For other filmmakers, the tradition is to drop hints and clues, also known as Easter eggs, from their previous movies in their later works. In true time-bending fashion, filmmaker Christopher Nolan has revealed that an Easter egg for his latest movie Tenet actually showed up in one of his earliest films, 2000’s Memento.
“I had this notion of just a bullet getting sucked out of the wall and into the barrel of a gun. It’s an image that I had in Memento“-the film literally starts with a bullet flying out of a wall, through a man’s skull, and back into a gun-“to demonstrate the structure of that movie, but I always harbored this ambition to make a film where the characters had to deal with the physical reality of that. In a way, an idea comes to the fore when the time is right for it, and it’s a hard process to quantify, so I was doing all these other things.”
Memento was one of the earliest showcases of Nolan’s obsession with subjective reality and non-linear narrative. The entire story unfolded in two parts, one moving forward, and the other movie backward, as the film’s protagonist, who suffered from short-term memory loss, tried to put the pieces of his life back together and figure out who murdered his wife.
Tenet takes that concept of time moving backward to the extreme, featuring a world where a team of international assassins is brought together to prevent armageddon with the aid of a piece of tech that allows them to move backward through time. According to Christopher Nolan, the influence of his previous movies was very heavily felt when he was making Tenet.
“There are things that you learn how to make and everything in Tenet, interestingly, on the surface of it, they’re all versions of action or particular ways of filming things that I’ve tried before in a different form. You’re building on what you’ve done in the past.”
Many viewers see Tenet as Christoper Nolan’s take on the spy movie genre, complete with dashing government agents in well-cut suits firing off bullets and engaging in fisticuffs to save the world. While Nolan himself is a huge James Bond fan, he wanted Tenet’s protagonist, played by actor John David Washington, to provide a more empathetic take on a secret agent hero.
“[Spy movie] characters, they tend to be cynical and cold, and they almost pride themselves on that. And yet you’re asked to believe that they would sacrifice themselves for their fellow human being. To us, we saw there’s a gap there. There’s something missing there. What if you could see that empathy? You could feel that empathy as an audience member? Combined with the fact that [John David] looks fantastic and kicks ass in all kinds of amazing ways and is unbelievably athletic, he’s just the complete package, and what a star.”
Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Tenet stars John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh, Dimple Kapadia, Martin Donovan, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Himesh Patel, Cl&émence Po&ésy, Denzil Smith, and Michael Caine. This news arrives from Complex.com.