page_title: Cinematic style of Christopher Nolan
section_title: Music
hierarchical_section_title: Cinematic style of Christopher Nolan / Aesthetics / Music
caption_attribution_description: Hans Zimmer on 'Widows', 'Dark Phoenix' and 'Wonder Woman 2'
context_page_description: Christopher Nolan is a British-American filmmaker known for using aesthetics, themes and cinematic techniques that are instantly recognisable in his work. Regarded as an auteur and postmodern filmmaker, Nolan is partial to elliptical editing, documentary-style lighting, hand-held camera work, natural settings, and real filming locations over studio work. Embedded narratives and crosscutting between different time frames is a major component of his work, and his films often feature experimental soundscapes and mathematically inspired images and concepts. Nolan prefers shooting on film to digital video and advocates for the use of higher-quality, larger-format film stock. He also favours practical effects over computer-generated imagery, and is a proponent of theatrical exhibition.
  His work explores existential and epistemological themes such as subjective experience, materialism, distortion of memory, human morality, the nature of time, causality, and the construction of personal identity. His characters are often emotionally disturbed, obsessive, and morally ambiguous, facing the fears and anxieties of loneliness, guilt, jealousy, and greed.
context_section_description: In collaboration with composer David Julyan, Nolan's films feature slow and atmospheric scores with minimalistic expressions and ambient textures. In the mid-2000s, starting with Batman Begins, Nolan began working with Hans Zimmer, who is known for integrating electronic music with traditional orchestral arrangements. With Zimmer, the soundscape in Nolan's films evolved into becoming increasingly more exuberant, kinetic and experimental. An example of this is the main theme from Inception, which is derived from a slowed down version of Edith Piaf's song "Non, je ne regrette rien". For 2014's Interstellar, Zimmer and Nolan wanted to move in a new direction: "The textures, the music, and the sounds, and the thing we sort of created has sort of seeped into other people's movies a bit, so it's time to reinvent." The score for Dunkirk was written to accommodate the auditory illusion of a Shepard tone. It was also based on a recording of Nolan's own pocket watch, which he sent to Zimmer to be synthesised. Ludwig Göransson, the composer for Tenet (2020), called working with the director an "eye-opening experience". Göransson said, "I know from watching his films how savvy he is with music, how much he understands it, but I didn't fully know that he could speak about it almost like a trained musician."
  Responding to some criticism over his experimental sound mix for Interstellar, Nolan remarked, "I've always loved films that approach sound in an impressionistic way and that is an unusual approach for a mainstream blockbuster ... I don't agree with the idea that you can only achieve clarity through dialogue. Clarity of story, clarity of emotions — I try to achieve that in a very layered way using all the different things at my disposal — picture and sound."
caption: Nolan frequently works with Hans Zimmer to compose music for his productions.
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