Christopher Nolan Tribute (Modern Masters Award, 2011): Santa Barbara Film Festival

Reviewed by Stacie Manifold.  Attended at the Santa Barbara Film Festival 2011.

Christopher Nolan was awarded the Modern Masters Award this year at the Santa Barbara  Film Festival on Sunday, January 30.  It was a honor to listen to him share a little insight on his life and career.  Before Mr. Nolan was brought on stage, a montage of his movies was shown.  After being introduced, moderator Pete Hammond asked what it’s like to see your work flashed in front of you like that?  Mr. Nolan replied that he was wired to see someone put together cuts of his films and saw connections between them that he had never realized.

Because Christopher Nolan’s film career spans only 7 features, the discussion of each film was more in-depth that other tributes I have attended.  Hammond started at the beginning and walked us through the movies one by one, showing a clip then discussing it with Mr. Nolan.  Nolan began experimenting making movies at age 8 with his brother using Star Wars figures and a Super 8 camera.  He’s come a long way to make a movie like Inception.

For his first movie, Nolan began shooting with video, but didn’t like it and switched to 16 mm. The movie was called “Following” and was made for 3000 pounds, equivalent to about $5,000 US dollars.  He and his crew and cast had day jobs to pay the bills, so shot the movie on Saturdays.  The movie took about a year to film at that rate.  Nolan mentioned something interesting in that he chose actors who could ad lib, because if something was a little off, the scene could continue since they frankly couldn’t afford to do a second take.

In contrast to Following, Nolan’s next movie, Memento was shot in scope and had a $3.4 million budget.  The film is based on a short story written by Nolan’s brother Jonathon called Memento Mori.  In fact, Nolan is fortunate to have many close people around him as support and partners.  His wife Emma Thomas frequently produces the films he’s working on and his brother has helped write many of his scripts.

Insomnia, a film Nolan directed in 2002, starred Al Pacino.  Nolan described shooting an important scene in the movie filmed in the woods where the camera focus is on Pacino with fog in the background.  Instead of trying to shoot a perfect take where the fog and Pacino’s performance both worked, Nolan chose to put a white scrim behind Pacino so he could focus on just his part of the scene and not worry about the elements.  In the long run this way of working took fewer takes, encouraged a better performance from the actor and is great advice for aspiring filmmakers.

At the end of the discussion, we were treated with an appearance by Leonardo DiCaprio to present Christopher Nolan his award.  By the clapping and flashbulbs when Leo appeared on stage, I’d say the audience enjoyed seeing him just as much if not more that Nolan.  Overall, the evening was expertly moderated by Pete Hammond; Christopher Nolan was open, truthful and educating; and the icing on the cake was seeing Leo in person.