NOTE:
- The following text was generated by AI from the video and contains certain errors.
- Content copyright belongs to the original author.
- This page is only for archiving personal study notes and will not be used for any commercial channels.
In Conversation With Nolan & Villeneuve | IMAX® Behind the Frame
00:04 The net is a remarkable cinematic achievement, and I’m always in love with movies that are tackling with that existential sensation that you’re walking into the unknown. It happens with movies that are dealing with time. A film like legitimate kiss marker, I suppose, that you like. Or movies like that. It’s a sensation that I felt when I watch 2001 Space ODC the first time are watching an inception on interstellar, it’s, it requires a lot of discipline and a lot of mastery to be able to achieve that. And I’m curious about for Tennett, if you could share with us, where does the idea come from? What is the birth of the idea of this mad idea of the inverted entropy, I.
00:56 Think the kicking off point really was a long time ago when I made one of my earlier films, memento. And the beginning of a mentor has a sequence that’s shown in reverse chronology because the entire film is then structured in reverse chronology. And so I included a backwards opening, you know, where guy piss shoots Joe Pantheon in reverse and, you know, begins with him to catching the gun and that kind of thing. And it's sort of stuck with me that I'd be interested in exploring that reality, the reality that the camera can show us that we can't see with the first, you know, the movie generation, you know, this hundred years or so, we're the first people to ever be able to see time in different ways. It's the movie camera that's shown us time backwards. It's one of the original kind of fascinating effects of what a movie camera can show us. And so I became interested in the idea quite some time ago, really following on from momentum rather than the structure of the story being backwards. What if you could literally change the direction of time for a character, for an object, and have two directions of time existing in the same frame. So not time travel, not jumping around in time, but actually looking at the physical process of time, which is I had dealt with a lot in intercellar.
02:32 And it’s been a lot of time talking to keep Thorn, great physicist to help me with tenant as well, because we, it was so much fun sitting around talking to him about the implications of real world physics and so much of it is truly stranger than fiction when you’re dealing with relativity, black holes, you know, those kind of things. And we’d explored that so much and enjoyed exploring that together. And it’s stellar. As I got into tenant, I, you know, I call them and I sort of talking about this notion of if you could invert the entropy of an object or a person. And some interesting things immediately came out of it, like the idea that you wouldn't be able to breathe there because it wouldn't pass across the membranes in the same way.
03:14 Or eat a chicken, for instance. What happened if you.
03:18 There's a lot of what ifs that the film is designed to inspire.
03:24 But it’s this, this. So the idea of the, to approach time with entropy came from you and not keep.
03:36 It did. I'd always been fascinated by the notion of that all the laws of physics are reversible. They're all symmetrical in time, in terms of time. And so there's no reason that the entire universe can't run backwards except for one law, and that's entropy. And there’s, I suppose you’d call it a conflict or a disagreement in, amongst physicists as to whether that’s cause or effect, you know, whether entropy is the sign of the arrow of time or whether it’s the cause of it for the purposes of our film, we view it as the cause of it. So we s we postulate, okay, what if there were machine that could, you know, flip.
04:13 That? And then the idea to merge that with the aspire movie. Yeah, can spontaneously or you leave that. The idea is living this and the idea of a time travel lives by itself for a while. Or.
04:30 I think for me it was always fused with at least a thriller scenario. I mean, coming from this idea of Guy Pearson, Memento, shooting somebody backwards, you know, the kind of kinetics involved in action cinema thrillers. So I think the spy genre was always really part of it for me because it’s the genre that gives you access to all of these wonderful kinetic action movie tropes. You know, the gunfight, the car chase, you know, armies fighting each other’s kind of things. And what I wanted to do was really explore the sort of experience of watching an actual film and watching a spy movie and sort of build out from that and try and build this sort of big screen, very immersive experience, you know, based on that to try and sort of take it to another level and find a reason for an audience to watch a car chase again and watch it in a different way and try and sort of look down the other end of the telescope at a lot of these tropes that we all kind of know and love from action cinema.
05:38 And more specifically from James Bond, because I felt that you were playing with the bond is almost a genre in itself. And you have like some entertaining one there. You have like the exotic place, you have the bundle, you have like the villain, whether that has always like, and I felt that you were playing with those codes and something having fun and sort of in a subversive way.
06:02 Yeah, I’ve always been a huge fan of the bond films as anyone who’ve seen any of my movies would know, but especially this one or is inception as well, I suppose. I think there’s also a lot of the lekari approach to espionage, you know, and I think partly that’s because with a bond film, we have James Bond at the center. Nobody worries too much about the reality of the spy world that they’re in. But when you have an anonymous figure at the center of the protagonist, you know, John David Washington character, I wanted to take on some of that complexity, some of that sort of jargon based, sort of more John Le Carrie, more bit more sort of real world spycraft feeling about the character and the way interact.
06:48 Did you, do you heard that Spielberg created any imagine that he was not allowed to direct a bond movie. Did you direct your own bond movie during Tenneta?
07:02 I think I did, yeah. And I think I really got to go. Yeah, I got to have a lot of fun with it. Certainly with inception, you know, you look at the end of inception with the sort of ski chase and the big fortress in the snow, that was very much a sort of homage to on our Majesty Secret Service, which is my favorite of the bonds. So like, but I think with this, yeah, I just went into that mythology fully because what I was sort of trying to do was create a stylized science fiction experience on top of that. And so you’re trying to use the same way memento, try to use the familiarity of the tropes of the film noir. You know, tenant is an attempt to use the audience’s familiarity with this by movie genre, the bond movie, to be able to take it someplace a little crazier, someplace a little different and have us experience it in a different way.
07:54 There’s something about, there’s a lot of spectacular scenes in tenet, but one of them that really absolutely blew my mind was this close combat between the protagonist. And himself. And it’s probably, it’s an, I don’t, I don’t say that to please you, but I, it’s probably one of the most exciting comeback sequence and mystery. Seriously, it’s mind blowing what you real group you were able to achieve on camera. And I would love if you could explain to us a little bit, how did you achieve having both actors fighting in different I’m direction?
08:38 It was not so much my achievement as my challenge to an incredible crew. George Cottle, stunt coordinator, Jackson Spoddle, fight coordinator. And then John David Washington, who was in the NFL is incredible athlete and had such dedication to learning this very long fight from both sides. So he had two versions of the fight to learn, protagonist, antagonist, and then he had to learn it backwards for both parts as well. And we shot at Day 1, you know, we started with it. And, you know, I just wanted, because I sort of felt like sometimes it’s good to start with the hardest stuff because we knew there were so many mind bending things to work out later in the film. I felt like of every department, you know, if stunts and wardrobe and production designs, camera, you know, if everybody could come together and figure out how to do that, we’d be in better shape for when we got to the middle of talent and shut the whole city down and did a massive car chase. You know, we really had to know what we were doing by that. And so it was this approach to shooting everything in camera. There are no, you know, visual effects in those fights. And it’s all incredible performance and knowing the fight for different ways and being able to switch with it.
09:59 And then Hesita shooting on IMAX handheld, according to a rule set that I put in place that basically said we weren’t ever going to reverse the footage. So we weren’t ever gonna use something from that. We’d shot for the first fight sequence, we see it for the second. Each piece of film is unique, and so everything is changed slightly in order to give you a different perspective on things. And so, I mean, the most obvious example for people seen it for more than once may have noticed is the tint, you know, on the masks that John David is wearing, it’s completely dark. The first time you're seeing that antagonist. The second time you see it, it's a lighter tint so that you can see his eyes through it because we're seeing it from his perspective. So the cameras closer to him, we're seeing his expressions and doing that similarly with the sound we're using, you know, his sound as foreground. So first as the suited protagonist without the mask, and then the second time we see it, we're favoring the sound of the guy behind the mask, whose eyes we can now see a bit. But the camera angles are different on the axis is different.
11:06 But it meant that one actor was doing the choreography backwards and the other one was going, and it’s just like, I’m trying to explain it to myself, Chris. I failed all night. I thought about it last night. I was okay.
11:19 There’s wanted to do it forward. So John David had to do forwards. He then had to get change different costume and do it backwards and needed to know, sorry, I misspelled. So there was no wardrobe change. You’d do it backwards in the same wardrobe, although we had a different tie, so it was stiffer so it wouldn’t move the same way, that kind of thing. And then he would have to go get, change into the SWAT outfit, do the entire fight forwards, then do the entire fight backwards in that wardrobe. And then we took everybody to Estonia, to Thailand, and we shut down freeway across the city. And we had to do that. The stunt guys had to do it with cars, had to do it with driving and literally do a chase forwards with regular vehicles forwards and with vehicles that would drive backwards at speed. And then the other way around. And so everything was sort of shot for different ways, and they did just an incredible job putting together all these rigs to be able to do that.
12:17 It’s remarkable. The, the, the, I’ve seen the movie many times, and I love movies that are like enigmas movies that the more you revisit them, you see new things every time. But you have to watch them a couple of times. Internet, it’s definitely one of those. And ad, I went online to see how people dealt with and I seen it. I if remarkable graphics where people were trying to explain and it looks like a madman subway, you know, like where the map and it even then when you look at it visually, it’s pretty impressive.
12:57 It’s still difficult to understand. My question is, as a filmmaker, when you make a regular movie with a very simple narrative, you still have sometimes some of your crew members that are confused. Were you the only one keeping the compass unset or.
13:12 You? I’ve done films where I’m, I’m. I mean, that role of the only person, I think with a lot of inception, sometimes I was the person with a handle on it. With tenor, what we found is I had a handle on it, was writing the script, but when it comes to the execution and the detail, I didn’t have a handle on it anymore than anyone else.
13:34 We had to pre visualize things. We had to look at computer graphics. We had to use tools to be able to look at the palindrome of each sequence, to look at it one way, look at the other and work on it from both ends together. So of any of the films I’ve done, it was the most collaborative effort. You know, we would all get in the room and there were no, we said right from Day 1, we learn this, there are no stupid questions. Because what we found is everybody’s brain. You would, you’d get certain things right and you couldn’t understand why other people couldn’t get them, and then you’d suddenly realize you were wrong. You know, and a lot of it was about diagrams and rules and all the rest. So a huge amount of work when it’s a pre visualization and we would change things on the previous to make sure that the secrets is all worked, you know, completely. So it was a very collaborative effort. It was never a, the basic concept behind Tennett with the mixing of timelines within the frame, it was something that we realize as we shot, you were never able to intuit. It’s something you have to experience so you could describe. And even in the edit suite, you know, was working with Jen Lame and, you know, I would try and explain something to it, but ultimately you had to sort of put it together and then talk about it, look at it and then look at it different directions and talk about it. And that’s what I kind of loved about the concept. It’s purely a cinematic concept, you know, you have to sit in a movie theater and watch it and let it wash over you and sort of experience. It’s not something you can intellectualize.
15:08 Yeah, I understand that. I would love if you were talking a bit about IMAX earlier and to talk about what is the percentage of max in the movie exactly. Gosh, I know, but I don’t know. You do you wanna. No, it’s been a few years. So, but, but it, but it’s, there’s, let’s see, it’s not the old movie. No. And I was wondering, oh, what is your decision for? Is it driven by sound?
15:36 Me, a lot of time is driven by sound because IMAX film cameras are very noisy. They’re huge and cumbersome, very noisy. And so you have to make decisions about whether when you post synchronize the sound or whether you wanna be able to record and use the real performances, which I would prefer. So the film is a mix of 65 millimeter, 5 perf, which you can, you know, pan Vision has a quiet camera for that. And that’s the letterbox format and that it expands to the 15 per 70 mil usually for the action sequences. And what we found over the years is there are different cut points you can mix, you know, you can put that cut point in a different place to either make the screen feel like it's suddenly expanding or you can disguise the cuts. I mean, in the final sequence when the protagonist is in the back of the car, all the shots inside the car, a letter box, and the ones outside aren't. And it plays because of the low ceiling and the dark ceiling of the car. So it's something that from, we first started to play with in the dark night. Yeah, absolutely. In messing around with it ever since in different ways.
16:39 Because it’s, it creates almost it’s a new way to install in the use a new way of a new editing tool in some ways, yeah, create impact and yeah, as you rightly said, to tell you the truth, I remember studying at the Dark Night and interstellar the first time I for part 1 when I had to for the first time shooting 1 for 3 to trying to make my own decisions about. I will.
17:08 Approach part 1 of Dune, June, which reminds me, so the five minute piece you saw at the front, which is from June 2, I just wanna turn the tables cuz we’re running out of time and ask you a few questions about June 2.
17:26 Talking about. I.
17:27 Know, I know and I know. Spoilers and all arrests, not much that you could say about at this point. But I’ve seen it, so I can’t say whatever I feel like about it being respectful spoilers, but watching the piece into this format, I was frankly just thrilled how amazing the translation is to this format for the film. I think it’s a incredibly exciting way for people to see it. And what I was really struck by was the sense of immersion in that world. There’s a little bit of, we talked about a little bit of grit to it. There’s a little bit of the emotion of that you feel, you know, watching that scene where, you know, Tim is reunited and reveals himself, it, it’s thrilling and very emotional, as it is in the finish film. I just wanted to ask you, looking at the minds, the detail of that world and how it works, where does, where has that all come from? Because without saying too much about the finished film, it’s a film that has so many unique images, so many things you’ve never seen before in this movie time after time. And I was so struck by the detail of everything, those minds coming out of the sand and things like that. And they’re not all from the book. I mean, where is that coming from with your team? How are you putting those details together?
18:49 Frankly, it’s like things that I spent a lot of time in the screenplay I wrote with John Spade, but I spent a lot of time myself alone. And through the years, there’s ideas that I accumulated that I wanted to insert in this film and in this, really, it was all inspired by Frank Herbert, the book. But it’s true that I had to come up with. I just to bring the words in a more cinematic way. And it’s just like a lot of things are coming out of the storyboard process as well, where I have to translate a scene and to find the most economic and the most expressive perceive. We to bring ideas to the screen where it’s almost like an extension of my brain, where I can, in a very intimate moment, dream. That’s where a lot of ideas are coming from, visual ideas are coming from. Are you a good withdrawal? Are.
19:42 You? Not particularly. And I don’t know she’s storyboard that much. I’ve done certain sequences. I mean, it’s fascinating to hear that you s so you creatively, you started with storyboarding before you ever got a camera.
19:55 And the thing is that I feel still today, once the screenplay is done, I will storyboard most the of the movie of, if not the entire movie. And it’s a new way to rewrite and to approach, bring the words closer to the camera. And I then, once the storyboard I finish, I rewrite the screenplay again from the storyboards because there’s a lot of changes that to be found through the storyboards and it’s a way also to for me to find the alphabet and the vocabulary that would be used, the semantic alphabet of the film, the rhythm, everything is in the boards.
20:30 And is that before you have the whole team on? Absolutely. I’m sorry.
20:33 I do it by myself. And it’s a way to dream about the movie in the most intimate way. It’s one of my favorite moment of the film process. Now, I, there’s a rule on my set is that the storyboard precedes the screenplay and nature precede the storyboard. So which means that most of the time I threw the storyboard out and we improvise with the camera, but it secures me to find the movie with the boards. I think it’s almost a different way to, right, to go deeper into the screenwriting process, more specifically for the cinematic sequences.
21:07 So what do you feel comfortable telling this audience about the new film? What are you comfortable revealing in this environment, if anything?
21:18 But listen, first of all, it’s like a movie that I’ve tried to create that would be a standalone, meaning that it’s like a direct continuity of Part 1. But I wanted the movie to be able, someone who has, would have not seen part 1 will be able to enjoy part 2. I gave enough clues in it to make sure that someone, yeah, you don’t need to have seen Part 1. I will say that I feel it’s a much more, I don’t know if you agree me, a bit more muscular movie. It’s a movie that has more action sequence and as a filmmakers, much more challenging. But definitely more, had much more fun doing it because it’s like we go, it’s a gear area warfare movie where we follow Paul and Chinese starting to do garias again, the arcanans. And I would say for the fans of the book, the people who know the book, that the movie is slightly different. I can say that when Frankerbert wrote the origin, the first book, he was a bit disappointed how people perceived the book because for him, Paul was not a hero. It was a dark figure. It was someone, it was, for me, it was like the booth book was a cautionary tale about like messianic figures and to correct the perception. You wrote Dune Messiah to make sure that people will understand that. So I tried at my best to do this as adaptation closer to the initial intention of Frank Herbert.
22:56 Well, I don’t. I won’t necessarily ask you exact points of reference, but for me, I don’t think you say too much. Say that, you know, if tune part 1 was Star Wars, this to me was very much same Person Strikes Back, which is my favorite of the Star Wars films. And I just think it’s an incredibly exciting expansion of all the things you introduce in the first one.
23:16 Yeah, I have to say to you, Chris, that is a massive complement and I’m pleased to know that you love The Empire Strikes Best as well, guys.
23:26 I do indeed. And I think that your sequel reminded me that in all the right ways, whilst being completely different from it. So I think it’s an extraordinary piece of work, and I think people are gonna be amazingly excited to see it, and they’ll be able to see it on IMAX film. So our tenant releases the 23rd, and then June 2 will be on the same screen also 70 mil filmprint. And it’s a wonderful translation. I think it, the format looks incredible there. So I need to say.
23:59 That I was a bull to bring Dune part to. I shut it for IMAX, but I was to able to do a translation to, we were able to do fingerprints because of you, because of the success of appendiver. And that I was so grateful. Again, Chris Nolan, I cannot say thank you enough for what you doing for cinema.
24:22 Equal. Yeah, and on that note, I know it’s late, so we should wrap it up, but I should just want to very quickly acknowledge someone who’s in the credits of tenant who worked at Warner Brothers for many years called Scott no, he was one of the best projectionist Warners who passed away just last week. And it made, it just makes me feel better to say his name to people and acknowledge all the great work he did for me over the years, but also keeping film alive, having these kind of screenings, what we’re gonna get to do with tenant, what we did with Oppenheimer this summer and what you’re gonna get with Dune 2, what you’re gonna get to do, totally dependent on the guys in the booth, these incredible projections who work so hard for us. So I just want to take a minute to acknowledge them and thank them for everything they’re done for us. And I want to thank you, Jenny, for being here this evening. Thanks. Telling me it’s a little bit about. Yeah, yeah.
25:21 Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Chris. Thank you.
@juneleung