Christopher Nolan has been on a righteously angry tear recently, laying into Warner Bros. — who’ve distributed his movies going back to Insomnia, in 2001 — for their controversial new deal with HBO Max. He’s absolutely livid that the studio is releasing its entire 2021 film slate on the streamer the same day they hit theaters — a decision he thinks is short-sighted and which could impact the future of big budget filmmaking, and the large crews they employ. But he’s not all sturm und drang. For instance, the brainiac auteur blurted out what may be the most relatable thing he’s ever said: He’s a big fan of Fast and Furious movies!
As per IGN, Nolan — whose Tenet, which underperformed in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic, was no doubt partly responsible for Warner Bros’ brash decision — was a guest on MTV’s Happy Sad Confused podcast. He apparently wound up being more happy than sad or confused, getting so comfortable that he confessed to have a big soft spot for a franchise that’s as gleefully dumb as his are stubbornly smart.
But there’s one he preferred more than the other seven titles, and it’s the one that has more cult appeal than the rest. “I’m sort of an original recipe [guy],” Nolan said on the podcast. “I mean the Rob Cohen original. But I’ve got a very soft spot for Tokyo Drift, actually. And then the skill as Justin Lin’s iterations, as they got crazier and bigger and crazier and bigger, they became something else, but something else kind of fun.”
He continued:
“The fun thing about those movies is even as they’ve gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, as sequels have to do … everyone always complains that sequels get bigger but we’re the people making sequels get bigger, we do want them bigger, you don’t want them smaller, it’s the Alien 3 lesson that [David] Fincher learned. You can do it but it’s not going to make anybody happy, even though personally I love that film, a lot more than he does in fact.”
So Nolan is also a fan of David Fincher’s Alien 3! And his razor sharp mind was evidently not broken by a franchise featuring skydiving cars and the planet’s longest runway. That said, he did admit he was an “original recipe guy,” preferring the more stripped-down and realistic (so to speak) entries. It’s nice to see some big name love for Tokyo Drift, the threequel and something of an outlier in the franchise, even if it did introduce a major fan favorite, namely Sung Kang’s Han Lue. Left brain filmmakers whose movies are sometimes as complicated as a Saturday New York Times crossword: They’re just like us!
(Via IGN)