Christopher Nolan, the film director behind movies including Oppenheimer, Dunkirk and Interstellar, is to be awarded a BFI fellowship for “constantly pushing the limits” of cinema.
The honour, which is often awarded to actors and film-makers towards the end of their careers, will go to Nolan at what appears to be the peak of his.
In September, Oppenheimer, his three-hour epic about the development of the atomic bomb, became the largest-grossing biopic of all time.
The 53-year-old has been hailed as a “blockbuster auteur” for more than a decade. He has a reputation for box-office success, even if some of his films have baffled audiences and critics.
Some of his more challenging works include Tenet, which received a five-star review in the Guardian despite being “gigantically confusing”; Inception, which audiences needed to watch twice to understand, according to its star Leonardo DiCaprio, and Memento, a thriller that is told backwards.
In its citation for the fellowship, the BFI said Nolan, who holds dual UK-US citizenship, was “constantly pushing the limits of what large-scale film-making can be whilst retaining a reverence for the history of the medium and the primacy of cinema-going”.
He will be presented with the fellowship on 14 February next year at the BFI chair’s dinner, which is hosted by the BFI chair, Tim Richards.
Nolan, whose work also includes the Dark Knight Batman trilogy, which grossed more than $1bn worldwide, said: “I am thrilled and honoured to be accepting a BFI fellowship from an organisation so dedicated to preserving both cinema’s history as well as its future.”
In 2002, Memento was the first of many of Nolan’s films to receive Oscar nominations. In 2010, Inception received eight nominations, and won in four categories.
Nolan received his first best director Oscar nomination in 2017 for Dunkirk, which depicts the allies’ retreat from the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk during the second world war. Nolan’s other movies include Insomnia, a psychological thriller starring Al Pacino as a detective on the hunt for a killer in an Alaska town.
Richards said: “Christopher Nolan is one of the greatest film-makers of the 21st century, creating hugely popular movies that have grossed over $6bn worldwide. His movies are all made for the big screen to challenge and entertain audiences around the world.
“Christopher’s commitment and support of the cinema industry is legendary. He has also been at the forefront of preserving celluloid through his involvement with the Film Foundation and his own support via the Morf Foundation for the BFI’s photochemical work, all done to ensure that current and future audiences will be able to continue to enjoy and learn from our incredibly rich history of cinema for many years to come.”
Other BFI fellows include the film-makers Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Orson Welles, Spike Lee, Satyajit Ray, Robert Altman, the actors Peggy Ashcroft, Jeanne Moreau and Elizabeth Taylor, and the film critic Dilys Powell.
