Christopher Nolan objects to Warner Bros. release plan, but he’s happy you can watch ‘Tenet’ at home now
Director Christopher Nolan’s latest movie, “Tenet,” was released on DVD today. (Emily Berl for The Washington Pot)
By
Geoff Edgers
Dec. 15, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. EST
There may be no stranger time to make big movies. And nobody makes them bigger than writer-director Christopher Nolan.
His films (“Interstellar,” “Inception,” “Memento”) twist time and space and the conventions of traditional cinema. They also bend budgets, with his latest, “Tenet,” rolling in at $205 million. Which might be part of why so much of the film’s release — both in theaters in September and on DVD on Dec. 15 — has been centered on the tenuous state of an industry crushed by covid-19 shutdowns.
Nolan’s plan for the digital rollout of “Tenet” was to talk mainly about the home release of his 11th film. But instead, he finds himself blasting his own studio, Warner Bros., for its decision to kick its entire slate of 2021 films to HBO Max. This isn’t about money, he says. Nolan believes the studio is not only making a business mistake in shifting “Dune,” “Matrix X” and 15 other films to the streaming service. It is betraying the filmmakers.
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“It’s about what the French call droit moral,” he says in a recent interview from his home in Los Angeles. “Do they own it absolutely, because they paid for it or they financed it? And that is not a purely legalistic question; it’s a question of ethics as well. It’s a question of partnership and collaboration. They did not speak to those filmmakers. They did not consult them about what their plans were for their work. And I felt that somebody needed to point out that that wasn’t the right way to treat those filmmakers.”
He declined to say how the HBO Max decision will impact his long-term relationship with Warner Bros., which declined to comment for this story. In a wide-ranging discussion, he talked about the making of “Tenet,” a mind-bending take on the James Bond films that stars John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki and Kenneth Branagh, as well as his writing process, philosophy on moviemaking, and
“The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries and Marvels of Christopher Nolan.” Tom Shone’s just-published book walks Nolan through his catalogue, offering both a technical window into the work and an analysis of how Nolan’s life connects to his films.
(The following interview has been edited for clarity and condensed.)
Elizabeth Debicki, left, and John David Washington in a scene from ”Tenet.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Bros. Entertainment via AP)
Q: I don't think people understand, because of how much discussion took place about the theatrical release, that in some ways this is the real release of "Tenet" in the United States. Back in September, hardly any theaters here were actually open for business.
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A: With all of the adversity in the world for 2020 affecting people in all kinds of horrendous ways, we were very lucky, very privileged to be able to release the film in parts of the world that managed the virus with appropriate response and then figuring out ways to safely reopen theaters. And the film did what it did with $300 million in those markets, and counting. Which sends a very positive message about the future of exhibition for when things can reopen safely and all the rest. In the United States, we were never able to release the film properly. I say “here” because I’m sitting in Los Angeles, and obviously to not open in your hometown and not be able to market the film because the studio was obviously hoping that Los Angeles and New York would open if the virus receded, which obviously has not happened, did not happen. The reality is, there’s people in the world with real problems. This is a pretty trivial concern about the release of film. But delving more into it, I’m a kid of the home video generation. And so we’ve all, and myself in particular, spent many years working with the studios on technical strategies of how to maximize image and sound quality for presentation, how we get it out there in that form and everything. And the short version of it is, I’m just super excited for people in America, in L.A. and New York in particular, to be able to see the movie.
Q: As I understand it, the idea for "Tenet" emerged 10 years ago?
A: The germ of the idea, the initial image being this idea of the bullet being sucked out of the wall into the barrel of a gun. That’s something I’ve had rattling around for about, gosh, 25 years. I used it in “
Memento” in a metaphorical way, a symbolic way to explain . . . to sort of suggest the structure of the script beginning. But I’d always harbored an ambition to construct a story where the characters would deal with that as a physical reality. So, over the years, it’s sort of progressed in dribs and drabs and baby steps forwards, and eventually I realized that the spy genre, the big sort of globe-trotting espionage thriller, was the way I wanted to deal with that.