Christopher Nolan Quotes

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

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

You're never going to learn something as profoundly as when it's purely out of curiosity

A camera is a camera, a shot is a shot, how you tell the story is the main thing.

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

One of the things you do as a writer and as a filmmaker is grasp for resonant symbols and imagery without necessarily fully understanding it yourself.

You musn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.

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

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.

I've been fascinated by dreams my whole life, since I was a kid, and I think the relationship between movies and dreams is something that's always interested me.

The best actors instinctively feel out what the other actors need, and they just accommodate it.

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

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.

Why do we Fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves back up.

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.

You always have to be very aware that the audience is extremely ruthless in its demand for newness, novelty and freshness.

I would never say someone's else's film isn't 'a real film.' The quote is inaccurate.

The term 'genre' eventually becomes pejorative because you're referring to something that's so codified and ritualised that it ceases to have the power and meaning it had when it first started.

Sometime, when you start thinking too much what an audience is going to think, when you're too self-conscious about it, you make mistakes.

I just love photographing things and putting them together to tell a story.

If you're going to perform inception, you need imagination. You need the simplest version of the idea-the one that will grow naturally in the subject's mind. Subtle art.

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

Movie logistics never really allow you to do anything but shoot the way the budget dictates.

Revenge is a particularly interesting concept, especially the notion of whether or not it exists outside of just an abstract idea.

The real truth of that is that much as you want to believe that it's you being on top of everything, you're actually relying massively on the people around you.

People want to see something that shows them you can do what you say. That's the trick.

To me, any kind of filmmaking that's reactive is not going to be as good as something more inventive and original.

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.

We shouldn't be chasing other movies, but stay true to the tone of Man of Steel.

I will miss the Batman. I like to think that he'll miss me, but he's never been particularly sentimental.

The only job that was ever of interest to me other than filmmaking is architecture.

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

I want to be surprised and entertained by a movie, so that's what we're trying to do for the audience. Obviously, we also have to sell the film.

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

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

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

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

There are points where you worry that you might be putting too much in and alienating the audience. But, funnily enough, some of those fears aren't correct.

By the time I was 10 or 11, I knew I wanted to make films.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I'm taking a bit of a wait-and-see attitude towards 3D.

I've been interested in dreams since I as a kid and I've wanted to do a film about them for a long time.

I've never read Joseph Campbell, and I don't know all that much about story archetypes.

The quality of racing continues to excel with starters increasing to 1496,.

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.