Tag Archives: Christopher Nolan

On Titles and Naming Things

“It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything.” — Oscar Wilde

One of my favorite parts of writing a piece of fiction is coming up with the title. I agree with Oscar Wilde: Naming a work of art is an art in itself and should always be treated as such. The name that is given to a work of art is massively influential on how that work is received. As a result, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the titles of my books (and the names of my characters, but that’s a topic for another day).

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Hollywood Thinks They Know Everything

The great screenwriter William Goldman had a famous quote about Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.” His full quote elaborated: “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.” Goldman meant that, beforehand, nobody (neither the producers, studio executives, directors, actors, or critics) could accurately predict which movies would be breakout hits or which would be box office duds. There are always surprises in both directions: movies everyone thinks will succeed end up bombing, while surefire flops become smash hits. At least that’s the way the movie industry used to work. Now Hollywood thinks they know everything.

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Tenet & Movies That Make You Think

Tenet is Christopher Nolan’s most ambitious film conceptually to date, which is saying something considering he made Memento, The Prestige, Inception, and Interstellar. Without spoilers, Tenet involves time travel, but it is a unique version of time travel—perhaps the most inventive form of time travel I’ve ever seen in a movie—and the most complex.

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Top 10 Movies (At Least 10 Years Old) I Saw in 2016

 

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I saw a lot of great movies in 2016 (the best so far being Arrival) but there are still too many I need to see before I can do a best-of list. So I was thinking of doing a “best of 2015 list,” since I spent 2016 catching up on all the movies I missed last year. But there’d be nothing interesting about my list, as it would be pretty similar to any film critic’s best of 2015 list. So I decided to do a unique list. Continue reading

The Inception of My Screenwriting: Or the Movie that Made Me Want to Write Movies

Inception

With the recent release of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, I thought I’d look back at the filmmaker’s career— and mine. Ever since The Prestige, a new Nolan film is an event in my life. He is the single-most influential writer/director on my own writing, and the film of his that has had the greatest impact on me is Inception. Continue reading