Christopher Nolan Picks His $530M War Drama as His Most Radical Movie Ever

With a handful of blockbuster movies under his belt and another Greek-themed flick coming to theatres next year, Christopher Nolan might not be ceding his position among Hollywood’s most acclaimed directors anytime soon, even after Oppenheimer ’s stunning success just last year.

Having started his career off with a very low-budget neo-noir crime thriller Following in the 1990s, Nolan quickly turned into one of the most promising figures in the industry, challenging himself with yet undiscovered genres and themes, as well as some different perspectives of time.

Talking about the latter, it might be the Leonardo DiCaprio-led sci-fi drama Inception that immediately emerges in mind, though Nolan’s most challenging multi-dimensional movie came way later, according to the director himself.

Christopher Nolan Says Dunkirk Is His Most Radical Movie to Date

Even with movies like Tenet and Inception which both explore the weird notion of the reality’s multiple layers, the director himself doesn’t think of those as the most difficult project he ever had to helm.

In an interview with NJ several years ago Nolan revealed he had to throw himself into a completely new thing to eventually build Dunkirk’s narrative, divided into three different points of view that give the audiences a full perspective of some of the World War II’s events.

“it’s one of the great, unique things that film can do, manipulating an audience’s sense of time, and one I’ve spent a lot of my career experimenting with — in some ways, I think Dunkirk is my most radical approach to story structure since Memento”, the director admitted, highlighting that he still had to keep the balance so that the story wouldn’t become way too complicated for viewers to grasp.

“It’s meant to be a very intense experience. It’s not meant to be a crossword puzzle you have to work out”, he said.

Years After Release, Dunkirk Remains One of Christopher Nolan’s Highest-Rated Movies

It’s fair to say the director’s most challenging task in the career eventually paid off, considering how much of a blast it was back in the day.

Released in 2017, Dunkirk comprised an all-star cast that included Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard, James D'Arcy, Barry Keoghan, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy and Tom Hardy among others, eventually grossing $530 million against a budget of $100 million.

The movie was also a critical darling, securing eight Academy Award nominations and ultimately winning three; even with the likes of Oppenheimer and Inception, Dunkirk remains one of Nolan’s best-rated films, currently holding a score of 92%, surpassed only by his 2000 psychological thriller Memento with 94%.