Living In the Shadow of Stanley Kubrick: Exploring Christopher Nolan’s Complex Relationship with Contemporary Cinema

Writer, director and producer Christopher Nolan has regularly been compared to Stanley Kubrick. Like Kubrick, Nolan possesses a marked interest in the complex interaction of narrative and characterisation. He has also chosen a life away from the public eye and yet, as with Kubrick, his seeming inaccessibility has only furthered his mythic status. Throughout his career Nolan has often opted to give the minimum contractual amount of promotional interviews and very little is known about his personal life, which he guards with great secrecy. He rarely talks about the complexities of his films, preferring instead to maintain a level of mystery that emphasises the central ambiguities of each narrative. Yet, Nolan has also been branded one of ‘cinema’s leading blockbuster auteurs’ (Kermode, 2014), a director whose name carries with it the weight of expected box-office success. It is the aim of this paper to address the possible ways of we might begin to reconcile these two positions: the invisible artist and the commercial brand identity.