Best 101 quotes of Christopher Nolan on MyQuotes

A hero can be anyone. Even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a young boy's shoulders to let him know that the world hadn't ended.

As far as the dreams go, really I would only point to there are times in my life where I experienced lucid dreaming, which is a big feature of Inception - the idea of realizing you're in a dream and therefore trying to change or manipulate it in some way. That's a very striking experience for people who have it.

As soon as television became the only secondary way in which films were watched, films had to adhere to a pretty linear system, whereby you can drift off for ten minutes and go and answer the phone and not really lose your place.

Batman and Superman are very different characters but they're both iconic and elemental. Finding the right story for them both is the key.

But, in each case, as a filmmaker who's been given sizable budgets with which to work, I feel a responsibility to the audience to be shooting with the absolute highest quality technology that I can and make the film in a way that I want.

Chris [ Nolan] and I have a strange way of working from the non-movie process, where after all these conversations and reading the script and more conversations, Chris went out and shot the films and the first thing he did, he wouldn't show it to me until I had written the music - not out of meanness, or anything, it just sort of seemed an interesting idea to see if there was some synchronicity and letting me use my imagination to the fullest instead of being constricted by cuts and images.

Every film should have its own world, a logic and feel to it that expands beyond the exact image that the audience is seeing.

Every Great Story deserves a Great Ending and 'The Dark Knight Rises' is our Attempt to give that GREAT story, a GREAT ENDING.

Film is the best way to capture an image and project that image. It just is, hands down.

Films are subjective - what you like, what you don't like. But the thing for me that is absolutely unifying is the idea that every time I go to the cinema and pay my money and sit down and watch a film go up on-screen, I want to feel that the people who made that film think it's the best movie in the world, that they poured everything into it and they really love it. Whether or not I agree with what they've done, I want that effort there - I want that sincerity. And when you don't feel it, that's the only time I feel like I'm wasting my time at the movies.

For me, as a film goer, I like nothing more than to sit in the cinema, have the lights go down and not know what I'm about to see or unfold on-screen. Every time we go to make a film, we do everything we can to try to systematise things so we're able to make the film in private, so that when it's finished it's up to the audience to make of it what they will.

George Lazenby is no one's favorite James Bond, but for me the anonymity at the center of this lavish production only serves to reveal the Bond machine firing on all cylinders: superb editing and photography, incredible score, great setpieces. The most romantic in the series, and it actually has, of all things, a tragic ending.

Heist movies tend to be a bit superficial, glamorous, and fun. They don't tend to be emotionally engaging.

I always find myself gravitating to the analogy of a maze. Think of film noir and if you picture the story as a maze, you don't want to be hanging above the maze watching the characters make the wrong choices because it's frustrating. You actually want to be in the maze with them, making the turns at their side, that keeps it more exciting...I quite like to be in that maze.

I always thought the joy of reading a book is not knowing what happens next. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)

I believe movies are one of the great American art forms and the shared experience of watching a story unfold on screen is an important and joyful pastime. The movie theatre is my home, and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me.

I don't actually tend to do a lot of research when I'm writing. I do know because I think a lot of what I find you want to do with research is just confirming things you want to do. If the research contradicts what you want to do, you tend to go ahead and do it anyway.

I don't ever like to feel myself in the position to demand of an actor that they trust I'm going to do something worthwhile. I feel a responsibility to articulate what it is I'm going to do. Whether that's showing them a full script or sitting down with them and describing my ideas in detail. It's a very healthy burden on me as a film director to be able to articulate what I want to do, to inspire actors, rather than just saying, take it on trust I'll be able to do something worthwhile.

I don't particularly enjoy watching films in 3D because I think that a well-shot and well-projected film has a very three-dimensional quality to it, so I'm somewhat sceptical of the technology.

If I could steal someone's dream myself, I'd have to go for one of Orson Welles.

I have always been a big fan of the character and am more of a moviegoer than a comic book guy, there is always something about the character of Batman that is very elemental. There is a great powerful myth to the character and romantic element that draws from a lot of literary sources

I have always been a huge fan of Ridley Scott and certainly when I was a kid. 'Alien,' 'Blade Runner' just blew me away because they created these extraordinary worlds that were just completely immersive. I was also an enormous Stanley Kubrick fan for similar reasons.

I have been interested in dreams, really since I was a kid. I have always been fascinated by the idea that your mind, when you are asleep, can create a world in a dream and you are perceiving it as though it really existed.

I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)

I like films where the music and the sound design, at times, are almost indistinguishable.

I like films that don't have that unonimity of a response; that don't have consensus in the audience. What it is essentially for me is that if you go back and watch the film a second time, do you feel that you've been played fair with? Are all the clues in place? Indeed, sometimes these things are even overstated. Specifically, for that reason.

I like films that continue to spin your head in all sorts of different directions after you've seen them.

I made 'Batman' the way I made every other film, and I've done it to my own satisfaction - because the film, truly, is exactly the way I wanted it to be.

I'm a very fortunate person. I get to choose the movies that I want to do. I have a lot of friends in this industry that don't get to do that. I grew up in L.A. A lot of my friends are actors so I realize every day how lucky I am to have this opportunity, so while I'm here, I'm going to try to do exactly what I want.

I'm not a big dreamer. I never have been.The only thing I've sort of obviously extracted from the research of dreams is that I don't think there's a specific science you can put on dream psychology. I think that it's up to, obviously, the individual. Obviously, we suppress things, emotions, things during the day - thoughts that we obviously haven't thought through enough, and in that state of sleep when our subconscious or mind just sort of randomly fires off different surreal story structures, and when we wake up we should pay attention to these things.

I'm very happy where 3-D is going, which is that it's becoming a choice - and thankfully, most people are still choosing 2-D.

I never considered myself a lucky person. I'm the most extraordinary pessimist. I truly am.

I never meet anybody who actually likes the format, and it’s always a source of great concern to me when you’re charging a higher price for something that nobody seems to really say they have any great love for.

In Hollywood there's a great openness, almost a voracious appetite for new people. In England there's a great suspicion of the new. In cultural terms, that can be a good thing, but when you're trying to break into the film industry, it's definitely a bad thing.

I realized that if you're trying to reach an audience, being as subjective as possible and really trying to write from something genuine is the way to go. Really it's mostly from my own process, my own experience.

I remember the initial genesis quite clearly. My interest in dreams comes from this notion of realizing that when you dream you create the world that you are perceiving, and I thought that feedback loop was pretty amazing.

I studied English Literature. I wasn’t a very good student, but one thing I did get from it, while I was making films at the same time with the college film society, was that I started thinking about the narrative freedoms that authors had enjoyed for centuries and it seemed to me that filmmakers should enjoy those freedoms as well.

I think audiences get too comfortable and familiar in today's movies. They believe everything they're hearing and seeing. I like to shake that up.

I think for me, what I'm doing on set is I'm watching things happen as an audience member and trying to just look at, what's the image we're photographing, how will that advance the story and what will the next image be.

I think for me when you look at the idea of being able to create a limitless world and use it almost as a playground for action and adventure and so forth, I naturally gravitate towards cinematic worlds, whether it's the Bond films and things like that.

I think the films Insomnia and Memento share all sorts of thematic concerns, such as the relationship between motivation and action, and the difficulty of reconciling your view of the story with the supposed objective view of that story.

I think there are advantages to different scales of filmmaking. You wouldn't want to do just one thing.

I think there's a vague sense out there that movies are becoming more and more unreal. I know I've felt it.

I try to be as efficient as possible because in my process, I think that actually helps the work. I like having the pressure of time and money and really trying to stick to the parameters we've been given.

It's always a fun collaboration with my brother. I'm very fortunate to be able to work with him. There's an honesty to collaboration. There's a lack of a gender or ego in our conversations. And so you can really throw anything around.

It's certainly difficult to balance marketing a film and putting it out there to everybody with wanting to keep it fresh for the audience.

It's difficult to keep anything fresh for an audience these days. With technology being what it is people seem to know everything there is to know about a film before you've even made it.

It's very important that a film that intends to play tricks on the audience... has to play fair with the audience. For me, any time you're going to have a reveal in the film, it's essential that it have been shown to the audience as much as possible. What that means is that some people are going to figure it out very early on. Other people not til the end. Everybody watches the film differently.

I've always been a movie guy, movies have been my thing. I love movies, all kinds of movies.

I've always believed that if you want to really try and make a great film, not a good film, but a great film, you have to take a lot of risks.