Video: Christopher Nolan in Conversation

A BFI hosted 45-minute Q&A with the noted filmmaker.

This just went live yesterday: An in-depth conversation with Christopher Nolan covering several of his films including Memento, the Batman trilogy, and Oppenheimer.

An excerpt about his screenwriting process:

“The first script I ever wrote, which had a nonlinear structure, was my script for ‘Following.’ I had the structure mapped out, and I thought the way to do it would be to write the story in chronological terms and edit it to that structure. What I found in that process is I had to do so much rewriting to make it coherent, to make it flow for an audience, so I never did it that way again.”

“Every time that I’ve taken on a non-chronological structure, I’ve done a lot of thinking about it, working it out, drawing a lot of diagrams, but then I write the script from page one through to page 124 — or in the case of ‘Oppenheimer,’ page 180 — always writing for the way the audience can see it sitting in the cinema seat. I find that, that way, you get the appropriate narrative momentum, you get the right connections between scenes, because you’re thinking of it in the right way, you’re not imposing the structure after the fact. So, for me, that’s been important to do.”

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