Christopher Nolan explains what makes a great film noir: “Continuous reassessment”

Posted On August 19, 2024August 19, 2024

While Hollywood has undergone various famous periods over the years, one of the most stylistically distinct eras remains the film noir years when directors working in the industry developed a unique framework for a specific set of artistic sensibilities. Although the genre was retrospectively named, it isn’t hard to see unifying principles that serve as undercurrents in many of the major works from that time.

At the heart of film noir is a sense of existential despair, where the world is depicted as a place of corruption, betrayal, and inevitable doom. The protagonists are often deeply flawed, cynical figures—private detectives, hapless criminals, or hard-bitten anti-heroes—who navigate a world where the line between right and wrong is perpetually blurred. These characters are frequently trapped by their own choices, haunted by past mistakes, and driven by motives that are as self-destructive as they are compelling.

Even though modern cinema has adapted noir elements in different ways, famously the neo-noir subgenre, the classics from the 1940s and ’50s continue to inform the works of many famous filmmakers working today. Among them is Christopher Nolan, who based one of his most renowned movies on the fundamental concepts that noir flicks popularised.

In an interview with Filmmaker, Nolan opened up about the background work he had to do on his infamously complex 2000 neo-noir Memento. According to the director, despite the unconventional narrative techniques incorporated in the movie, the core principles were lifted from classic noir gems, which made them so effective.

Nolan explained: “For me, film noir is one of the only genres where the concept of point of view is accepted as a fairly important notion in the storytelling, and where it’s totally accepted that you can flashback and flashforward and change points of view. The best film noir always involves a continuous reassessment of things, especially in terms of ‘Who’s the good guy?’ and ‘Who’s the bad guy?’. You want the double cross, you want the surprise, and you want to keep the audience mindful of the fact that they don’t know the full story and that they can’t trust all the characters.”

Using a non-linear structure, Memento stars Guy Pearce as a man on a strange mission to track down his wife’s killer, constantly battling the debilitating effects of amnesia while using photographs as an external memory source. Just like traditional noir movies, the sense of unreliability that pervades the narrative contributes to the rising cinematic tension.

While talking about the memory device that is central to Memento, Nolan added: “His psychological condition and his point of view are crucial to why the structure is there: it’s an attempt to put the audience inside his head and to make them think about the characters around him and the situations he’s in in the same way that he does.”

Nolan’s sophomore effort, which came after his fascinating debut feature Following, set the bar very high for the kind of complex narrative structures that fans would come to expect from him in the years that followed. Although it’s very far removed from the kind of storytelling that noir filmmakers practised in the 1940s, the guiding principles remain the same.

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