60 Minutes - 05/17/2026: Betting on War, The Knowledge, Christopher Nolan

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

Last month a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier was indicted for using classified intelligence to make bets online. It comes as online prediction markets have exploded in popularity. The war in Iran and capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro have revealed suspiciously-timed bets on when an attack might happen, even the fate of world leaders. Correspondent Jon Wertheim reports on the phenomenon of betting on war and the creation of a whole new category of insider trading.  As tech companies promise that AI-powered autonomous vehicles will transform transportation, correspondent Anderson Cooper takes a ride down the ancient roads and medieval alleyways of London in the iconic black cab. London’s black cab industry still relies on a 161-year-old test called “the Knowledge”, requiring prospective cabbies to memorize thousands of London's landmarks and the shortest routes between them all. Cooper reports on this legacy institution and why London cab drivers aren’t about to hand over their keys to big tech.  Legendary Hollywood director Christopher Nolan, whose blockbuster films have earned 18 Academy Awards, meets with correspondent Scott Pelley ahead of the release of his highly-anticipated adaption of Homer’s classic, “The Odyssey”. Pelley interviews Nolan and those who know him best about his filmmaking at a young age, his trademarks, and his most ambitious project yet. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From the trusted team behind 48 hours, welcome to case-by-case. Your weekly update on the biggest true crime stories unfolding right now. Nick Ryder remains in custody without bail. Luigi Mangione accused of stalking and gunning down United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson. From high-profile trials and stunning evidence to major breaks in cold cases, we'll follow it all case-by-case. Follow and listen to 48 hours case-by-case wherever you get your podcasts. As long as there have been wars, there have been war profiteers.

But never quite like this. Tonight, new evidence that betters, including a U.S. soldier, may have profited by using inside information to wager on when and how military operations will unfold. A soldier using classified intelligence to trade. Unprecedented. There is nothing to compare that to. This is a new kind of insider trading. On ancient roads in London, a very modern battle is brewing.

If we do a left here, the goldsmiths hole. Black calves will soon be competing with artificial intelligence-powered autonomous taxis. But as we found out, London's cabbies aren't about to hand over their keys. Your knowledge is better than what a Google map will tell you to go. Oh, don't bite me laugh. Seriously, you know. It's like comparing a hot dog vendor to Gordon Ramsey. I feel a real responsibility to try and get as much on screen

for the audience as possible. Action! Christopher Nolan is one of the great directors of our time. Oppenheimer, Dunkirk, Interstellar, and next, The Odyssey. I mean, it was the hardest movie I've ever done by far. I mean, not even close. I'm Leslie Stahl.

I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alphonsey. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories and in our last minute, Nate Bargettze, with something funny about America.

Tonight on 60 Minutes. The war with Iran and the U.S. military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro have carried the usual hallmarks of conflict. Soldiers, strategy, casualties, costs. But they've also been accompanied by a new feature, betting on war. This year alone, more than a billion dollars has been staked online on military decisions and

outcomes. As if they were wagering on football games or Oscar winners, betters all over the globe have taken positions, some suspiciously timed and with information seemingly too specific for a civilian outsider, on when and how an attack might happen, even the fate of world leaders. It's created a whole new category of insider trading. As long as there have been wars, there have been war profiteers, but never quite like this. Cloaked in night shrouded in secrecy, U.S. Special Operations Forces captured Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro on January 3rd. He was taken to the U.S. to face drug trafficking and narco-terrorism charges.

As it turned out, the president of Venezuela wasn't the only figure in the operation who would find himself confronting federal charges. U.S. Army soldier Gannon Ken Bandike, who was involved in the planning and execution of the Venezuela mission, was charged last month with using classified intelligence to place bets based on when the surprise raid would unfold. If the allegations are true, this is one of the worst betrayals of trust in this area that I can remember and possibly ever. should feel confident that the most important little agency they've probably never heard of is on the job. Now a private lawyer in Washington, Rob Schwartz, until last year, worked for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission,

a federal agency policing fraud and insider trading. A soldier using classified intelligence to trade. Unprecedented. Classified intelligence that he knew about because he helped plan and to execute the mission. There is nothing to compare that to. The Justice Department alleges Van Dyke made a series of wagers totaling roughly $34,000, including a half-dozen the day before the raid. He ended up netting more than $400,000. According to the indictment, Van Dyke immediately withdrew his profit,

then tried to delete his betting account on Polymarket, the world's biggest online prediction market. The 38-year-old Army Master Sergeant has pleaded not guilty. Polymarket says it cooperated with launch. enforcement. If you are a corporate executive and you're privy to non-public business information, you go trade on that, that's insider trading. Everybody knows that. But the same thing exists in prediction markets where this soldier is alleged to have traded. You're saying different contexts from what we usually think, two guys at the golf course are winking and whispering and

tipping each other off, but this is still meeting the definition of insider trading? Exactly right. This is a new kind of insider trading. trading. Spiking in popularity, prediction markets, including polymarket, offer wagers on the likelihood of future events. Will the Dodgers win the World Series? Will Jesus return in 2026? For that matter, in a 60-minute interview, would President Trump say the word trillion more than 10 times? Turned out that one didn't pay off. But lately, another kind of wager has found popularity. What will happen in military conflicts? Dates of attack. Will an airspace close?

Will enriched uranium change hands? You can bet on it. You can also bet on this. Insiders, people holding non-public information, will be laying down their money too. In the U.S., it's prohibited to make military bets on platforms like Polymarket, though it's easy to find digital workarounds

as Gannon Ken Van Dyck allegedly did. Here's what's more astounding than the existence of military bets, how often they pay off. It's alarming to see a culture around betting on war. Michelle Kendler Kretsch and her team at the Anti-Corruption Data Collective examine polymarket bets on military outcomes. She looked specifically at long-shot wagers, bets with less than 35% odds. Despite being underdogs, they won more than they lost,

a telltale sign, she says, of, quote, systemic insider trading. Give me the apples-to-apples comparison to military bets versus, say, sports wagering. So military bets are 52% success rate. Sports, 7%. Wildly disproportionate to what conventional probability

should be telling us. Absolutely. In Ocean Away, another team of digital detectives say they too have identified crooked betters wagering on war. This might be the most insane pattern we have found on Polymarket so far.

Based in Paris, Nicholas Weimans small data analytics firm bubble maps creates visualizations of bets on Polly Market to spot bubbles or clusters of suspect traders. One paradox of Polly Market, everything about the trades is totally transparent and public, except the traders themselves remain anonymous. This big cluster in the middle, no one talked about it. The firm's head of investigations goes by his online handle, Deebbs. He asked us to obscure his identity over fears of retaliation, over fears of retaliation for his detective work. They shared for the first time

what they believe is a more egregious insider training case than Gannon Ken Van Dykes. We spotted nine polymarket accounts, all connected, who made collectively $2.4 million, banning almost exclusively on U.S. military operations. Van Dyck made $400,000. Here, 2.4 million.

And now, here's the crazy part. 98% win rates. Wait, wait, wait, wait. 98. 98. This is like winning the lottery multiple times, you know. The linked accounts made dozens of winning bets on the specific dates of pivotal moments in the war with Iran, even when the odds were low.

The first U.S. strikes, the removal of Iran's supreme leader, the announcement of a ceasefire. How do we know this isn't just someone who has really good instincts? Luck alone cannot explain those numbers. If you know this, why don't federal prosecutors? Well, hopefully with your interview, they're going to know this. We talked to one source in the Defense Department with relation to Sergeant Van Dyck, and he said, listen, there are dozens more of these. Van Dyke was just a small fish.

Oh, sure. There's so many people involved in the planning and the execution of a military operation. A former U.S. military officer, Dieb, speaks from firsthand experience when he says military bets are ripe for crime. You have obviously the government officials, but you also have the military planners, right? You have the military intelligence analysts and even spouses. They hear things, and that means that there are, consequently, are a lot of potential insiders. And it's not just the bogus high-tech online prediction markets where trades based on war have raised intense suspicions.

It's happening on the old-school and heavily regulated commodities markets, too. I'm highly suspicious at this point. And I'm not the only one. Any trader right now is highly suspicious. A former commodities trader, David Covel, is now a New York lawyer representing victims of fraud on the same markets he once traded. In 2021, he secured the largest whistleblower award for commodities market manipulation in U.S. history. Well, this is a classic graph than any commodities trader will understand. Covel walked us through the morning of March 23rd. Fighting had been raging for three-plus weeks, and it was a slow trading day in oil futures.

If you see the chart, you'll see that no one is trading during that time period. Why would you trade at that time? It doesn't make a lot of sense unless you have a real reason. Then, according to data, the financial firm LSEG provided us, suddenly at 6.50 a.m., more than $800 million was staked on the chance of oil prices dropping. 15 minutes later, President Trump posted on true social that the White House, in Iran had, quote, very good and productive conversations about ending hostilities. The news sent the price of oil plummeting more than 10%. What kind of profit is that resulting in?

We're talking tens of millions could be $80 million. You see this graph and you think insider trading. That's a natural conclusion to draw. I can't know it without knowing what happened, but it's a natural conclusion to draw. Covel is not alone in finding this highly dubious. 60 Minutes has learned federal investigators are probing these oil market trades as well. What are the odds the government knows the identity of whoever executed that? If they go to the exchanges, they can know them.

This could have been someone inside the U.S., this could have been someone from a foreign country. This could have been an enemy. Identifying who it was would be the secret to figuring out whether it was insider trading or not. It's not just markets that risk manipulation by war bets. It's truth as well. Emmanuel Fabian, military correspondent for the times of Israel, thought little of a piece he wrote in March about an Iranian missile strike in an empty forest near Jerusalem. But soon after he published the account, Fabian received a barrage of messages asking him to change his story. He ignored most, but they turned darker.

One of them was, you're going to make us lose $900,000 and we'll invest even more than that to finish you, is what he wrote. He also wrote details about my siblings as well. He said, I know how often you visit your family. What's your fear factor at this point? I was quite worried. He investigated and found war bets on polymarket hinging on whether an Iranian missile would enter Israel, specifically on March 10th.

And Fabian's small news story voided the side of the bets predicting no missile, angering the losers. It was at $14 million that were being waged there. $14 million. Yeah, but by the time it closed, it actually went up to $22 million, if not mistake. Also, the person who wrote them, they wrote that, you know, if you abide by my instructions and change it, then, you know, you can end with money in your pocket and this

will all be over. Despite this pressure campaign against you, that escalated to death threats, you did not go in and change your copy. Do you worry that other people might not have your principled stance? I do worry. We know when there's a lot of money involved, in this case, $22 million, I think that can cause people to, you know, to lie. Fabian reported the threats to the police, and to Polymarket, which said that threatening a journalist was unacceptable and banned the accounts involved. Polymarket has said they work proactively on any suspicious activity constantly behind the scenes.

Overseeing all this, playing sheriff in this New Wild West? In the U.S., it's that niche government agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC, set up in the 70s to regulate food prices. Historically, led by a commission of five, today it's run by one person, Michael Seleig, a 36-year-old whom President Trump nominated chairman last fall. We will hold whoever is engaging in fraudulent, manipulative, or insider trading activity accountable to the American people.

But enforcement actions have dropped by more than two-thirds since 2024. Staffing has dropped sharply too. Sealing declined our interview request, though the CFTC told us it is. hiring more staff and using AI to go after bad actors. And government officials are aware of the new potential for corruption. In March, the White House issued a memo to staffers, noting it is a criminal offense for anyone to use non-public information on prediction markets. Where do you draw the line? I guess reasonable people can debate where the line is.

Source after source told us they fear today's insider trading scandal is tomorrow's national security scandal. If market watchers can spot irregular trades, surely enemies can too, and they'll make their war plans accordingly. Just to put it plainly, this could be putting people's lives at risk. Other adversaries may be using this information in order to plan their own strategy. If you're taking a futures position, a year from now, Sergeant Van Dyck is the only person charge with insider trading? No. I think it's just going to multiply from here.

On my new podcast, on par with Maury Povich, we're getting down to the truth behind the names that you know and love. Unfiltered conversations with legends like Leanne Morgan, Kathy Griffin, Ricky Lake, to find out when they feel the most on par. We're breaking

it down with Don Lemon, Aaron Parnas, Lamani Jones, laughing it up with Josh Johnson, Dan Soder, many more. You know, the results are in. Great conversations are always on par. So follow and listen to On Par wherever you get your podcasts. On ancient roads and in medieval alleyways in London, a very modern battle is brewing. Black cabs, which are as synonymous with that city as Buckingham Palace, will soon be competing with the artificial intelligence-powered autonomous taxis.

Tech companies promise these AI inventions, some of which are already operating in several American cities, are safer and smarter than human-trained. drivers. But as we found out, London's cabbies aren't about to hand over their keys. After all, just to get a license, they've already proven their own kind of intelligence, studying, often for years, to pass a 161-year-old test called The Knowledge. There's nothing artificial about it. They just have to memorize 25,000 streets and thousands of landmarks and businesses, and know the shortest roots between them all. Look, we're the oldest form of transport in the world. In fact, we come before buses and trains and stuff.

Yeah, we are the icons of London. If we do a left here, you'll have the Goldsmiths hole. Tom Scolion has been driving one of London's famous black cabs for the past 34 years. What's the weirdest request you've gotten from a passenger? What, this week? Or you wouldn't believe? There's a guy that's a regular right. and he's got an Irish wolf hand, dog.

Because you're a bit of paper where the dog lives, dog jumps in the bag. One of the best customers I've got. Never says a word. Never complains about it, right? But we get people, Hayland's day in the morning, take my kid to school.

Never seen me before in the life. Probably never seen me again. That's the trust we get. The trust and confidence in cabbies here dates back to 1865 when the knowledge exam was first introduced to London's horse-drawn cab. Do you have riders testing your knowledge?

Every right. Which way you're going, mate? And Google says this and Google says that. You're never going to bait the knowledge. Your knowledge is better than what a Google map will tell you to go. Oh, don't bite me laugh. Seriously, you know. It's like comparing a hot dog vendor to Gordon Ramsey.

At the Transport for London office, nervous, aspiring cabbies dress up in their Sunday best to take a seat. series of oral exams known as appearances. Whenever you're ready, sir, we'll go from Soho House, 40 Greek Street to the Chanceery, Roswood, please. Candidates are quizzed on how to get between two random points. Live on left Greek Street, right Sharsby Avenue, left Great Women Mill Street, forward Haymarket. As examiners measure the distance, ensuring they're calling the shortest route.

Unfortunately, sir, I can't score you today. He failed this round, but for those who do pass the knowledge, this memory, this memory The characterization has proven to be so challenging it can change the structure of their brains. A study from University College London found cab drivers posterior hippocampi, the part of the brain linked to memory, got bigger throughout their careers. Everyone in their profession has had to train themselves with knowledge to be the best what they are, and that's what we're doing. Stephen Fairbrass has been trying to pass the knowledge for eight years,

Anshu Morjani for five. They showed us the official study guide known as the Blue Book. These are like the points. Points of interest. So any paying customer would want you to take them to. I mean, there's thousands of them. Yeah, 6,000 of them. I just have to look at this.

The last judgment, PH, the Law Society Hall, the Londoner Hotel, the Marquis, the Mon Library, the National Gallery. I mean, this is crazy that you have to know all this. You have to learn individual restaurants? Individual restaurants. Public houses. What if a restaurant goes out of business? Then he changes names and then you learn a new name.

Then it comes on the list. It comes on the list. Yeah, it goes on the list. Now their knowledge is being tested like never before. Autonomous vehicles haven't been approved to pick up passengers in London yet, but several companies are already trying out their cars here. Wave, a British startup, backed by Nvidia and Microsoft, hopes to be operational later this year,

as does Waymo, which is owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet. To Kidra Mawakana is Waymo's co-CEO. She says putting more of its robot taxis on the roads can save lives by reducing the million traffic deaths worldwide each year. You believe driverless cars are safer than a human-driven vehicle. In the case of Waymo, we actually have the data that shows us that we're five-time safer than a human driver. Waymo has already made significant inroads in the U.S. It first began offering rides to customers in a Phoenix suburb in 20,000. Now, millions of riders across 11 major U.S. cities are being driven by Waymo's each month.

Humans want to get in the car, send that last email they didn't get to send, and check on the kid that's screaming. But we're trying to drive and do that. So this really gives you the chance to take care of all of those things and then let the Waymo driver safely get you from point A to point B. You call it a Waymo driver, but there's no driver. We really think it's important to think of it as there is a driver, right? driver is the most experienced driver in the world.

We travel over 2 million miles a week. So humans drive about 700,000 miles in a lifetime. So this is almost three lifetimes per week that our fleet is driving. Because it's been trained on every other ride that Waymo's given? At the whole fleet, yes. Waymo's AI has also driven billions of miles

in simulation to train for the countless rare scenarios it might face on roads, like snow on the Golden Gate Bridge or even an elephant stopping traffic. Start ride whenever you're ready. In San Francisco, we took a trip in one of its robo taxis with product manager Chris Ludwig. Happy Friday. It's a little freaky not to have a driver. You hear this all the time, but I'm watching the wheel very, very carefully. Yep.

But after a few minutes, the ride felt strangely normal. It feels like a very careful. Our goal is kind of blissfully boring. The car is outfitted with 29 cameras, six radars, five microphones, and five LIDAR sensors, which continuously pulsed to measure distances, objects, and people as far as three football feels away. Inside a screen shows riders what the car is seeing. It sees an intersection, I don't know, 300 feet away, but because there's other cars, I can't

see it, but it sees around these other cars. That's right, and that's partly the design of the placement of the sensors, makes it superhuman compared to what a human would be able to do. Waymo says the data gathered from these sensors enables the AI to respond faster than a human. We saw that when a woman talking on her phone crossed right in front of us. It's kind of crazy to see a person change their mind and how quickly the Waymo responded to a slight motion of them moving forward. Exactly. Its system has learned to react to those subtle cues because that's what's necessary. necessary. Waymo's AI may have a lot of training, but it still makes some rookie mistakes.

Oh my God. What the fuck is that Waymo doing? In Los Angeles, a Waymo drove through an active police scene. Waymo, come on! There's also been incidents of the robotaxies getting in the way of emergency responders and illegally passing stopped school buses, leading to a software recall and a federal investigation. Back in London, Waymo's robo taxis have been drawn. driving the streets to build a detailed 3D map to train its AI, a company standard before operating in a new area.

But it does have competition. We want to make sure our AI can understand every concept of might encounter. Alex Kendall is Waves CEO. Unlike Waymos, his artificial intelligence doesn't map out a city before driving in it. How is it possible you don't need to map a city entirely before getting your vehicles to drive autonomously in it? Well, think about how you and I learned how to drive. I learned how to go through a few traffic lights, and that taught me how the concept of traffic lights works.

In a similar way, that's how our AI learns. We train it on millions of hours of experience driving all around the world. So this means when it goes somewhere it's never seen before or it's never been mapped, it can understand what's in front of it and make decisions in real time. Waves Robotaxies are still in testing and not yet available to the public. The products that we're building will use inbuilt sensors. But Kendall believes his AI will be able to more easily adapt to new environments. Let's go for drive.

He took us to Westminster, a district in London that's home to some of the city's most historic landmarks to show us where he's been training his fleet since waves' early days in 2019. So I'm not touching the controls. The AI is controlling the steering, the speed, the indicator is the brake. Until robotaxies are approved by the. The government here, a human has to sit in the driver's seat for safety. Here's one of the busier roundabouts in front of Westminster, right in front of Parliament. Lots of tourists around different vehicles.

This guy just crossed into Arlington. Now back to another lane. There's a bike that we're going to have to wait for before making the lane change. It's just such a long list of things that can happen on the road. I think that's the main advantage of an AI driver here, is that it can have the intelligence to deal with things that you may never expect on the roads. I'll go lead by up, Maurice, lifting to Marlborough Road.

Aspiring cabby, Stephen Fairbrass, didn't seem too concerned about that. Do you worry about the future of this? You know, autonomous vehicles driving around? No. Why don't you worry? To me, the human brain will always be the strongest tool. Can you imagine you're trying to hold down a vehicle with no driver in it.

You're standing there in the rain, trying to get home, and that vehicle just drives straight past you you because it hasn't got a sensor or a human brain or an eye to turn. So to me, human beings, drivers, always going to be needed. Always.

Enshumor Johnny, however, didn't seem so sure. Every profession is being affected by... I don't know what it's going to do in near future. But it's always there on your mind that yes, and you're getting into a career, not knowing what the future is? The future is. Over the last decade, London's black cab industry

has seen a steep decline. The number of drivers has fallen from 25,000 to 16,000 today. So has their income, as Uber and other ride-hailing companies have been cutting into their business. Mr. Fabres. Even so, hundreds still sign up for the knowledge, each year.

Okay, sir. This was Stephen Fairbrass's 20th attempt. We're going to go to the Riding House Cafe, please. Riding House Cafe, sir, is on Great Titchfield Street, sir. Okay, sir. Go right into Mortimer Street, right into Norseo Street, left into Riding, Nass Street, left into Portland Place. Great Tudeltsville Street, said, down the right.

Okay, all right. Sorry, sir. I can't remember that other name of the... After Portland Pace. All right, calm down, okay, deep breaths. Yeah? Fair Brass failed this round, and we'll have to try again. For Anshu Morgiani, this was his 41st try.

Run me down to Ladywell Station, please. Lead by Broccoli Road, left Adelaide Avenue. Complair and Mordley, lead by Ladywell Road, right, Railway, Terrace, sedan left. Today, I'm going to score you, okay? Oh, thank you, sir. He passed. Thank you, Mr. Morgiani.

Thank you, Mr. Moore. And just this week, after five years of trying, where Johnny finally completed the knowledge and will now earn his license. There's probably some people going to be watching who think, why spend years of your life studying for this exam when you could be Uber drivers much faster? Do you want to drive around in one of them famous cabs out there?

Hundreds of years of all of history. It means a lot to people of London. It's like London without the Queen. about the queen, I'd say. You can't have a London without a king or queen. You can't have London without a black cab. No. Correct.

Impossible. Celebrating 20 years of Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes. It's a privilege. It's incredible. That's been the honor of a life. Go to 60 Minutes Overtime.com. Staples Preferred Business Membership, built for busy business owners, because you've got bigger things to think about.

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Twizzlers keep the fun going. Yeah, I know. I just stopped whatever you were listening to to tell you that Twizzlers keep the fun going. Well, irony isn't my forte. But twisty, chewy, yummy Twisler sure is. So think of Twizzlers as a little palette cleanser for whatever's queued up, which, by the way, should be coming very soon. Like any second now.

Okay, Twizzlers, time to keep the fun going. Christopher Nolan is among the great Hollywood directors of his generation. His blockbusters have won 18 Academy Awards and hauled in more than $6 billion. Next, Nolan will release this summer his adaptation of the nearly 3,000-year-old story, The Odyssey. We met the 55-year-old British American in his office in L.A., where he wrote epics including Oppenheimer, Dunkirk, Inception, Interstellar, and The Dark Night. A Nolan movie is a spectacle, big and loud, at the limits of what's possible. But a Nolan story is grace, imperfect people, revealing what it is to be human.

The Odyssey is Nolan's most ambitious yet. It had to be, he told us, because he imagines every film is the last he will ever make. I feel a real responsibility to try and get as much on screen for the audience as possible, to give the audience the fullest flavor, the fullest set of images and events that we can give them for a given story. What are the essential elements of a Christopher Nolan film? I always try to have a point of view on the story

that's from inside the film. So I'm not looking at the characters from 30,000 feet. I'm trying to be in the race, in the maze, with them. Because I want to try and give the audience a sense of what a place would smell like, what it would feel like. But you're also trying to make the most involving, the most extreme version of a story possible. Nolan's Odyssey is an extreme version of the Bronze Age War fought by the Soldier King Odysseus, with his Trojan horse deception and 10 years struggle to return.

home. The Odyssey is Nolan's 13th film in 28 years, and unlike many directors, he writes the screenplays. When I'm writing, I'm visualizing the film as an audience member, as somebody experiencing the story. Then when I direct the story, I'm trying to take the audience. So in the case of the Odyssey, I'm trying to put the audience into that horse. I'm trying to put them on the deck of it. It's just a ship. You don't want the audience to watch the film. You want the audience to be in the film. Very much.

Yeah. I have a feeling of having connected with these characters, having lived in the world with these characters. Action! We're sitting next to your desk. Yep. And I couldn't help but notice there's a book right next to me called How to Make Good Movies.

So this is it. This is the secret. That's the secret, yeah. I tried to tell you. tidy up before you came and hide all my secrets. It looks like it was written in the 1950s and there's a guy with a Super 8 camera. Very much about Super 8. Yeah, Super 8.

I'm actually old enough to have started on Super 8. My family had a Super 8 camera instead of a video camera. My earliest memories literally are of Chris making movies. Nolan's younger brother, Jonathan, is a Hollywood director who told us that Chris was handed the family 8-millimeter camera to keep him busy. Our take on Star Wars, of course, in the basement blowing up some of my toys with firecrackers. Probably eight or nine years old at that point, I would have been three or four. What was it that fascinated him about the camera?

I think he's just always been captivated by the idea that you could take this device and use it as a portal into another universe. It was like a door. another universe, but a door that at first Chris Nolan had to batter through, like the astronaut in Interstellar. As a young man, you graduated with a degree in literature, you applied to film school, and they turned you down. How do you know that? Research. You know about research. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yes.

What did the film school tell you? Nothing. You just get a letter saying, no thanks. I want to be a writer anyway. Despite no thanks, he kept shooting films on weekends with friends. Then, in 1999, a turning point.

He made Memento. I don't remember. It's a complex mystery with an amnesiac investigator who remembers. members clues through tattoos. This was an early reveal of Nolan's trademark, an intricate plot of shifting timelines

that challenges the audience to keep up. But movie executives feared it was confusing. Something doesn't feel right. No one wanted to distribute Memento. Yeah, we don't have to say it quite like... It's quite so sternly. I mean, it had... This story has...

happy ending. The story does are happy ending and no, it was a lesson in humility, it was a lesson in patience of independent filmmaking, which is, you know, you finish a film and you really feel you've achieved something, but convincing the industry of that, the distributors of that,

it can take a long time. It took a year to find someone to distribute Memento, but audiences found amnesia unforgettable and the so-called confusing screenplay was nominated for an Oscar.

Every no that he got just confirmed for him even more that he wanted to do this. Emma Thomas met Nolan first day of college. She's produced all of his films and their four children. They've been married 26 years. I cannot imagine Chris

if he wasn't making films. And outside of, you know, family, which is probably the most important thing to him. No, genuinely, the most important thing to him. It's horrifying to think how frustrated he would be if he wasn't able to tell stories via the medium of film. A medium, he prefers extra large. He collapsed an actual building in the dark night.

Nolan uses computer animation, but not if the authentic is humanly possible. possible. In the film Tenet, he bought a 747 and built a hanger to crash it into. In 2024, he blew up the Academy Awards. Oppenheimer won seven Oscars, including Nolan's first for Best Director and Best Picture. Seems to me you make movies the hard way, and the harder, the better as far as you're concerned. The hard of the best, uh, right to the point. of the Odyssey, and I think we pushed pretty hard on this one and maybe found some limits. Let's go!

Nolan's Odyssey brought Matt Damon and thousands of cast and crew to Greece, Iceland, Morocco, Italy, and Scotland. He shot 2 million feet of IMAX film. Unbelievable! What do you think when you see that? You've seen it a hundred times? I've seen a thousand times. I mean, I think it's a lot of work by a lot of people. I have the sense that you don't think of yourself as the most important person on the set. I think of myself as the representative of the audience on set. That's my North Star.

That's how I have to be looking at the film. So in a sense, I am the most important person on the set because I'm the audience. In taking on the Odyssey, it does become a bad scale. It needed to be the biggest film that... We had done. It needed to be challenging to all of us, because that's the nature of the story. Looks like you nearly drowned Matt Damon. We certainly put him through his paces. I mean, it was the hardest movie I've ever done by far. I mean, not even close.

This is Damon's third Nolan film after Interstellar and Oppenheimer. The first meeting I had with him, at the end of the meeting, he said, this movie's going to be hard. I kind of looked at him like, I've made, I don't know, 100 movies or whatever. I looked him like, yeah, I know. And he looked at me and went, no, this movie's going to be really hard.

Nolan often returns to his stars, including Killian Murphy in the Batman films, Dunkirk, and Oppenheimer. He really understands what actors do and what is required of them to do it. He's an actor's

director. As far as I'm Yeah. People might not think of him that way because the canvas he paints on is so big, but look at the performances in his movies. Particularly in the case of actors, you're handing them a script and you're saying, okay, you go away and you become an expert on that character's perspective on the story. So then when I'm on set, they're informing me. You know, they're bringing me information about how that character would see things, how that character plays. So in a way, it's the opposite of what people think it is. I think what separates him from other directors is the stories he wants to tell are incredibly ambitious, and the way he wants to tell them is incredibly ambitious. In this case, he wanted to do it 100% in IMAX, which had never been done.

IMAX is Nolan's great ambition. It's really a wonderful way to retain the original image. The Odyssey is the first feature shot completely on the job. giant film format. When Nolan was 16, he saw an IMAX documentary at a museum and was spellbound by the five-story screen. But IMAX is expensive and cumbersome. Digital photography and editing are faster and cheaper, so almost no one does this anymore. Look at the slicing machine. It looks like it was made in the 1940s. Probably what. We watch The Odyssey being cut and glued together in the last film lab of its kind in the world.

Why keep this ancient art alive? Well, the 70-millimeter IMAX frame has resolution or image quality up to three times higher than digital. Art, the hard way. There it is. Oh, nice. Very clean. Hollywood could say IMAX isn't practical. screenplay shouldn't challenge the audience,

and computers are cheaper than a 747. But the people we call artists are inspired by dreams, like a seven-year-old with a super eight. How would you like Hollywood historians to describe your career? Long? I'd love to feel that I had added something

to the body of work of all the filmmakers I have admired and that great film history that's developing. If I can play some part and moving the language of it forward somehow, that would be a great thing to be remembered for. The last minute of 60 Minutes. Mark Twain, Richard Pryor, Lucille Ball and Lenny Bruce, all used comedy as a mirror to hold up to the nation. As Nate Bargetse sees it,

the reflection helps shape America. In a country like ours, that is the most big. It's comedy that brings us together through jokes about the experiences we all share. There is almost nothing that the Andy Griffith Show, the Jefferson's Saturday Night Live, or Seinfeld have in common. Other than the premise that a laugh can be found

almost anywhere in this country on nearly any topic, when done right, American comedy shines light into dark places in a digestible way. For example, blazing saddles and all in the family confronting bigotry by ridiculing prejudice. Walls were broken down in the process. Few things have that kind of power in America. I've always loved stand-up comedy

and encourage young artists to give it a try because I truly believe its authenticity will stand the test of time. And everyone knows that AI is not that funny. I'm Bill Wray. Tonight marks the end of the 58th season of 60 Minutes. We're already at work on stories for season 59, which starts in September. Between now and then, we'll bring you some of our favorite segments.

See you next week. On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Little Richard. And we pull apart the story behind the image. And we do this by digging through the BBC's vast archives. Discovering forgotten interviews that change exactly how we see these giants of our culture. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. I'm Immanuel Jochi.

I'm Kai Wright. And this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives, wherever you get your podcasts.