What do we really know about Christopher Nolan? For a filmmaker whose body of work is perhaps the most watched, and discussed, of any this century, the British blockbuster titan is still an enigma. Often, filmmakers expose the rawest and most personal parts of their psyche through their output. It’s true of someone like Steven Spielberg, whose parents’ messy divorce coloured, in different ways, more or less everything he ever made; or Martin Scorsese, whose work is all shaped and informed by his Italian Catholic upbringing. After 13 films, though, Nolan has seemed to leave us little the wiser. Or to put it in movie terms: what, exactly, is his “Rosebud”?
Nolan’s latest film, The Odyssey, might offer the clearest look yet into the mind of a man who has always resisted conventional notions of auteur analysis – though that’s not necessarily saying much. Nolan told The Hollywood Reporter back in 2015 that “the more you know about somebody who makes the films, the less you can just watch the movies”, and that he didn’t “want people to have me in mind at all when they’re watching the films”. He prefers, in other words, to let his movies do the talking. (But who can hear what they’re saying over those famously muddy sound mixes?)
