Christopher Nolan has never been shy about his deep love for the James Bond films and how much they’ve influenced his work. But recently, the iconic director revealed that, for the first time, he made the conscious decision to set aside the Bond movies and not partake in a long-standing tradition before filming his upcoming blockbuster Tenet.
In an interview with Total Film (via GamesRadar), Nolan opened up about forgoing his tried-and-true practice of screening specific Bond films before filming. Normally, the director would show his cast the direct inspiration for certain scenes, but for Tenet, he chose to take a different approach despite the movie trafficking in the same sort of globe-trotting espionage that would make 007 feel right at home. Instead, Nolan wanted to reference the spy genre through “a memory and a feeling” instead of the “specifics”:
“It’s totally in my bones. I don’t need to reference the movies and look at them again. It’s about trying to re-engage with your childhood connection with those movies, with the feeling of what it’s like to go someplace new, someplace fresh. It actually has to take them somewhere they haven’t been before, and that’s why no one’s ever been able, really, to do their own version of James Bond or something. It doesn’t work. And that’s not at all what this is. This is much more my attempt to create the sort of excitement in grand-scale entertainment I felt from those movies as a kid, in my own way.”
Again, Nolan’s well-known love for the Bond films is the reason he’s on the short list every time the franchise is in need of a new director. He’s been sprinkling in Bond homages going all the way back to 2005’s Batman Begins, and in a 2018 interview with Variety, Nolan didn’t even try to hide that Inception was an attempt at making his own version of Bond.
(Via Total Film)