1970-present
Latest News: Christopher Wins First 2 Oscars for 'Oppenheimer'
More than 20 years after his first nomination for Memento, director Christopher Nolan is finally an Oscar winner.
Nolan, 53, won his first Academy Award for Best Director for Oppenheimer on March 10. He had little time to bask in his victory before earning a second trophy, when the 2023 biopic expectedly won the biggest honor of the night, Best Picture, moments later. The director thanked the “incredible” cast and crew of the film, including Best Actor winner Cillian Murphy, as well his wife Emma Thomas, the film’s producer.
“Movies are just over a hundred years old. I mean, imagine being there a hundred years into a painting or theater. We don’t know where this incredible journey is going from here, but to know that you think I’m a meaningful part of it means the world to me,” Nolan said, thanking the academy for his director win.
Oppenheimer won 7 Oscars total, including the the two male actor categories thanks to Murphy and Robert Downey Jr.
Who Is Christopher Nolan?
Christopher Nolan is a British-American filmmaker known for his complex storytelling in big-budget movies such as Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014) and Tenet (2020). He most recently helmed the historical biopic Oppenheimer, released in 2023, receiving an Academy Award nomination for directing.
Nolan first garnered attention for his early movies, Following (1998) and Memento (2000). After directing Insomnia, Nolan became famous for Batman Begins (2005) and the subsequent Dark Knight trilogy based on the Batman comic-book franchise. The 2008 sequel The Dark Knight broke box office records and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2020.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Christopher Edward Nolan
BORN: July 30, 1970
BIRTHPLACE: London, England
SPOUSE: Emma Thomas (m. 1997)
CHILDREN: Flora, Magnus, Rory, Oliver
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Leo
Early Years and Training
Born on July 30, 1970, in London, Christopher Nolan started creating films as a child, making his first short at 7. Nolan traveled between Chicago and London while growing up—his mother was from America, and his father was from Britain—and after attending Haileybury School, eventually went on to attend University College London, where he studied English literature and joined the school’s film society. Before releasing longer-form work, he created shorts like Tarantula, Larceny, and Doodlebug.
Directing Beginnings
Nolan’s major film debut, Following, was a black-and-white, small-budget work about a lonely writer obsessed with following strangers and then partners with a burglar. The film’s unconventional, non-linear narrative scheme helped garner interest in Nolan’s work and propelled him to his next film, Memento. The noir-ish indie feature starred Guy Pearce as an amnesiac man who relies on Polaroids and copious note-taking while seeking vengeance. Nolan adapted the work from a story written by his brother, Jonathan Nolan, and the film received two Oscar nominations for its editing and screenplay.
Nolan continued presenting psychological thrillers with the remake Insomnia, starring Al Pacino as a police officer in Alaska handling a murder investigation while contending with a lingering guilt. The director’s career then traveled into the stratosphere when he agreed to helm the re-launch of the comic book hero Batman with the 2005 film Batman Begins, starring Christian Bale as the titular character. The movie went on to earn more than $372 million worldwide. Nolan next released 2006’s The Prestige, a well-received story about dueling magicians starring Bale, Hugh Jackman, and Scarlett Johansson.
The Dark Knight and Inception
In July 2008, Nolan’s Batman sequel, The Dark Knight, opened and set a record with the highest weekend gross in the United States, at $158 million. It became one of the top five highest-grossing films in America.
While the production received acclaim, including several Oscar and Golden Globe nominations, sadness also marked the proceedings. Heath Ledger, who starred as the villain the Joker, died from an accidental prescription drug overdose before the film was released. Ledger won a Golden Globe and Oscar posthumously for his work, and Nolan accepted the Globe award on Ledger’s behalf.
Two summers later, Nolan returned to the box office with Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the leader of a group of dream-traveling mercenaries. The film was another critically lauded blockbuster for the director and won four Academy Awards for its technical wizardry. Nolan followed Inception with the third blockbuster film in the Batman franchise, 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, this time starring Anne Hathaway as Catwoman and Marion Cotillard (who was also in Inception) as Miranda Tate.
Nolan was the sole screenwriter for Following and Inception. Excluding Insomnia, he has shared writing credits for his other films with Jonathan Nolan, among others.
Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Tenet
In the fall of 2014, Nolan returned to the big screen with Interstellar, a nearly three-hour sci-fi epic that follows the journey of a team of astronauts seeking a new world for the inhabitants of a besieged Earth. The visually arresting, existential film stars Matthew McConaughey, Hathaway, and Jessica Chastain, among others.
In 2017, the acclaimed director brought another epic to the big screen, the World War II film Dunkirk. Built around three storylines offering different perspectives on a dramatic turn of events in 1940, Dunkirk mainly earned rave reviews for its portrayals of the tensions and terrors of war, picking up Golden Globe nominations for Best Motion Picture—Drama and Best Director, as well as an Academy Award nod for Best Director. Three years later, in 2020, Nolan helmed the mind-bending thriller Tenet.
However, Nolan’s next project would bring him wide acclaim and put him on the cusp of his first Academy Award win.
Oscar for Oppenheimer
Like Dunkirk, Nolan found inspiration in global military history for his next film, the 2023 biopic Oppenheimer. Starring actor Cillian Murphy—who has appeared in six of Nolan’s projects—in the titular role, the movie tells the story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in developing the first atomic bomb through the Manhattan Project.
Oppenheimer is based on the 2005 book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Nolan acquired the screen rights and read the book three times to prepare a screenplay he felt reflected the magnitude of the subject matter. “Nuclear weapons are in a class of their own in terms of destructive power for humankind,” Nolan told Time. “It speaks to the heart of why I wanted to make a film about the Manhattan Project. These [scientists] were the most brilliant people on the planet; they knew exactly what was going to happen.” Nolan shot the movie using 65mm IMAX film and insisted on using practical effects for the film’s showcase scene, a recreation of the Trinity test conducted in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.
Aided by a viral marketing push coinciding with the same-day release of Barbie and an ensemble cast including Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, and Emily Blunt, the film became the third-highest grossing globally in 2023, and Nolan received numerous accolades for his directing. He won the 2024 Golden Globe Award for Best Director, and Oppenheimer was named Best Picture—Drama. Nolan would earn equivalent honors at the BAFTA, Critics Choice, and Directors Guild of America Awards.
Likewise, Nolan was nominated for Best Director at the 2024 Academy Awards and won—while Oppenheimer was named Best Picture.
Cinematic Sensibilities
Nolan’s movies are known for their intellectualism, psychological depth, and unorthodox storytelling. Both Following and Memento had non-chronological narrative structures, with Memento receiving much of its attention for unfolding episodically in backward time. And Inception has stories that exist within other stories as the characters explore the realm of a person’s highly layered unconscious mind.
The director’s work has also focused on male protagonists who try to come to grips with their past while working through the complex challenges of the present day. Women in his films have been written as allies, heroes, or romantic interests, some of whom also become casualties.
Nolan imbues vivid artistic sensibilities into films that are positioned as mainstream entertainment, as seen with the imagery and cinematic choices that abound in the Batman series, Inception and Interstellar, with scenes resembling surreal paintings given life. Nolan’s choices have significantly influenced filmmaking, proving that complexity can exist in the commercial.
Wife and Personal Life
During his first week of school at University College London in 1989, Nolan met fellow student Emma Thomas. They connected through their participation in the school’s Film Society, kicking off an enduring life and business partnership. The couple married in 1997 and have four children: Magnus, Oliver, and Rory, as well as daughter Flora.
Additionally, Thomas regularly serves as a producer on all of Nolan’s feature films. The two founded their own production company, Syncopy Inc., in 2001. “We’ve known each other a very long time. It’s wonderful working with people who will completely tell you the truth. There’s no agenda in the creative conversations,” Nolan told CBS Mornings of their filmmaking process in 2014. “It’s a very honest response. You need people around you who you have that relationship with.”
According to Screen Rant, Nolan uses his children’s names in working titles for his projects to shroud them in as much secrecy as possible. The director has also given his kids cameo appearances in his films. Most recently, Flora appeared in Oppenheimer as a young woman who suffered severe burns from an atomic explosion during a vision sequence.
Nolan and Thomas now live in Los Angeles. The director has dual citizenship within the United States and Great Britain.
Net Worth
According to Celebrity Net Worth, Nolan has amassed a fortune valued at around $250 million through the success of his films.
Quotes
- If you picture the story as a maze, you don’t want to be hanging above the maze, watching the characters make the wrong choices because it’s frustrating. You actually want to be in the maze with them, making the turns at their side... I quite like to be in that maze.
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