Original subtitles

Background!

I've been making films

for the big screen for a long time now.

That's what inspires me creatively as I'm writing the script,

as I'm thinking about what this is going to be, as I'm casting it.

Everything is about that "larger than life" experience

that we're intending to give the audience at the end of things.

You have a set of ideas as a filmmaker

that you're working on longer-term.

And they could take decades to come to fruition.

The time has to be right in all kinds of different ways.

This film is so complex and ambitious.

I just don't think he would've been able to pull it off ten years ago.

It's definitely a product of the many years of experience

that we all have at this point.

I think, for me, tenet was wanting to

get back to a broader sense of filmmaking.

Dunkirk was a large-scale film, but it was very specific to

the one time and place.

Without being too reactive to that,

I wanted to go all around the world again.

Nathan is a big part of the very early pre-production on the films,

when Chris is still working on the script.

Fairly early on, they'll just go off on scouts.

I always...

At the beginning of the film, we go wandering, looking for the film.

And it was just one of those things, "let's just go there, see what happens."

They spend a lot of time walking,

just absorbing the environments that they see,

and it's really valuable time,

because it's that time before Chris has figured out

the answers to all the questions,

and it really does shape the movie. It shapes the script.

Tenet is a classic spy story.

I grew up loving spy movies, particularly the bond films.

But to make it sing fo today's audiences,

I felt like, for me to really engage with it,

I wanted it to have bigger possibilities.

I wanted to do it in a way that I was excited about.

What we did with inception for the heist genre

is really what tenet attempts to bring to the spy movie genre.

The film deals with this concept of inversion,

which is the idea that the entropy of an object

or a person, indeed, could be reversed.

This isn't interstellar, you know?

I did have kip Thorne read the script

and he helped me out with some of the concepts,

but we're not gonna make any case for this being scientifically accurate.

But it is based roughly on real science.

Every law of physics is symmetrical. Every law of physics can run

forward or backwards in time and be the same,

other than entropy.

So the theory being that if you could invert the flow of entropy,

you could have an object that

the direction of time is reversed for that object.

This screenplay is

in my entire career, the one that I have read more times

than any other screenplay.

Memento was like that, and inception was like that.

You read the script, and they're actually

quite hard to parse on the page.

One of the reasons I kept going back to the script

was to enjoy and delight in the fact that so many things paid off.

It kept yielding the penny-dropping on

why we were there or why that person was involved.

The thing that really felt good to me about the script was how fresh it was.

It just didn't feel like anything I had seen before.

I think he is dealing

with time head-on here.

He's bringing up

how we understand physics,

how we've learned behavior,

how we love, how we hate, how we react...

All of those things, due to how time is perceived.

The thing about inversion is it's very much cinematic.

It's something that you have to see on the screen

to fully engage with.

That's the reason I felt like it would make a compelling movie.

You could read the screenplay and see where it was gonna go,

but to feel it and actually experience it,

we have to make the film.

I didn't wanna take on the spy genre

unless I felt I could bring something very fresh to it.

Something we talked about a lot at the script stage was,

these characters in fiction, they are very often portrayed

with real cynicism. They're very hard and cynical characters.

And yet, there's a degree of selflessness

and self-sacrifice to what they do

that speaks to a different set of ethics.

For me, a lot of the inspiration was John David Washington

and realizing what he could do with this character.

I get told by my agents that, "Christopher Nolan

wants to have a meeting with you."

So I was like...

I didn't think it was real. I didn't know what it was about.

I end up meeting Chris, and then we end up talking for a couple hours.

Last thing he said after that meeting was like,

"well, good luck."

I was like, "that's it. I guess I did terribly."

His read on the script was immediate and precise.

He and I both felt that we had the opportunity here

to try and create a character with more warmth and generosity

as a motivation for going to the extremes

and doing the most extreme things, but for the greater good.

The protagonist is a sort of aspirational figure.

He is suave and he is confident and he's got a certain swagger,

but he's also got a very accessible humanity.

You just love him. You just love him.

I do, anyway.

I wasn't trying to be warm or charismatic or anything.

I'm actually kinda...

I'm kind of a nerd, so...

But jumping into the psyche of somebody like that,

I think it is inherently just displayed that way

because he actually cares.

Jd was the first person that we cast,

and then we cast the rest of the film around him.

Michael Caine, I'm just trying to hold it together.

I'm sitting across from him. I'm like, "just be in character."

But I found myself watching the performance.

I'm like, "I'm just gonna watch for a second.”

Seeing him play a scene opposite sir Michael...

It was really a thrill to watch these two play off each other

and to watch Michael do what's he done so well for so long.

Chris went over there and hugged him.

Afterwards said, "that's a wrap on Michael Caine."

It was such a beautiful moment. I was really feeling it and dug that.

It's just lovely to have a little bit of Michael.

We had Rob pattinson, whose work

we've been admiring hugely in recent years.

He just has done such challenging and interesting work

in the last few years in independent films.

You're looking at this guy who's wanting to challenge himself,

who's wanting to do things very different.

I met with Chris. We were talking for three-and-a-half hours.

Still no mention of a project. So, I waited.

And I kind of left, and then my agent was like,

"so how was it?" And I'm like,

“I don't know. I mean, he's a really nice guy."

He didn't mention a movie at all,

so maybe it was a really bad meeting.

It was very important to me that

we travel the world with the film because

it's about a threat to the entire world, the entire human race.

We needed an international cast to continually remind you of that.

Dimple... She is very famous in India

where film culture is really amazing.

I go up to my nephew and I tell him,

"I've been offered a Chris Nolan film."

So he goes, "auntie, Chris Nolan!

You, you like prestige. Chris Nolan.”

I said, "okay. Chill. It might be a crank call.

Let's not get our hopes too high."

The difficulty of casting priya was very much logistical.

India's just a long way from Hollywood.

The best way to do it was to just go there and meet dimple in person

and talk about it and have her do a scene for us,

which she graciously offered to do.

The highlight was that he had the camera in his hands,

and that was like a real high point for me, okay?

He's taking the audition.

I saw Elizabeth debicki in widows

and I said to Chris, "you have to see that movie for her

'cause she's just incredible."

And he agreed and was like, "oh, yeah. Let's see if she'll be willing."

With Kat, I feel like Chris wrote a very strong woman.

She's an incredibly intelligent person.

She's very intuitive. She can be manipulative if she wants to be.

She has this dry gallows humor, which I love,

which was a pleasure to read in a female character.

She's certainly someone who's used to getting what she wants in life.

But she's been held captive by this person.

Chris Nolan repeatedly told me when we spoke about it first

that this guy really was as bad as they get.

"An appalling piece of humanity," is how he put it.

/t reminds me somewhat of what Heath brought to the joker

when we made the dark knight

because it really wasn't the type of villain

where you get overly concerned with the justifications

for the behavior. It's really much more about

a destructive presence in the world and having to respond to that.

If we see an achilles heel in him,

it's an emotional quality.

Love, I would say, for his estranged wife Kat.

But he is ruthless. He is ruthless and he is egotistical,

and it's truly terrifying inside an intelligent being.

An intelligent being capable of reckless risk-taking.

We have to go to some very dark places with these characters.

So, I was very grateful to have Ken as my scene partner,

because I felt like we both understood the seriousness

of the imagery that we were putting on screen.

He does have a point of view that has a certain logic to it,

and the interesting thing about what Ken brings to this character

is that he makes the character very difficult to sympathize with.

It actually makes it quite hard to accept

any of the point of view or truth

that he might be trying to expound to justify what he's doing.

Because he's so clearly doing everything for the wrong reasons.

There's something so powerful about belief.

We've seen these characters, sator and protagonist,

they both believe that they're right.

Their motivations might differ,

and obviously their tactics are definitely different,

but they truly believe in the tenets that they stand on.

And these themes are highlighted and displayed

in this film beautifully through the characters, through the writing.

And what keeps you interested, what keeps you invested in the story

of what's happening with inversion are the characters.

- Two, one... - Action!

This is my third film with Chris.

You read it, and you realize when you read it

"oh, shit, how are we gonna do this?"

Because he's gonna wanna do this for real.

We all know that Chris is very big

on getting everything in-camera and doing things as real as possible.

You prep a movie with him

and set up for it different than any other movie.

You have to look at every single thing,

like assume you're doing it until told otherwise.

This is how we make films. If we can build it, we do.

If it's impossible, we have to rely on our friends at VFX.

We use visual effects to combine

filmed elements as much as possible.

We're using a minimal approach, rather than going full cg.

We feel like audiences, where 20, 30 years ago,

they might've recognized those tricks,

they're out of practice of seeing them. Now we're used to just seeing cg,

wall-to-wall built environments.

So you can pull the wool over their eyes again

by using old-school tricks.

I think a lot of what we do is about texture.

The audiences are always aware on some level

of the difference between things that are animated

and something that's been photographed.

That has a patina and texture and a flavor and a taste to things

that is unfamiliar to people.

I think that has an impact long-term.

It's the reason you can keep going back and watch the movie, and it doesn't age.

I think all his movies get stronger with time.

I have to credit being able to shoot the way he shoots.

Every film, you're trying to challenge yourself

because you're trying to give something new to the audience,

but you're also trying to advance your techniques in some way.

When you do look at the movies and the trajectory,

it does feel like each of them builds on the last.

/t was very obvious that this script

was going to be technically very challenging in many ways.

Film storytelling is very linear.

You go from a, you go to b. But in this script,

people go from b to a as well, and sometimes they meet along the way.

Just reversing film... That's a trick people are familiar with.

And it doesn't really quite tell our story.

The manipulation of time photographically

that we needed to engage in,

it's similarly analogous to the way we approached zero gravity

in inception and interstellar, for example.

It's using a variety of techniques, so that there isn't one particular trick

that the audience tunes into, and then it starts to feel artificial.

We used a lot of different techniques to achieve that,

including a lot of in-camera photography,

performers performing backwards or cars driving backwards.

The camera running both forwards and backwards,

depending on the needs of it.

And also cg to put in the appropriate reaction to the world around.

We really tried to create something that

feels possible, plays as plausible to the eye,

but what's happening is actually quite impossible.

We started the shoot

with the scene in the rotas vault because

it was relatively contained, but extraordinarily complex.

That first week's shooting was literally preschool.

I've never had any job where so many of the finest professionals in the world

at what they do, would show up on a given day

and, honest to god, they didn't have it right what's happening in that scene.

Here we go.

That's no slur, that's no call on anybody.

It's just that complicated and that different

from movies that came before.

It was a baptism by fire for sure.

That first week was tough.

It was really tough. But it truly did set the tone.

Chris was very happy with it, the dailies looked fantastic,

so it was a real morale-boosting way to start such a huge adventure.

It's a testament to the skill of the different department heads that

each technique that was at our disposal tended to work equally well.

And so on a case-by-case basis,

every shot of every sequence, we had to decide

which technique to apply to a given shot

to achieve the appropriate narrative effect.

The camera literally sees time.

Before the motion picture camera exists

there's no way for people to conceive of slow-motion

or reverse-motion.

Cinema itself is the window onto time

that allows this project to come to fruition.

It's literally a project that can only exist because the movie camera exists.

So, the jumping-off point for how you visualize these things is

reversing the film in the camera.

With Chris, it's always an in-camera approach.

By limiting yourself, by doing everything in-camera,

you always keep connected to reality, and also the physics of reality.

Action!

Every film that we make, we move further

in the direction of making imax cameras

be a part of our package in the same way that any other camera would be.

At this point, they're the workhorse for us.

/t has this extraordinary strength

and power in terms of how deeply they can

take the audience into the story.

It's a very imposing camera.

Feels very important when you're shooting something on imax.

There's a nice pressure to it.

Everyone is very precious about the film.

You have to change the mag of film every few minutes.

So, every take is a lot of time afterwards.

It makes you bring your "a" game pretty quickly.

People always talk about imax, "it's big."

For me, it's also something else.

It's a way of looking at imagery and story

that is not only supposed to connect with you in an intellectual way,

but also in a visceral way. You have to feel it.

And that is something that the big format very much does for me.

We had two 65 mm cameras from panavision.

We shot most of our dialogue sequences with those cameras.

And our big action sequences, we'd shoot with imax

we used more cameras

and shot more 65 mm negative than I think any project's ever shot.

And it totaled, up to this point, close to a million and a half feet.

So, it's pretty impressive.

We wanted fo not only shoot imax this time,

but we wanted the imax cameras to run backwards.

This was challenging.

Imax cameras, for as far as I know, has never really run backwards.

Definitely not for a production like this.

Imax was very helpful to start a hew engineering project with us,

and we built mechanics in their magazines and in the cameras

to enable us to shoot backwards.

Because of it, we've had to rethink a lot of things about how you load mags,

how you make the camera electronics work in reverse, all that stuff.

When we're shooting, sometimes we'd work with a backwards mag,

sometimes we'd work with a forwards mag.

And you should definitely not mix those up,

because disastrous things will happen.

Hoyte, with his engineering brain,

'cause he has a wonderful engineering brain

as well as a great photographic eye,

is always looking for and coming up with

ways to break down the barriers between where the camera can go

and where the actors want to be.

And on this film, he and his team were able to get the camera

absolutely everywhere that I could possibly want and conceive of.

We used the edge arm for the vehicle chase sequences.

We also had the edge arm on boats.

We shot aerial.

Steadicam.

Handheld, a lot of handheld, that hoyte loves doing.

Hoyte, he's athletic.

These imax cameras are heavy, they're not light.

He's in there with this.

There was a take where I was fighting,

and I kicked him once, and I was like, "oh..."

He was like, "no, no. Keep going. Keep going."

I was like, "I kicked the dp, and he's totally with it."

Chris and I and the core crew, we are there,

and we are on those freaking boats, and we try to be as close as possible.

I think some of that love he has for film and this process

and connecting with the people he works with is in

how he sets his lighting, in how he finds things with the camera,

in how he's able to find the strength to carry that bad boy

and run with me or move when I move.

More than any other project,

this is just, for me, every day, learning, learning, learning.

That is very gratifying in itself.

It's by far the most complex thing that I've ever shot.

Not necessarily in terms of purely action,

but in terms of the concept of it,

and in terms of how we wanted to lead people through the story.

It's a huge challenge.

Where you're seeing a sequence more than once

or from more than one point of view,

we wanted to never just simply reverse the film,

we wanted fo create a new sequence and make fresh choices about

how to shoot it,

what perspective to shoot it from.

We would say,

"okay, so we're seeing this from the protagonist's point of view.

Which protagonist?

How do we want the earlier protagonist to experience the later protagonist?”

And if you follow a very complicated line

with stuff happening and going backwards and forwards,

suddenly it becomes very important

how you as a viewer are led through that story.

There's something very particular to this approach to time

and the mixing of directions of time

that render it really, really, difficult or impossible to intuit.

It therefore becomes a film

that's much easier to watch than it was to make.

There's nothing simple about a Chris Nolan movie.

We, as the crew, have to just jump in with both our feet.

It's just not as simple as forwards and backwards.

It's the interaction and combination

of things going backwards and forwards,

and going backwards also means backwards in time

and all that's implied in that.

You needed a road map, as it were, to get through this movie.

So, what visual effects does often on a lot of films is,

is get involved with previs, and quite often, that previs is

what I like to call technical previs.

It's more like a GPS map, if you like,

of the entire sequence and all of the different elements coming into play.

And on this film, it became obvious fairly quickly that that was gonna be

a really useful thing.

In fact, so much so that I felt like that was gonna be all I would do.

Andrew Jackson is one of my favorite visual effects supervisors,

for the very simple reason that

he doesn't see his job starting the moment you wrap.

Even though he's the visual effects guy,

he just has ideas and suggestions

that are gonna help us get more creative stuff,

as opposed to just saying,

"hey, we're gonna do this all visual effects.”

I mean, Andrew Jackson gets every piece of information,

as he always does on all our films,

and then we just use what is necessary to a minimum,

so you're not trying to fake something into the shot.

I brought bodie in, so that he could focus 100% on previs,

and I could go back to actually supervising all of the visual effects,

which is my job.

The fact that you had someone dedicated on the movie

to just explaining what the hell's going on

indicates what kind of movie this was.

Throughout every kind of setup in the whole film,

the forwards and backwards had to work.

'Cause there are parts of this film

where there are at least four of the same person.

- At least four. - At any one moment in time.

Continuity in every film is important.

I tried to put every scene into a day or a night,

and then just go chronologically through the story.

However, something that happens here may also happen here,

but in reverse.

So, later in the movie,

they're watching the same event, but from a different perspective.

The previs became the only way that you can actually see

the timelines in both directions at the same time.

And to explain it to people quickly when you needed to.

So much of it is visual. Like actually seeing it,

you're like, "that makes absolute sense.

Yes, that's absolutely how it should be done."

It was really a great tool,

but to imagine that you'd open it up,

fake a look, and go, "oh, that explains everything."

That was not the case.

The joke on set became

that we'd ask him a question about the car chase,

"does this happen before this?" You know, whatever.

The first answer would always be wrong.

It was striking the degree to which your instinct would tell you something,

and you'd be absolutely convinced of it,

and then after really puzzling it through and looking at the sequence

and looking at it objectively, you'd realize that

you'd started with a misapprehension.

I've never worked on a film before where I've seen so many people

discussing the intricacies of the plot at length

and debating, "oh, what about if this happened?”

"I think we're wrong. I think we've got to stop."

It took a village, in a way, for everybody to keep everybody honest.

That never got any easier, and that's unique to this film.

But that continually reinforced my passion about the concept

and my interest in the concept.

'Cause it always felt like something that not until it's finished,

not until you experience it do you fully understand it.

And that was an exciting thing to be involved in.

It was all very well and good for us to struggle with the concept,

but to struggle with the action,

one of my first thoughts upon finishing the script was,

"this is gonna be the toughest stunt coordinator job George Cottle ever had.”

It was my first real meeting with the other hods.

Chris was talking to me about

how he thinks would be the best way to first approach it,

and I was like, "okay." So he's like, "so, you should put a fight together

of one guy fighting another guy, moving forward,

and then play that backwards."

And I was like, "okay." So I'm making my notes.

I'm like, "okay, so fight forward and play it backwards."

"Then take the other guy away

and have the guy who was first attacking

watch the video of him doing it backwards,

then have him do the routine perfectly backwards,

then have somebody attack him as he's going backwards.”

I'm like, "okay, attack him as he's going backwards."

"And then flip that film, and that's your fight scene.”

And at that point, I just stopped writing

and looked up and everybody at the table started laughing.

And even Chris was like, "I lost you, didn't I?"

And I'm like, "you did. Yeah, you did."

In writing the script, obviously I had to visualize a lot of the things

and give it my best guess

as to how it was going to feel, how it was going to work.

But as far as the specifics of what's that actually gonna look like,

until George and his guys started seeing what looked good this way or that way,

it really was impossible to know.

I had a team of four stunt guys and a couple of stunt riggers

and we just started coming up with very simple moves

to see what it looked like forwards and backwards.

At the end of every week, I'd put it all together and I'd sit with Chris,

and he'd be like, "I like this. I don't like this. That works well."

The first thing we learned is that if you have

such skilled stunt performers, as we did,

they can perform things forwards and backwards, they look the same.

I encouraged George and his team to look to the world of dance

and dance choreography, things like that, really think outside the box.

We brought in somebody who was amazing.

Like the move on the floor where he's going all crazy

and going for the gun? That was something that she'd come up with,

and we showed it to Chris, and he's like,

"I love that. That needs to be in there."

The training was Paramount.

Nobody's ever thrown an inverted punch before. So how does...

How do you make that real life, you know?

Every rehearsal we did with actors, we would video it,

because there'd be times where they would do a fight or a move,

or even just a simple run backwards,

and they'd be like, "oh, my god, that looks stupid."

This is actually the most I've ever looked at "playback," 'cause I had to

just for mechanical purposes.

You needed to have that reassurance on hand and be like,

"no, look, that's pretty good.”

And they're like, "oh, great. Okay, perfect.”

That's it.

Even the stunt guys found it tough.

They worked a long time to get to that level,

and we only get the actors for three or four weeks

to get them to that same level.

I take my hats off to them. They did a fantastic job.

Yeah!

The film was incredibly demanding for all the actors,

having to figure out acting backwards, talking backwards.

For fights, for running, and, yes, for speaking.

Sator has a Russian accent.

And to speak in reverse in a Russian accent at pace, at length,

while fighting and walking backwards

is unquestionably a challenging thing for an actor to do.

I feel like speaking backwards with a Russian accent now

will become like new actor code for like,

"but have you done your homework?"

"Can you speak backwards in a Russian accent?"

/t was so many days of like,

"stop. Hold it. Let's talk about this before we do it again."

Jd Washington was great because he came to play.

I asked for my hot sauce an hour ago.

He was a professional football player.

And we didn't break him,

but we definitely pushed him to his limits.

The first week was all the vault fight, and it was intense.

Ultimately, jd has to learn that fight in four different variations.

Forwards as the protagonist in current time in the suit,

we also shot that in reverse,

then in the antagonist suit coming out of the machine,

and he has to do that whole fight forward,

and he has to do that whole fight backwards.

When you watch the film, it just plays so seamlessly

that you don't realize how much time and effort

went into putting the pieces together.

That was insane. That was like...

It was a different demand, a different ask as an actor,

which I thoroughly enjoy.

But it was stressful because you wanna get it right.

The thing about physically talented performers

is you wanna get a Gauge on what they can do themselves

because if you have an absolute divide between what the actor can do,

and then what the stunt performer can do,

if the actor's only really walking and talking,

and every time he breaks into a run,

you have to get someone else in,

it's pretty limiting in terms of how you shoot things.

Every movie we've ever done, the actors always talk a big game.

They always want to do their own stunts.

This was an amazing group of actors

because they all not only talked a good game,

but they gave a good game, too.

On a warm evening in Mumbai, we had a couple of shots to get

where we're getting bungeed up onto a building.

Rob and I had to do that first part of it.

Jd and Rob showed up and they're like, "what have you got us into now?"

And we walked them to the top of the building,

and they were like, "okay, show me once."

So I got their doubles to show them the little thing,

and they were like, "okay, all right."

I think that's one of the benefits of being so exhausted.

You just don't have any energy to be terrified.

Two, one... action!

That, I wasn't nervous about. That was just fun.

It felt like a roller coaster. I love roller coasters.

But the jumping off, that was scary.

I was like, "Chris, do you wanna

hang a platform and have jd jump off,

so you get that moment?" He's like, "great. Fantastic."

It was ten-foot wide by eight-foot.

When you hang that over the building 250 feet in the air,

it looks like a postage stamp.

John David, who'd gone through everything with the stunt guys,

and the harnesses, and the safety,

and where the platform was, all that stuff done.

So then I'm talking to him about performance.

Chris was giving me some notes 'cause I say a line,

I gotta do some things before I jump off,

and I'm always sharp. I'm usually on it,

and I kept... I just hit him with a, "yeah, okay, okay."

But I wasn't taking to the note.

To me, it just felt like he had a different idea

about how he wanted to play the scene, and he was sticking to that.

He realized when I finally got it,

like after take seven or something.

He started laughing to himself, and he told me,

"oh, I realized you were scared shitless."

I was like, "yes, Chris. I was."

I was so scared.

He was terrified about being asked to jump off a skyscraper.

I was like, 'fair enough.”

Rob pattinson had fo do an incredible amount of driving.

He's a very self-deprecating guy, Rob.

He pretends as though he can barely drive.

I think I did one day of training of driving backwards,

made my teacher feel so sick he had to stop.

And so I assumed, "all right, that's nixed my driving for the movie."

The stunt team did an evaluation on him,

and they were really impressed,

and so he ended up doing a lot of his own driving.

We've done very large-scale car action in the past.

My interest in revisiting it was,

"well, what happens if you can turn it on its head,

look at it in a different way?"

You're challenging everybody involved

to come up with ways of making this fresh and making it new.

When we started seeing some ideas for the car flip...

We've all seen cars flip hundreds of times.

The key for us, again, was the flip had to make sense forwards

and it had to make sense backwards.

It was another case of, "we're gonna just have to do this."

Scott Fisher and his incredible effects team started building these cars

and turning the drivetrain around,

so we could drive them at high speed backwards.

The first time we did if, it just blew everybody's mind.

To watch that happening in reverse, it just looked incredible.

Travelling to Estonia and putting those pieces together,

we were ready to go.

Those guys over there started setting up

all the actual vehicles for the movie

with the same kind of stuff that we had tested.

What you can see here is a special effects rig.

A Cannon that's used to flip the vehicle.

They did a great job getting all that stuff done

and testing them and making sure they were safe to operate

through that whole thing

because once we start there, we're on the freeway

for almost two weeks straight of nonstop car stuff.

Shooting in the day, you have the problem

of where are you gonna find a road that,

that city is able to let you shut it down for weeks at a time?

The city of Tallinn in Estonia

was kind enough to give us a great big long stretch of highway

for much of the day.

That was a first for me.

Like, "when will we ever be able to do this in life?"

Shut down the whole entire freeway.

We knew early on that we would be doing a lot of pod work.

It's basically the little cabin of a driving seat,

pedals, and a steering wheel.

We knew with the cars going forwards and backwards

that we would need the pods to be able to be inside the vehicle

for when they're going backwards, so the guy can hide.

And we'd also need it on the roof,

so we could then shoot inside at any angle,

anywhere Chris wanted to be with the imax camera.

The spacing's looking perfect so far.

The stunt drivers have known and worked with each other for decades,

so the guys just had it so dialed in.

Much like earlier with the fighting and almost being a dance,

it was so similar in a way with the vehicles.

In going to Tallinn, where a Hollywood production had never been before,

there was an excitement and an enthusiasm to help us out

and to really show that you could do something on a grand scale.

It's hard to imagine that being possible in any other city, really.

Well, Chris always envisioned this film

as a globe-trotting action epic,

and obviously, the best way to do that is to actually travel yourself.

In spy films in particular, I think,

one of the reasons that we're so drawn to the genre is escapism.

And it's the idea of these characters

who get to live in a world that we don't get to live in.

Yes, you could recreate India in a soundstage

or London in a soundstage,

and you're not gonna capture the essence or the authenticity.

Being able to go to seven different countries

gives it such a nuanced sense of realism 'cause you're actually there.

What you saw is what we experienced.

Prep on this film was really complicated

because we were based out of la

and making plans for all these huge action set pieces

that were gonna be happening all over the world.

We were going places during the busiest times.

Summer in amalfi, monsoon season in India.

We basically had to make sure that we had the best people on the ground

in every country, and we certainly did.

Chris wanted this brutalist, eastern bloc vibe

that we got from Tallinn.

It's just phenomenal. I mean, it's got a very vibrant culture,

has all kinds of interesting Soviet-era bits of architecture.

As we prepped the film, we put more and more things into Tallinn.

We shot the concert sequence there at linnahall.

It was built for the Soviet union's 1980 Olympics.

It's brutalist architecture, and it sits out overlooking the baltic sea.

Actually, I think it's one of my favorite buildings

we've ever shot in.

In the end, what you see as an audience is a fragment or is a shot,

but you are filming a reality.

You wanna buy into that reality.

When you send in a SWAT team or when you send in the actors,

you want them to understand the overall architecture of the place.

So, in that way, a real location always helps a lot.

India is a great place to shoot, but it had its challenges.

Shooting at night in monsoon seasons,

where it's very, very wet, over a big area that we needed to light up.

This was very challenging.

Coming here and putting it all together and putting it in such a massive way.

Everybody's just gobsmacked at what he's doing out here.

It's absolutely awesome.

The building sequence we shot

in a building called the vardhan building.

There are only two little elevators in there,

that would sometimes stop or just not come, for no reason.

And so, you would make the decision,

"am I gonna walk up the 18 floors or not?"

The Indian people that we worked with,

they were just very, very good and hardworking people

that knew exactly what needed to be done,

and that made stuff happen for us.

We were able to get some really remarkable images,

including some of the first aerials in a film of Mumbai ever.

It's not something they'd allowed in the past.

Crucial plot elements happen in quite unusual places in the movie.

I mean, who knew there was an enormous wind farm in the middle of the ocean

just off the coast of Denmark?

Before I shot dunkirk, I was traveling with my family,

and I saw this wind farm from a plane, and I wrote it down, filed it away.

Shooting dunkirk, we were right next to an offshore wind farm,

and some of the only visual effects we really had to do in dunkirk

were erasing the windmills from the shots.

And it was a bit of a shame because they look fantastic.

And so that cemented the visual potential for me.

I really want to shoot one of these offshore wind farms.

One of the things that we had done on dunkirk

was we had shot a lot of boat scenes.

Anytime you're shooting with boats and working on the water,

it's incredibly difficult.

I don't think I ever would have wanted to try something like

shooting out at the wind farm on the icebreaker

if we hadn't done dunkirk.

A lot of the challenge for us was finding these ships,

their availability for the times we needed them,

and then finding out how we were gonna effectively shoot them.

The icebreaker, for me, stood out right away,

because it was so unusual and the paint scheme is so unusual.

And because these boats work.

This boat's not sitting around,

waiting for someone to call it up to work on a movie.

So, to find our icebreaker that had this look to it,

and then to get the boat to work during the times we need it

was really awesome.

Dunkirk had been, I mean, really one of the largest

marine units ever assembled for a movie.

And having done that with Nell,

I thought this job would be relatively easy for him.

But the reality is when you start writing in luxury yachts,

and icebreakers, it gradually started to add up.

We had 120 ships on this movie, which is staggering,

and more than half of those were on camera.

When it came to picking our mega yacht,

we had a lot of options.

A lot of these boats exist, but generally

they're owned by people who are not interested in letting you rent them.

A lot of them are meant for cruising the coast

and sitting at the beach, and planet 9, which we ended up going with,

was very utilitarian. This boat meant business.

It is literally a world travel machine.

It's got an ice-rated hull that can go anywhere in the antarctic.

I gave it a very slightly militaristic aspect. It feels defensive.

It doesn't feel like a toy.

It feels like it has a functional purpose.

The amalfi coast at that time of year,

it was almost impossible to get around by car.

We would move the crew starting at 3:00 A.M.

Out to the yacht to work all day.

Food, water, anything that was needed, film,

this is the first time planet 9's

being involved in this kind of thing.

Normally, a yacht only takes 12 guests

and here we are out at anchor with 100 of you on board.

So, it's been a pretty amazing, very, very different experience for us.

The real challenge of filming on a luxury yacht like that

is everything on that boat is finished

to this extraordinarily expensive and high degree.

It was a bit like shooting in a museum or a China shop.

Everything here is custom. The furniture is built inside the ship.

The wallpaper, the lighting, the carpets.

Doorways are really narrow in a boat

and the furniture's very large.

This is to protect the woodwork from us.

We had to protect the doors and the walls

because they're fabric or leather.

Right now, we're preparing for a scene

where we're gonna bring an mi-8 military helicopter

and perform some operations on this deck.

We're expecting downdraft speeds of almost 100 miles an hour,

which is really substantial. That's a basic, I believe, a class 2 hurricane.

Well, the helicopter's too heavy to land on the deck of the yacht.

The yacht has its own helicopter that can land,

which is very, very small in comparison.

And it was massive. Those things are supposed to land

on an aircraft carrier, not on a mega yacht.

And so, in the end, through tests and rehearsals,

they ascertained that they could just touch down on the deck

low enough for people to get in and out.

No one, absolutely nobody has pulled that off before,

and I don't think you will ever see that again.

Of course, in the film's it's a very quick thing, a very throwaway thing.

But that's the nature of this type of filmmaking.

This is a real yacht, this is how a character like sator might live.

To be on these boats is to get a strong sense of character,

which is manifest in these incredible vessels

that either keep him castle-like, Neptune-like on the sea,

repelling all invaders, or cutting through his environment

in this deadly, shark-like, high-velocity way.

There's definitely a level of casting that goes on with these ships.

And especially for sator's character, with the yacht,

his personal racing sailboats.

Somebody of that caliber is gonna have the best.

What I was looking for in the script was that bridge

between the glamorous, frivolous world.

Yachts add something with physicality and danger.

The f50s. It's the baddest sailing craft on the water. It's a rocket ship.

They were quite terrifying, actually.

You go, "yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it's gonna lift off the water."

And then the first time we did I, I went, "holy hell."

Like it's so... It goes really incredibly high up.

I made a few calls to some guys I knew that had sailed

previously in America's cup and it turned out that some of those guys

were now these professional sailors on the sailgp circuit,

which is basically like formula 1, but for sailboats.

When we first started talking to sailgp,

we wanted to get them to amalfi 'cause we were already there.

We saiq, "all right, we'll go to you guys,

when you guys go to southampton.”

These boats just can't travel. It's a big deal

to get these boats to move, and just to get them in and out of the water

is a whole process.

They come in, they set up these big tent cities.

They've got... they unpack their boats that they have in containers.

Imagine a boat that really doesn't want to float,

and that's what you're dealing with. This boat wants to fly.

So, you put it in the water when you use it,

and you take it out of the water when you don't want to use it.

Obviously, the sailgp guys have never done anything like this.

They've never been asked to do anything like this.

I don't think sailing at this level

has been in a feature film ever, so this is a first.

It's also been a learning curve trying to film these.

So, I think all of us have learned from both sides.

/t was a meeling of these two crazy worlds,

like a film crew meeting a traveling circus

of the world's best athletes and the fastest boats on the ocean.

Like throwing people off of one of their boats

is just their idea of a nightmare.

It's like, "no, you can't throw somebody off the boat."

"No, no, no. But that's what we need to do."

"Yeah, but he can't fall off the boat."

"No, that's what we need him to do."

There's a whole extraordinary set of safety protocols

that we needed to know how to do,

and the actors needed to know how to do.

So, we all went through that safety training

before we were allowed to get near the boat.

For the first time in the shoot

we, as a film crew, were very much subjected

to what is possible with these boats.

The fact that these things go 50 knots,

anything that you have on the water that can keep up that fast,

isn't gonna be stable enough for any kind of camera platform.

It's not actually that cold.

No, it's not that cold. It is that wet, however.

The real breakthrough was to have Andrew Jackson

go a week early to work with sailgp and look at camera placements.

We were able to do things with these boats that they had never done before,

just because they've never had to and no one had ever tried.

We were able to remove the wing and tow the boat

and get it up on the foils, which was very stable and very safe.

That was the scenario where it was safe to involve the actors

and be able to photograph them actually foiling,

actually lifting off the water.

We knew we were gonna have to do some of the sequence

on this other vehicle.

The buck rig was a supplement.

Basically half of the ship bolted onto a real powerboat.

It was really just for close-up stuff and for dialogue.

In the end, it all paid off, it all worked actually very smoothly,

and we were able to get the sequence in a relatively short amount of time.

I think Chris is unique in that he can

look at things like enormous boats

and just the quality of light in a place like amalfi

and do something magical

at the service of a story that goes for his sweet spot,

which is how do you make great cinema?

Not just tell stories in pictures,

but how do you make the experience of cinema?

To be actually in the thing, to feel the thing physically

move around you or feel the boat rock under you,

it just obviously, organically feeds the truth of a performance.

A lot of these sequences you read in the script

and you just think, "yeah, would be cool in a movie,”

and then you get to set and it's like,

"yeah, we gota 747 we're crashing into a building."

"That's how we're achieving the 747 crashing into a building."

Writing the plane crash,

I knew I wanted to try and do it in some ways in-camera.

It read on the page as the most exciting sequence,

and I definitely was scratching my head about how we were going to achieve it.

One of the first things I asked Chris was,

"how big do you want the plane?”

He laughed, and I said, "I think I could get you a real plane."

We wound up visiting an airport in victorville

where they have all kinds of planes that are being sold for scrap.

When I looked at 737s, they looked a bit small compared to the 747s

and the md-11s I was seeing on the other side.

It's like, "well, maybe we could just go shopping there instead."

When we first talked about crashing a plane,

I thought maybe a cessna.

Maybe a 707, something small.

But we went all-out, 747,

almost 300,000 pounds.

To see a plane like this actually makes you realize

what we're all flying in, when we're flying. These things are huge.

I don't think we tend to get the scale of it

when we're just walking in through the gangplank.

Our main focus, when we got there, was the brakes.

Of course, that's the part they take off right away,

when a plane is decommissioned.

Here's a finished bogie with four of our eight brakes.

We have four on this side, four on the other side.

These rebuilt, real-deal calipers from boeing.

The same system we use to remote-drive cars

with pods, you basically put that, stuck it in the belly of the plane,

and one guy steered, one guy dealt with the braking,

and we propelled it by pulling it on cables.

So, this is our cockpit. There's nobody up above, obviously,

and we drive, we steer from here.

Braking systems here on the right.

We have a couple cameras facing forward.

Back ones, we can see the position of the wheel at all times.

We actually have several different views we could switch between,

so we can see forward, we can see backwards.

A couple of shots involve guys climbing out of the escape hole,

and they're near the wheels and stuff,

so we want to be ready for any kind of an emergency or panic stop.

There was an enormous amount of prep that went into that sequence

because we were shooting at a working airport,

and they're not traditionally in the business

of crashing planes for real.

From a safety point of view, we made sure that everything was good.

Just working with Scott Fisher and his team,

making sure that we knew all of our parameters for safety.

There were sections we had to go through the cars,

stop, go through the guy unloading.

Blowing this stuff out the back.

Dropping the gold out.

That's the thing on Chris' movies. You do it, it works, you move on.

Yeah, I think I'll enjoy it more when I see the movie.

I was like, "how they gonna pull this off?

There's no way they're gonna crash this thing into that building."

It's still a damn 747, okay?

It's really a big object.

Of course, if you blow something up,

and you can only blow it once, we would shoot with several cameras.

We have so many cameras, you're not going to be able to watch this

and it not potentially be photographed.

So, wait for the movie to come out next year, okay?

Everybody in place. And roll cameras.

Three, two, one... action.

I think from a wardrobe point of view,

the film was extraordinarily challenging.

With this type of movie,

you're looking to establish an iconic presence at the heart of it,

and that was something that I knew Jeffrey would be able to do

and put together a great team.

I read the script at least four or five times

before I even spoke to Chris

because we knew we had to do something new, something special,

because it is an amazing piece.

We started talking about characters first.

What they're doing, why they're doing it,

what their relationships are to one another.

And then individual characters.

Well, the clothes do identify where you are and what we're doing.

When you look at the protagonist,

he continually changes. He takes on different personas.

He's on the border of James Bond. He's secret, yet he's out there.

All those things come into play when you dress a person like that.

And I came up with a very good, iconic look

that worked for jd and works for the movie.

I didn't feel like I had to think about it. They just felt so a part of me,

a part of the character. I felt sexy, to be honest.

The Polo shirt has turned into our, quote unquote, iconic look.

It has a great deal of strength,

yet it doesn't overpower you with the tie and the shirt.

There's something slightly relaxed and a lot of confidence,

and on jd it looks great.

Neil is a slob. He's just rolls in every day, doing what he does.

I thought that Neil's the type of person who appreciates chaos.

I felt like he couldn't take himself too seriously.

His first suit that you see him in, in India, is this linen suit.

Where you see it's just been aged and worn down,

as if he's never cleaned it.

It's just like he wears it every day. And that's the real Neil.

He's got the skinny little tie that he ties like a schoolboy.

But then, when he goes posing as a wealthy businessman,

he takes on a different persona.

Yet, a little bit of Neil still peeks through.

So, you've got a double-breasted suit,

which is perfectly tailored and everything.

But if you look at the fabric, there's a little playfulness to it.

So, that character is still there,

even though he's pretending to be somebody else.

With sator, you could go so many ways with that character.

You see, you hear Russian oligarch, and you think wealth, lots of money.

Or you have a guy who says, I'm so wealthy, I don't care.

It gave you a clue to the inside of the mind of this character

and how he feels about the world, how he reacts to the world.

The original designs for him were more over-the-top.

Whereas after a serious discussion with Chris,

I took it all down to a much lower level,

which works for the character. It makes him very individual to who he is.

Kat's journey in the film varies from these moments of great strength

to fragility, to softness.

She's very conservative.

You could easily go very Russian oligarch's wife.

You could go extremely designer.

But because she isn't that person, the marriage has fallen apart,

she does not love this man anymore,

she's not in that world. She comes from a stately place.

So, we kept her that way.

When you watched Elizabeth, she had such graceful movements.

Like almost balletic.

I thought, here I have a 6'3" actress.

My feeling was to just own it,

and I said to Chris, "I think we should just go with it."

So I made the clothes flatter that physicality of her.

The wardrobe of this type of film was always gonna be very important to me,

and Jeffrey has an excellent sensibility

for combining something with a bit of glamour,

something with that little extra aspirational quality almost,

but with an idea of how that can be reconciled

with the real-world texture that we're trying to get across.

I think part of the success of what the movies look like is Nathan.

Nathan and I have a shared north London background.

We speak that same language

of industrial design from our childhoods.

He's been with Chris a long time.

Their synergy's just top-notch.

Traditionally, our methods are always,

you try and find something real and shoot it, and then

use a little bit on stage. Nothing new, old techniques.

So it just grows the scale of the whole place.

To make the audience believe, you have to make

the futurism of it believable,

and therefore you have to make it familiar.

It's like something that you feel that

that could exist, and for art department,

and I'm sure for Chris as well.

It's just more fun to build the stuff.

Nathan has that talent for building things that you instantly believe in.

They're visceral. They feel like real places.

The first time you read this script,

you have a lot of questions,

not the least of which are... "Turnstile?

How does that work?"

We wanted to integrate the process of inversion

into the texture and the tone of the rest of the film.

The idea of the two rotating things was something that

Nathan came up with in terms of how to mirror things.

How to make if look like a reflection

at the same time as actually a unique half of what's going on.

There's an evolution of those turnstiles,

so they'd start off small, and they keep getting bigger.

The early ones started off as two cylinders

that rotate, and you're able to transfer across,

and then the next one's bigger, same idea,

but you're able to transfer across something really large.

Then they look more like a slot machine and go round and round vertically.

You could stop 'em and start 'em and change the speed and the pacing,

depending upon what was needed for the shot.

We try on every film

to do things in-camera as far as possible.

We honed it down into using scale tricks,

so we don't have to build so big, and we can

deceive the eye with our forced perspectives.

For example, in Barbara's office,

you're able to fool people because you have the real set,

and then, at a certain point, it fades into painting.

They brought in a painter from england who did it freehand.

You're like, "whoa!"

What you're doing is putting three dimensions

on a two-dimensional surface

in order to give the impression that it's one continual plane.

For the final battle sequence,

the scale of that set alone was just immense.

There was a mine just behind Joshua tree in eagle mountain,

100-year-old mine,

and it had the core batch of existing ruined architecture

where we could really develop that site and twist it into what we wanted.

There were a few existing buildings.

In the model, the ones that were existing

are represented in the light gray.

All the dark gray are buildings that we built.

We've created some miniature buildings that are 30 or 50%

of what a full-sized building would be.

This building here is about 50% of full size,

and it just extends the city even further than what we've done.

When we got into the cave sequence

where they enter the cave,

it had to tie into our eagle mountain set.

That cave was amazing. That was mind-boggling.

We are at stage 16 at Warner Bros.

This is the largest stage in Hollywood in terms of volume.

This is the link piece to eagle mountain.

We've built a few caves in our time,

and we've learned over the years how to achieve that grand scale.

So you feel it's big, but it's an illusion.

What you're looking at down the end is a forced perspective.

So it looks like it goes on forever, but it doesn't.

So as we come in,

this perspective now is all forced,

so it's like Alice in wonderland.

So here we go... see?

So we just scaled these down, 3D-printed them, and then,

ed strang, our scenic,

just painted a little backing to make it go even further.

So, now we come out into the main cave.

This is now the hypocenter.

We've used fiberglass molds,

foam carving, and then, as we got higher,

we used lightweight vacuform,

and then plastered the whole thing to link it all together.

So, there's lots of different techniques.

In typical Chris fashion, he made this big set,

he got to the end, he wanted to blow it up.

So we did our best we could to blow that thing up.

All these things just helped inform me as a performer.

It felt like it was so real that it was easy to lend yourself to that reality

and just go for it. And that's a credit to Nate-dog.

He knows what he's doing.

Three, two, one. Up.

- Cut. - And that's a cut.

- Cut it. - Cut.

Three, two, one... action.

The battle at stalsk-12 at the end,

that's the area of the film

where you're paying off the concept for the audience

and you can take it to a bigger scale of action.

We shot it at the end

because we knew that we would have to learn how to do all this stuff

before we got to that sequence.

When we arrived there, we felt ready to do that,

ready to apply it to a real big set piece.

For me, I was like, "this is dunkirk on steroids or something."

I've never been on a movie of this scale,

especially something that is not a part of any franchise.

It's extraordinary.

The environment is as realistic as it's gonna get.

It's much easier because you are in a real circumstance

and you can feel it and you don't need to

create your own fantasy.

Every set in every location, they all bring their own challenges.

In the reality of tenet,

a building can explode, but a building can also rebuild itself.

We took the most practical approach.

We had a one-third scale building that we blew up the bottom,

and we had a one-third scale building we blew up the top,

and then we had a full-size building

that was the beginning and the aftermath.

When you've done a lot of movies with green screens,

it just feels like such a privilege to be doing it. It feels like...

Yeah, make the building...

That explodes itself and comes back together.

It feels very, very real, essentially 'cause it is real.

Eagle mountain was at the tail end of our shoot.

It'd been a long shoot, everybody was tired.

You're in the middle of nowhere.

And you're like, "oh, my god. It's just gonna be so daunting."

And then, all of a sudden, the four chinooks started up.

And it was just, "oh, my... This is really happening."

Even my seasoned stunt guys who have seen some pretty epic stuff were like...

You can just see 'em all standing up,

and holding their guns, and like, "yeah, let's do it"

and it just really helped charge the whole crew

to push through that three weeks of eagle mountain.

We were out in the desert. It was hot,

guys were in full gear,

the complication there was having to run sequences

both forwards and backwards.

To try running out in the desert over rocks this big,

not looking where you're running,

and trying to make it look like you're running in the right direction.

That was definitely a challenge.

It's scary because

the scale is so big on this movie that

to reset four military helicopters and 600 extras...

There's been a few shots where I've...

I've just... you just fall.

I was like, "I'm so sorry."

It's a credit to George and company

just being able to get everybody on the same page

to move in unison, backwards and forwards.

I think these scenes are heightened in a way

that it has everyone constantly having to think and work as a team.

Eagle mountain, that was graduation masterclass for all of us.

It was like a culmination of everything we learned

put together in this really physical place.

Every department head coming to stalsk-12

brought an expertise they'd developed over the last six months,

and so they were able to pull off a lot of really extraordinary things.

When you work with new people, there's always a moment of terror

as you lose your...

The comfort blanket of the people that you've worked with before.

Ludwig and Jen, both are absolutely incredible,

and they both were involved very early on, during the shoot.

I mean, they brought really fresh energy, new perspectives.

Jen lame has done some extraordinary work prior to this film,

and it's easy to look at a large-scale action film

and see the editor's influence.

It's much harder to look at dramas, to look at smaller-scale things,

and understand fully the influence of the editor.

But good work is good work, and what I was looking for was somebody

with a different point of view, who would have a fresh take

on this type of material.

I knew Ludwig's other work,

and what was interesting is working with a younger composer, somebody who had

a completely different set of references for film school.

The great thing about our initial meeting was

that wasn't in any way a bad thing.

It was a totally positive thing.

It was like, "okay, we're both gonna bring interesting things to the table."

Most times, when I start working with a new director,

you get thrown in right in the middle of the process

when they're editing the movie.

This was a little bit different because

he contacted me before they started shooting.

One of the challenges that I pose

to any composer I'm working with is

I don't use temp music.

I don't love using temp score either

because then you get used to something... I don't know,

it always feels weird to me to import cds

of other composers and put them in.

There's something wrong about that.

Chris was like, "okay, well, do you wanna start working?"

"Do you wanna start... Can you start writing some demos?"

I went to work straight away.

He was able to give me tracks as we were finishing planning the film

and things I could listen to as we were actually shooting.

Talking a lot to John David Washington about his character,

just getting his take on the protagonist,

that's also extremely inspiring.

The last day of shooting in the desert,

we're surrounded by thousands of extras in military gear.

Robert pattinson's driving this truck up the hill,

and four helicopters just...

Dreading like, "okay, how I'm gonna write music for this scene?"

We've maintained the tradition,

which used to be industry standard until relatively recently,

of screening film dailies wherever possible.

John Lee has figured out ways over the years of bringing dailies

to some of the hardest-to-reach spots in the world.

We're in amalfi right now, and we've found this school

and this is the gym.

Lucien, our projectionist, travels with this huge kit of stuff.

We screen it at wrap. Four or five times a week, we have a big screening.

It was such an amazing experience to be able to watch film dailies.

Focus, take notes,

think how I would use that when I get it in four days.

You can't hide in imax.

Some of my old tricks, maybe, of doing certain things.

You really need to be aware of what the end result is.

I hadn't done a lot of fight sequences.

On top of that, a forwards person fighting a backwards person.

It happens twice. I was nervous about that.

We shot each sequence twice.

I literally directed the scene twice.

Talked to Jen early on about a rule

which we were able to almost never violate.

I think we once had to do it, but to never use the same shot

in both sequences, reversed.

Now the film's on home video

and people are able to scrub the edits and look at it backwards and forwards,

they'll see all kinds of differences in the sequences.

I felt like I had to keep referencing the footage over and over again,

to the point where I would watch it so many times

that I would have to step away and go for a walk and come back

because it was daunting.

Editing is a misunderstood profession

because it's seen as a technical job in some senses,

but the technical part of it is the least of it.

It's really about having a sense of story and character,

and how those things all mesh.

And Jen has that absolutely beautifully. She's an extraordinary editor.

Another reason why I was excited

to work on a Chris Nolan film is because of the music.

Chris is so involved with music.

Watching him work with Ludwig and getting rough edits of pieces.

He came up with a brilliant, brilliant score.

What I have always felt about music in film is that

it shouldn't be a coat of varnish

that's applied to the thing at the end.

It should actually be something

that's in there in the construction of the film,

because you want it to be one of the building blocks of the film.

The big airplane heist, for example, when they crash a 747 into a building.

I wrote that piece of music just based on the script,

and it just felt like, "okay, did you actually shoot this scene

while listening to my music?" Because everything matches up perfectly.

That way, you build everything as a whole,

and you're seeing how

the different elements are working as an organic whole.

I think that visiting the set, seeing the designs early on,

reading the script obviously ahead of time,

and spending as much time as possible with the rest of the creative team,

understanding how these decisions are made

and contributing and feeling the thing grow as a whole,

that cohesion is very important to me.

The proudest thing for me is now I can look back on the experience,

reading that script

and genuinely sitting in that room and thinking,

"I have no idea how we're going to do half of this stuff,"

to then completing it and Chris being happy...

That's incredible.

It just goes to show what can be achieved

when you take the time and you have the right people

and you put all of those ingredients together.

It was ambitious, there's no question,

but we were surrounded by the absolute best in the business.

And we felt great about the huge talents

that were helping us make the movie come to life.

I remember Chris, after one of the meetings,

he was like, "it's gonna be hard." He said it just like that.

And I laughed, but months later...

Yeah, you were right, sir. It was very hard.

Working on a Chris Nolan movie for me is

like watching a Chris Nolan movie.

It both felt like the hardest job I'll ever have in my life,

and the hardest work I've ever done, and the most fun I've ever had.

And I feel like that's what you feel like

when you watch a Chris Nolan movie.

You're like, "man, I need to see that again. That was crazy,

but I had the best time ever.”

It was undoubtedly the most complicated thing

that I've ever been involved with.

But it was very inspiring to see how the different department heads

and the people working for them Rose to the challenges.

It made for a very inspiring environment on set.

Chris is so knowledgeable about film.

He directs everybody, every department.

He's not just directing the actors and their performance,

he makes sure that everybody understands

why you're doing something forward and backwards,

and the effect it's gonna have in the film.

Chris always sets the tone.

He sets the tone for me and for the actors.

He's never sitting down on apple box, or he's never shying away

from testing out a rig.

He can just keep shooting.

If the rain's coming down, he's loving it.

You lose the right to complain about anything.

I mean, it's a good move on his part.

It's infectious. You can't help but to want to keep going

and give it your all.

You come to work, you come to play, luckily,

because that part of it is important.

This is a fairly brightly puritanical approach to art.

There's this really nice tone that

we're all in it together. We're all making this crazy film,

and let's not be too precious.

Let's stay safe, and let's do this.

When you're a kid, and you think about the way

they make huge Hollywood movies,

this is what I would imagine that to be.

This massive team of people that travel the world,

go to these incredible locations and shoot all of this amazing stuff,

that is tenet in a nutshell.

- And a cut. - Cut.

More than any other film we've done,

everything we went through and all the resources we had

are there on the screen for the audience to enjoy.

And I feel very, very good watching the finished film

that it's a grand-scale entertainment.

And, for me, that was always the ambition for the film.