Christopher Nolan offered a way out for those who felt they didn’t understand his 2020 film Tenet.
The British-American filmmaker is known for his complex and layered storytelling, often involving non-linear narratives.
Many viewers of Tenet complained that the plot, about a former CIA agent (John David Washington) traveling backwards in time, was hard to grasp.
On Wednesday, February 7, Nolan appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and was asked about his confusion about the film and whether he understood everything in it.
“You don’t have to understand everything in Tenet. It’s not all graspable,” the director said.
“It’s a bit like asking me if I know what the spinning top at the end of Inception means,” Nolan added, referring to the notoriously ambiguous ending of the 2010 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
I have to have an opinion about it for it to be a valid, productive ambiguity, but the point is that it is an ambiguity. As Emerald likes to say, the point is that the character doesn’t care whether they fall or not.
When asked whether audiences should “understand” his movies or just “experience” them, Nolan replied, “If you experience my movie, you understand it. I’m very sure of that.”
I think when audiences are disappointed with my past narratives, sometimes they miss the point a little bit. It’s not a puzzle to be solved. It’s an experience to be had, preferably in a movie theater, but also at home, hopefully over an uninterrupted period of time.
It’s an experience that has to be lived, that’s the essence of it, that’s the feeling of it. Everything else, if people want to talk about it or discuss it further, if the ideas resonate, that’s a huge plus.
Tenet recently made headlines again after Nolan recounted that a Peleton trainer had slammed the movie during training.
After the director shared the anecdote, fans were able to track down the moment when fitness instructor Jenn Sherman slammed the movie during her virtual “tween and arm” class in 2020.
“This song is from the soundtrack of a movie called Tenet,” Sherman says in the video accompanying Travis Scott’s The Plan.
Is anyone else watching this crap? Is anyone else watching this? Because I need a manual. Somebody needs to explain this. Yeah, no kidding, what was going on in that movie? Do you get it? Seriously, you have to be a neuroscientist to get it. I want two and a half hours of my life back. I want it back.
Nolan is probably the favorite to win the Best Director Oscar this year for his latest film Oppenheimer. The biopic about the “father of the atomic bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer leads the Academy Awards with 13 nominations.
