At this point in their respective careers, Steven Soderbergh and Christopher Nolan are household names for cinephiles. But once upon a time, in the early ’00s, Soderbergh needed to help Nolan get his foot in the door when it came to his entry into studio filmmaking. Variety (via Rolling Stone) reports that Soderbergh called up Warner Bros. on behalf of Nolan to convince an exec who didn’t like Nolan’s “Memento” to consider the director for “Insomnia.” All it took was three simple worlds: “take the meeting.”
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“What happened was, I got a call from Chris’ agent, Dan Aloni, who I had known because he screened”‘Memento” for me after it couldn’t find a distributor after being on the festival circuit for a year,” Soderbergh started off. “Dan calls me up out of the blue and says, ‘Could you watch this movie? I have this client of mine who has this movie, and we think it’s really good, but nobody will pick it up and we don’t understand why. Maybe we’re all crazy.’ I see the movie and I think it’s a fucking instant classic.”
“Cut to months later, Dan calls me and he goes, ‘Look, there’s this script over at Warner, “Insomnia,'” Soderbergh continued. “‘Chris is really interested in it, but Warner won’t take the meeting.’ “And I go, ‘What do you mean they won’t take the meeting?’ And he goes, ‘Well, the executive there didn’t like “Memento.”‘ And I said, ‘Well, so what? Why won’t they take the meeting?’”
That forced Soderbergh to call the studio and help Nolan out. “I called that executive and I said, ‘Take the meeting. You’ve got to take the meeting,’” the direct went on. “And he goes, ‘But I didn’t like the movie.’ And I go, ‘Well, did you like the movie-making?’ And he goes, ‘Well, yeah, it’s brilliantly made.’ And I go, ‘Take the meeting.’ That is all I did. I knew Chris well enough to know that if he gets in the room, he’s going to get that job.”
And not only did Nolan get the job, but “Insomnia” cemented a relationship between the director and Warner Bros. that lasted nearly twenty years. In their time working together, Nolan made several smash hits at the studio, including “The Dark Knight” trilogy, “Inception,” and “Dunkirk.” Oh, and Nolan didn’t do too badly with “Insomnia” either. He earned an Academy Award nod for original screenplay, and the film also received a nomination for film editing. “Insomnia,” a remake of the 1997 Norwegian film of the same name, stars Al Pacino as a detective caught in a cat-and-mouse game with Robin Williams‘ killer in a town off the Alaskan coast where it’s always daylight. Over the course of the his investigation, Pacino’s detective develops insomnia, leading him to question his judgment on the case.
“Insomnia” may be an overlooked work in Nolan’s filmography, but without that movie, Nolan wouldn’t have the career he has today. “It started a very fruitful relationship,” Soderbergh said about Nolan’s time working with Warner Bros. “But let’s be clear: one way or another, Christopher Nolan is going to emerge. If he didn’t make “Insomnia,” he’d have made something else and still had the career he has. That was just a fortunate set of circumstances where I could get on the phone and advocate for him.”
Nothing lasts forever, though. After disputes over the release of 2020’s “Tenet” during the COVID-19 pandemic, Nolan left Warner Bros. for Universal to make “Oppenheimer.” But Warner Bros. and Nolan have since patched things up, with the studio reportedly cutting the director a seven-figure royalty check for “Tenet” after its release. But does that mean Nolan will return to Warner Bros. for his next project after “Oppenheimer”? Don’t rule that out, but given that film’s success at the box office this summer, maybe Nolan and Universal will develop a more long-standing working relationship.
“Oppenheimer” is in theaters now.