Chris Chris, Nolan Nolan… diehard fans chanted this slogan in unison, (an ode to his Dark Knight trilogy) at the special Mumbai screening of ‘Dunkirk’ over the weekend. As the sounds echoed in the theatre, the much-acclaimed director remained calm and collected. He playfully pointed out that the screening got sold out also because ‘it is a good film’.
The British filmmaker loosely reminds you of a more casual version of Daniel Day-Lewis’ Reynolds Woodcock in ‘The Phantom Thread’ — a genius singularly focused on his job, avoiding any sort of distraction. You can sense his simmering impatience underneath a Zen like exterior.
Nolan’s extreme focus in times of digital clutter is noteworthy and perhaps explains why he doesn’t use a cell phone even today. Elaborating on why he doesn’t use mobile phones, or emails in the digital age, Nolan says,
“This way I don’t have to worry about my Facebook data (smiles). I am not interested in that side of life actually. We may live in a digital age but we live in an analogue world. One of the things we all love about celluloid film is that it’s a very good analogy for, the way I see it, having a relationship with real life. Digital doesn’t have that. So analogue remains a powerful storytelling tool. I don’t have a cell phone but I don’t think that is relevant to my choice of medium, they are two different questions. One of the problems with digital semantics, which Tacita (Dean) and I talked about a lot, is that the word digital is essentially meaningless at this point in our culture. What does that even mean? It’s used to describe everything, and everything uses digital technology. My films use massive amounts of digital technology. Tacita in her presentation yesterday, talked about how she uses digital technology to make the masks that go into her camera, that then allows her to do multiple exposures on celluloid films. We all use digital in this and in that, but it doesn’t really mean anything.”
