Christopher Nolan Biography

Christopher Nolan is an English-American filmmaker best known for his 2023 film Oppenheimer, a biopic of physicist and A-bomb enabler J. Robert Oppenheimer. The film won seven Academy Awards, including best film of the year and best director for Nolan himself.

Nolan is also well-known for his 2010 headtrip film Inception and his blockbuster Batman movies: Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012).

Raised in both England and the United States, Christopher Nolan began making films in school, shooting short movies while a student at University College London. His first feature, 1998’s The Following, showed enough promise that Nolan was given the opportunity to film a feature based on a story by his brother, screenwriter Jonathan Nolan. The result was 2000’s Memento, a tricky psychological thriller that starred Guy Pearce and Carrie-Anne Moss.

From there Nolan’s projects got bigger and more profitable. He did a remake of the Norwegian movie Insomnia (2002, starring Al Pacino) and an adaptation of the novel The Prestige (2006), and resurrected the Batman franchise with Christian Bale in Batman Begins (2005). Nolan followed that with The Dark Knight in 2008, the sequel that earned Heath Ledger a posthumous Oscar for best supporting actor.

A specialist in dark, psychological dramas, Nolan often alters the narrative sequence of the story to disrupt the chronology and linear plot points, as in The Following, Memento and Inception (2010, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page).

His other films include Interstellar (2014, starring Matthew McConaughey), Dunkirk (2017) and Tenet (2020). Many of his films have been produced by his wife, Emma Thomas; she also won an Oscar as the producer of Oppenheimer.