Recently, “Oppenheimer” filmmaker Christopher Nolan made headlines by favorably comparing Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two” to the “Star Wars” sequel, “The Empire Strikes Back.” Those comments come from a conversation that took place on February 2, 2024, after a screening of Nolan’s sci-fi “Tenet” in IMAX 70mm Film at AMC CityWalk, as the film was recently given a quick theatrical re-release (“Tenet” came out during the pandemic and wasn’t as widely seen theatrically as most of Nolan’s movies, only grossing 365.3 million, given that was the heart of COVID-19 season in summer 2020).
READ MORE: ‘Dune: Part Two’: Christopher Nolan Compares Sequel To ‘Empire Strikes Back’
During the conversation, Villeneuve adoringly queried about “Tenent,” his use of IMAX, but also about “Inception.” In the conversation, Villeneuve essentially interviewing Nolan, he zeroed in on the James Bond influence that has seeped into “Inception” and Tenent” and asked if Nolan was trying to “play with the codes” of Bond and was attempting to subvert the films.
“I’ve always been a huge fan of the Bond films, as anyone who has seen any of my films would know, but especially [‘Tenet’], or ‘Inception,’ as well, I suppose,” he explained. “I also think there’s a lot of [John] le Carré approach to espionage because with a Bond film, we have James Bond at the center, but nobody really worries about the reality of the spy world that they’re in, but when you have an anonymous figure at the center, the protagonist, John David Washington’s character, I wanted to take on some of that complexity, that jargon based, more John le Carré, a bit more of real-world spycraft feeling about the character and way he interacts.”
Villeneuve relayed an anecdote that Steven Spielberg made “Indiana Jones” in reaction to being unable to make a Bond movie. “Did you make your own ‘Bond’ movie with ‘Tenet’?” he asked.
“I think I did, yeah,” Nolan chuckled in response. “And I got to have a lot of fun with it. Certainly, with the end of ‘Inception,’ if you look at the end of it with the sky chase and the big fortress in the snow, that was a big homage to ‘On Her Majesties Secret Service,’ which is my favorite of the Bonds. But with [‘Tenet’] I went into the mythology further because I was trying to create a stylized science-fiction on top of that. In the same way ‘Memento’ tried to use the familiarity of the tropes of the film noir, ‘Tenet’ is an attempt to use the audience’s familiarity with the spy movie genre, the Bond movies to be able to take it someplace a little crazier, a little different and have us experience it in a different way.”
For Villeneuve’s part, he’s very reverential to Nolan, calling the backward fight scenes in “Tenet” “mindblowing” and some of the greatest ever captured on screen and admitting he studied “The Dark Knight” and “Inception” when preparing to make “Dune” and “Dune: Part Two.” Villeneuve also teases ‘Part Two’ and calls it a “more muscular…guerilla warfare movie” with more action sequences. And Nolan describes it as an “extraordinary piece of work” that should get audiences excited beyond the very ecstatic early word from social media reviews. It’s a great conversation, worth watching in full, so check it out below.
