder if somebody’s going to start forging lost movies,” he says in a suite in Claridge’s in the West End of London. “You know, go off into the desert with a camera, and come back with a masterpiece of the past.”

He pauses and takes a sip of Earl Grey tea. We’re talking about Erich von Stroheim’s lost nine-hour, 42-reel epic, Greed, which was screened only once, in 1924, before being pruned to a little over two hours by MGM, who thought the film was madly indulgent and effectively unreleasable.

Most of the extra footage subsequently vanished and Von Stroheim was heartbroken, disowning the studio’s cut. But the handful of people who attended the full-length screening emerged from the cinema staggered by what they’d seen, some swearing they’d just witnessed the greatest film ever made.

“God, what a tragedy it doesn’t exist,” says Nolan. “But maybe one day, someone will find it.” Another pause, another sip of tea, and also an arched eyebrow. “These things do happen.”

Nolan is far from the only director (or cinephile, come to that) to obsess over the director’s cut of Greed, but he’s the first one I know of to moot the idea of forging it. The idea is somehow totally insane and totally logical at once: it would be a film that everybody would want to see, but you would never be able to take credit for it.

A Nolan character might just do it. And, if not a character, then you get the impression Nolan himself could be tempted.

We’ve arrived at the subject of faked masterpieces via a wormhole. Nolan, 44, lives in Los Angeles and is in town to talk about Interstellar, his ninth feature but the first to receive an honest-to-goodness awards-season push. (This interview is part of it.)

It’s a film set variously on a parched future-earth, in deep space, on a frozen otherworld and in the gap between dimensions, with a key sequence cribbed “completely and explicitly” from Greed’s climactic struggle in Death Valley. In other words, you probably wouldn’t describe it as this year’s The King’s Speech or The Artist.

But it was the non-appearance of Nolan’s The Dark Knight on the Oscars’ best picture shortlist in 2009 that prompted the Academy to expand its list of nominees to 10 - so that it might include, as has been wryly noted, films that people actually go to see.

Nolan thinks that a handful of recent big-budget films, particularly the James Bond outing Skyfall and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, are helping rehabilitate the blockbuster from its continuing drift into the realm of the crash-bang-wallop. He says he’s been “feeling a shift,” and the reception of Gravity last year – seven Oscars, six Baftas, critical hosannahs – has been “encouraging”.

He hasn’t seen Cuarón’s film yet because he didn’t want it to “confuse” him while he was immersed in production on Interstellar, but plans to watch it at some point over the Christmas holidays with his four children, and is “looking forward to having a chinwag with [Cuarón] afterwards”.

Nolan may be the only director working today who can use the word “chinwag” without irony. Born in London and educated at Haileybury school, Hertfordshire, he is so well-spoken he’s almost newsreaderly.

He also carries himself like a successful businessman, which, of course, he is. There were mutterings that Interstellar, which is as intrigued by the sentimental as it is the metaphysical, might be the film to trip him up, but it’s rumbling towards £20 million at the UK box office and its worldwide takings have just passed £400 million. It’s the most successful film this year not to be based on a book, a comic, another film, or a Danish system of interlocking toy plastic bricks.

A film to which Interstellar has been likened, both regularly and inevitably, is 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick’s film is like a black hole in science-fiction cinema: no film made in the genre since has been able to escape its gravitational wrench. Nolan’s plan was to use that pull to his advantage: come in perilously close to Kubrick’s masterpiece and then slingshot his own film around it.

“I put it like this: you can’t make a science-fiction film pretending that 2001 doesn’t exist,” he says. “But I think 2001’s relationship with humanity is more philosophical, more abstract. I wanted to embrace the metaphysics, but relate it to something more obviously human, like love.”

As such, when Nolan started work on Interstellar in early 2013, he and his screenwriter brother Jonathan extensively reworked the script, which Jonathan had originally penned for Steven Spielberg in 2007.

One of the more fundamental changes was turning Murph, Cooper’s eldest child, from a boy into a girl. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Jessica Chastain, who plays Murph as an adult, described Interstellar as an expression of love from Nolan to his 13-year-old daughter Flora (the film was shot under the code name “Flora’s Letter”).

The plot outline that Nolan passed on to his composer, Hans Zimmer, didn’t mention spaceships and wormholes at all: instead, it was a single-page short story about a father who leaves his daughter to do an important job. Its central theme, Zimmer later explained, was the idea that “once we become parents, we can’t help but look at ourselves through the eyes of our children”. The story contained only two lines of dialogue. Father: “I’ll come back.” Daughter: “When?” No concrete answer is forthcoming, perhaps because even a small amount of time apart from a child can feel like forever. The easiest way to feel the relativity of time is by loving someone.

That binding theme makes Interstellar an unlikely cousin of Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s critically adored coming-of-age film, which was shot over a 12-year period in the distinctly un-space-age surrounds of east Texas. As you might expect, Nolan is very taken with the synchronicity.

When he saw Boyhood, Nolan wrote to Linklater to say how much he’d loved it, and is “nervously” awaiting the Texan filmmaker’s response to his. He doesn’t see either film as being “bigger” than the other.

“The screen is the same size for every story,” he says. “A shot of a teacup is the same size as an army coming over the hill. It’s all storytelling.”

Nolan has yet to tap into the dramatic potential of crockery, but his point rings true: think of that spinning top curling slowly across the table in the final shot of Inception, on which our entire understanding of the movie hangs. In the two preceding hours we’ve seen the streets of Paris rise up and fold back on top of themselves, and a snowy mountain fortress exploding and crumbling into powder, but the spinning top is the biggest shot in the movie.

He seems to feel an almost moral imperative to continue working on these giant canvasses, and says the prospect of taking a break from enormousness for a film or two, just to cleanse his palate, is pretty much out of the question.

“There are filmmakers who pride themselves on ‘one for the studio, one for me’, and I just don’t see it that way,” he says. “I have an opportunity that very few filmmakers get, to do something on a huge scale that I can control completely and make as personal as I want, so I feel a big responsibility to make the most of it. Because there are tremendous filmmakers out there who will never get that opportunity but would do something extraordinary with it.”

He says the experience of making his first feature, Following, was just as onerous as working with a $200 million Warner Bros. budget: “I don’t look at the scale of the films in terms of money or the physical size of what we’re shooting. It’s in terms of my life, my time, however much I’m investing in it. It took me a couple of years to make Following and another year to take it round the festival circuit. It was and remains a huge movie to me.”

To keep Interstellar grounded, he worked hard with his director of photography, Hoyte Van Hoytema, to make everything look as down-to-earth as possible. The film’s spaceship, The Endurance, was shot “like a Honda rather than a Lamborghini”. The alien planets were filmed on location in Iceland so the cast could be “inspired by the environment”. (“I didn’t want to just shoot in front of a green screen, then give it to the visual effects guys and say ‘figure something out’.”)

He found the formality and precision of making Batman Begins, the first film in his Dark Knight trilogy, draining, and vowed that, from The Dark Knight onwards, his sets would be “playgrounds of spontaneity”. He loves solving problems in the heat of the moment, and says he does his best thinking on his feet, using storyboards as guidelines and preferring to rely on the images in his head.

It’s a working method that has occasionally given rise to accusations of control-freakery, which Nolan pretty much acknowledges: “I’m completely invested in every project I do,” he says.

Maybe that’s why he was stung by the recent furore over Interstellar’s sound design, when some cinema-goers complained on social media that passages of dialogue were drowned out by the film’s sound effects and score.

He doesn’t seem amused when I bring it up, and is clearly irritated by the idea that his decision to mix the sound in what he describes as an “impressionistic” way has been regarded by some as a mistake.

“Small films avail themselves of these kinds of techniques all the time and everyone’s fine with it,” he says. “But there’s a sense with a big movie that everybody has some kind of responsibility to play by the rules. And I think that’s complete bullshit.”

It’s a strange thought: Nolan the maze-builder, the maker of riddles, seeing himself as someone who works outside the lines.

“Oh, God, no,” he says, when I put it to him. “Breaking rules isn’t interesting. It’s making up new ones that keeps things exciting.”

What is the biggest misconception about you held by people who don’t know you?
I couldn’t — I don’t know. I have no idea, to be honest. I don’t know what people think about me. (laughs)

Even from articles or things, you don't feel that you’ve been misunderstood in some way?
Not significantly, truthfully. I mean, I’m always — well, I think I answered this earlier: people saying that I make cold films. I think people perhaps aren’t aware of the subjectivity of that assessment, which is often true of the way people watch films in general. But when you show somebody a film that makes a certain amount of people cry and other people say it’s cold, you’re like, “Well, clearly that’s what you’re bringing to the film.” That’s not really about me, that’s about the films. About me, I couldn’t tell you.

Inversely, what is the thing that you wish people who don’t know you knew about you? Is there something that you would like people to know about you?
No, I don’t want people to know anything about me. I mean, I’m not being facetious. The more you know about somebody who makes the films, the less you can just watch the movies — that’s my feeling — which is why doing these things [interviews] always feels a bit like— (laughs) I mean, you have to do a certain amount of promotion for the film, you have to put yourself out there, but I actually don’t want people to have me in mind at all when they’re watching the films, genuinely.

What is your favorite part of the filmmaking process? Pre-production, production, post-production, something else?

I really like the whole spread of it and the variety of it. I think if I had to choose, I would say sound mixing — I would think that’s the most fun there is.

Sky007 wrote:

Dragon_316ca wrote:As of January 2nd, Jeffrey Wells still haven't received his blu-ray screener: http://www.hollywood-elsewhere.com/2015/01/revealed/

Wells is not worthy

Rsionis wrote:

What is the biggest misconception about you held by people who don’t know you?
I couldn’t — I don’t know. I have no idea, to be honest. I don’t know what people think about me. (laughs)

Even from articles or things, you don't feel that you’ve been misunderstood in some way?
Not significantly, truthfully. I mean, I’m always — well, I think I answered this earlier: people saying that I make cold films. I think people perhaps aren’t aware of the subjectivity of that assessment, which is often true of the way people watch films in general. But when you show somebody a film that makes a certain amount of people cry and other people say it’s cold, you’re like, “Well, clearly that’s what you’re bringing to the film.” That’s not really about me, that’s about the films. About me, I couldn’t tell you.

Inversely, what is the thing that you wish people who don’t know you knew about you? Is there something that you would like people to know about you?
No, I don’t want people to know anything about me. I mean, I’m not being facetious. The more you know about somebody who makes the films, the less you can just watch the movies — that’s my feeling — which is why doing these things [interviews] always feels a bit like— (laughs) I mean, you have to do a certain amount of promotion for the film, you have to put yourself out there, but I actually don’t want people to have me in mind at all when they’re watching the films, genuinely.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/c ... ing-760897

CoolwhipSpecial wrote:Still waiting for the entire docking scene to show up on YouTube .