L'LOOKBACK: How Jonathan Nolan Freezes Time
Director, writer, and producer Jonathan Nolan opens up his archive to L’OFFICIEL and discusses the fascination with time that is so prevalent in his work, from Fallout to Westworld to Interstellar.
The phonograph record sitting on a shelf in Jonathan Nolan's Los Angeles office is a reminder. The cylinder-shaped record, a device for playing music that predates the flat round vinyl record, serves to help Nolan recall where he came from, where he’s been, and where he can go, as a person and storyteller. Nolan’s Oscar- and Emmy-nominated body of work—including Amazon’s Fallout, HBO’s Westworld, and the film Interstellar (which he cowrote with his brother, Christopher Nolan, and which celebrates its tenth anniversary this month)—has come to define modern sci-fi. "We haven't done anything on a modest scale in quite some time," he says with a laugh. The phonograph record was used as a prop in the Season 1 finale of Westworld. "It looks like a twist on something familiar… or taking a familiar object and making it feel just a little bit distant, a little bit strange."
The record, containing the music of Polish composer Frédéric Chopin, dates back to his father and noted Chopin fan, Brendan Nolan, who worked as a copywriter on accounts including Guinness and Cadbury Chocolate. Brendan always had dreams of writing for television. On a work trip to Los Angeles in the 1960s, Brendan met a producer for the sitcom The Monkees at a hotel bar, who advised him to write a spec script and send it to him. He did, but the spec script—which included a scene in which The Monkees, a pop rock band and lighthearted American answer to The Beatles, encounter a phonograph record, a relic of the past, on the beach—was returned by mail with a note saying that the producer had died. So, the senior Nolan’s dream of writing for television was never realized. "We put the cylindrical record in Westworld's first season finale as a little bit of an homage to my dad," he says. By the time Jonathan Nolan began writing for television, his father had already passed away.
The passage of time, memory, and links to the past have always been major themes in Nolan’s work (Memento, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight trilogy, to name a few). "Time is really the thing that separates us most," he says. "We're stranded not just in space, but in our little moment with the people who came before us… our parents, our grandparents. If we're lucky enough, we get to know those people a little bit, but eventually they have to go and you're on your own. And you get a glimpse of your children and a chance to connect to them. And then it's your turn."
