60 Minutes - 07/12/2026: The Vatican's Orphans, Sealand, Christopher Nolan

Episode Date: July 12, 2026

From 1950 to 1970, the Vatican sent thousands of Italian children to eager American Catholics for adoption. The children entered the United States on orphan visas. The trouble was most of the children were not orphans. They were the children of unwed mothers, many of whom were alive and searching for their children. How the Vatican got into the orphan business is the subject of The Price of Children. Bill Whitaker speaks to author Maria Laurino and to American adoptees still struggling with the decades of separation from their birth families. Heather Abbott is the producer.Correspondent Jon Wertheim journeys by boat (and winch) into the world’s smallest—and unlikeliest—state: the Principality of Sealand. Just off the English coast, and roughly the landmass of two tennis courts, it boasts a full-time population of one. It was built during World War II as a nautical fort, and later repurposed as a “pirate radio” station under its monarchs, the Bates family. Wertheim takes a tour of this micronation and its history of piracy, coups, countercoups and rogues. Michael Gavshon is the producer.Legendary Hollywood director Christopher Nolan, whose blockbuster films have earned 18 Academy Awards, meets with correspondent Scott Pelley on his adaptation 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. Nicole Young is the producer.

Bella familia, mamma mia. Mary Rolato grew up in Ohio longing for a large family, only to find out that she had one. In Italy, it was years before she could ask her birth mother the most painful question of all. Why was she given away? The church convinced her that it was the best thing for her. And so instead of helping her,

it was better for them to make money selling babies. So am I angry at the church? Hell yeah. Enter some countries you arrive in style. Here, you arrive in what's basically a backyard swing hoisted by a crank 60 feet above the North Sea. And if you're wondering about the safety regulations, yeah, us too. Then again, when you are a sovereign nation, you, by definition, set your own rules. I'm a hellful way to get into a country.

The only way to travel. Welcome to Sealand, a monarchy that declared its independence in 1967. Just wait till you hear this story. 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 Bill Whitaker. I'm John Worthheim. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Scott Pelly. Those stories tonight. On 60 Minutes. During the 1950s, the Catholic Church in Belgium separated thousands of newborns from their unwed mothers

and put them up for adoption, often without the mother's consent. The women were shamed into surrendering their babies by their families and a powerful church. In 2024, Pope Francis apologized for those forced adoptions. But Belgians weren't. the only victims. From 1950 to 1970, the Vatican sent 3,500 Italian children to America on something called an orphan visa. The trouble was, most were not orphans. Like their Belgian counterparts,

they too were the children of unwed mothers. Many mothers later went searching for their children, only to discover they had been sent across an ocean. As we first reported in 2024, thousands of American adoptees are still struggling to piece together their lost lives. It was a day he'll never forget. American adoptee John Campitelli was 28 years old when he was reunited with his Italian birth mother. He'd been searching for her for more than a decade. A mother he'd been told had abandoned him.

My mom said, you know, 28 years had gone by. I've never been able to bake a cake for you for your birthday. She says, I don't care what month it is. I'm going to bake you a case. We need to celebrate because our prodigal son has finally come home. John Campitelli was born Piero Davy in 1963 in Italy. His mother, Francesca, was unmarried and forced by her family to give him up. He was sent to a Catholic-run institution for the children of unwed mothers.

Shunned and disgraced, Francesca handed her baby to the nuns. Immediately, her name was stripped from the birthright. With the stroke of a pen, Piero Davy became an orphan. Campitelli showed us the church documents that changed his life. It says here they have been since birth, and their whereabouts aren't unknown. They knew damn well where my mom was. I mean, she showed her documents when she handed me over. So this is an outright lie.

A lie, John Campitelli, has spent his life unraveling. As soon as he was declared an orphan, he was eligible for adoption and a U.S. visa. He says his mother told him she had no idea. She had every intention of coming back for him. She said, I never signed a paper anywhere saying that I was willing to give you up. She thought placing you in the institution was temporary? She thought that it would be her right to be able to get me back someday when she got her life together. She never signed you away.

No. She said, I placed you because I couldn't keep you at that point in time because of the family situation. but I never consented to the adoption or to the fact that you would leave Italy and you'd be far from me for the rest of my life. Piero Davi was one of thousands of children born out of wedlock that the Vatican repackaged as orphans. The church arranged the visas, helped by a 1950 U.S. law that broadened the definition of orphan to include a child with one parent but one who couldn't provide care. With that leeway, the orphan program boomed. For Piero's mother and thousands like her, it was devastating to learn the child she'd entrusted to the church had disappeared.

It seems that many of these mothers had no idea that their children were being sent to the United States. Could they do anything about it? No, absolutely not. You can't send a baby to the United States and then tell the adoptive parents that the birth mother wants the child. Author Maria Loreno uncovered the Vatican's orphan program in her book The Price of Children. She pieced the story together from hundreds of documents in the church's own archives in New York.

Loreno told us the program hinged on a consent form. The mothers were supposed to sign severing all rights to the child. But Loreno told us doctors or lawyers sometimes signed the consent without telling the mother. Others were deliberately misled. There were women who were trapped into this situation and tremendous pressure to relinquish their children. There were women who were tricked, who signed forms they didn't understand. And in the worst cases, there were women who were told their child had died. Told their child had died.

Yes. What do you make of that? Yeah, it's so horrible. The thinking, I've been told, was that it was an easier psychological closure to tell a birth mother that her child had died, then to let her know that her child had been given up for adoption. So representatives of the church were telling these mothers that their children had died when in fact they had not and they had been sent to the United States? Yes. Lorino told us many more women were told they could get their children back. She found

letters from distraught mothers pleading for their return. Now these are letters that were found in the archives? That's correct. This is a letter to Reverend Landy, Monsignor Landy. I beg that my children be repatriated. If I cannot again see my children, I will shorten my life.

I find myself deceived, and I do not even know how. Monsignor Landy was Andrew Landy, an American priest living in Rome who ran the orphan program. Landy's boss had the ear of the Pope. In 1951, Pope Pius I, 12th,

personally saw the first children off. Thousands more would follow. How could they be defined as orphans? I know. If they still have a mother, or in many cases of fathers, still alive. Yes, and to talk to the adopted children today, they get very angry to say,

I'm not an orphan. You know, I spent years searching from my parents, but it was a linguistic construction. The church charged $475 per child, about $4,500 today. But Loreno told us the demand from eager American Catholics grew so fast that Monsignor Landy

sent local priests to scour the countryside for more children. The correspondent shows that they traveled throughout Italy looking for cases for children to send. Literally looking for babies born out of wedlock. Yes. It actually turned into a machine. Yes.

Looking for babies to send them to the children. the United States. Right. John Campitelli told us he had a loving family in New York, but when he found out he was adopted, he says he became obsessed with finding his birth mother. There were few clues. Even his surname Davy was a dead end,

invented by the state to cut all ties. Finally, he persuaded an Italian newspaper to publish his story, and then a breakthrough. Someone knew his mother. In 1991, he spoke to her for the first time. She said, all right, are you Piero? I said, well, no, I'm John. Oh, no, I'm really Piero.

Okay, I'm your son. So you were nervous, I was really nervous because it's something that I always wanted to do, but when the moment comes, you're like... Kind of tongue-tied. Yeah, yeah, it was tongue-tied. I finally get to talk to the person that actually gave birth to me

that held me, that had breastfed me for two or three days in the hospital. So I know that she loved me. What was her voice like to you? It brought me to tears, I must admit. And we said we were never going to let go of each other from then on. Two months later, he was on a flight to Italy. We had exchanged photographs, but I said, I didn't need a photograph. Because I saw that lady there in front of me, and I said, that's my mom.

She looks identical to me. And after 28 years, I could say that, I just ran over to her and I embraced her. And I said, Mom, finally, I kissed her. I said, Mom, no one had to tell me who you were. I knew who you were. I just had to look at you. Campitelli moved to Italy and learned Italian to speak to his birth family.

But he told us that didn't undo the suffering the church had caused. I felt that my whole life was based on a lie. They told her that they would take care of me, and that was a lie. They got rid of me. They didn't take care of me. They cut all relationship that I could possibly have with my birth family, and they shipped me overseas. I became a package for them. To this day, the church insists the orphan program was the only chance for a new life for these children.

Loreno told us Monsignor Landy, who ran the program, died in 1999 without ever expressing any regrets. I think that he believed in the merit of the program that they were bringing children. to good Catholic homes and that these children would be raised well in the United States. How does that explanation sit with you now? Terribly, I mean, because this is how women were treated, and this is

why I think of them as disposable women. Disposable? Yeah. It's a terrible thing to give up your child, but nobody was thinking about these women then. American adopte, Mary Rolato, travels off into Italy to see her birth family. She told us she had a happy life growing up in Ohio, but she says she longed for a large family,

only to find out she had one. It was 1992 when she first met Anna Maria, her birth mother. The only thing I could do was stare and look at every inch of her for at least an hour. And you're dumbfounded. Not only does she look like me, but she acts like me. I act like her. We're the same weight. It's almost like this is my twin, but older.

I know exactly what I'm going to look like when I get older. So now I pay attention to my health. Mother and daughter say they're still learning about each other. Rolato told us it was years before she could ask the most painful question of all. Why was she given away? I just needed to know her story, her truth, because no mother gives up their child so willingly without grief. Do you now understand why she gave you up? Because she didn't have a piece of bread, she said, to give us.

Poverty. She didn't have clothes for us. She was in a desperate situation, you know. So instead of the church helping her maintain a house and feed her children, instead they took her children. Anna Maria is now 83. Very bello. She agreed to speak.

speak with us if we withheld her last name. Even decades later, the stigma of having children out of wedlock remains. She told us about her other child, Christian, who was sent to a church-run institution when she became ill. But when she went to pick him up, she says, the nuns told her he had died. I went into depression, Anna Maria told us. I searched for her. I searched for her. I went into depression, Anna Maria told us. him everywhere. How did he die? Where was he buried? Nobody could tell me. Did you believe that your son was dead? Something inside me didn't feel right, but I could do nothing about it. But Christian had not died. He told us he learned the truth about his mother at age 40.

Anna Maria says the church had put him up for adoption without telling her. It was a swindle, she told us. They stole a child that they wanted. So what was it like for you when you found that Christian was in fact alive? I have no words, she told us. There were lots of tears and hugs. The Vatican's orphan program ended in 1970, but the fallout continues. rippling across generations.

Mary Rolato told us she never should have been sent to America. I think the church convinced her that it was the best thing for her. And so instead of helping her, it was better for them to make money selling babies. That's all I can think of. You know, so am I angry at the church? Hell yeah, I am. I would have a different life too.

And while it might have been difficult, I still would have survived it. Without this kind of grief that I have inside of me now, that I have inside of me now. Hey, it's Jen Hatmaker. Here's what I've learned in midlife. Joy isn't the reward you earn after all the work is done. Joy is the work.

That's what this new series on For the Love is all about. The sacred yes. It's choosing delight, rest, and pleasure on purpose. Because saying yes to yourself, that's the thing that finally lets you fill your table with everybody else. Come find your sacred yes with me. Follow and listen to For the Love wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, name that country.

It's planted opposite Europe, sitting proudly on the other side of the North Sea. It's a monarchy that features its own currency, postage stamps, constitution, national anthem, love of tea, and a pair of handsome princes born two years apart. We speak of Sealand. A crumb of real estate off the English coast that declared its independence in 1967, Sealand has a full-time population of one. It has a landmass the size of roughly two tennis courts. Its leading export might be the national mythology,

a history of piracy, coups, counter-cues, rogues, and offshore internet schemes. It may make tiny Lichtenstein look like China by comparison, but as we found out in 2023, by right, Sealand is a sovereign nation. Join us as we compile some notes from a truly small island. We can see Sealand over there, by the way, now. You see that? Oh, there she is.

Yeah, yeah. On the starboard bow. Behold, the world's smallest state. It's a micronation in the extreme, a principality which sits, or stands, only seven miles off the coast of England. Its self-described reigning monarch is this guy, Prince Michael Bates.

Here we are. Yeah. A platform and a couple of concrete husks, and this is a state. Yep. Enter some countries you arrive in style. Here, you arrive in what's basically a backyard swing hoisted by a crank 60 feet above the North Sea.

And if you're wondering about the safety regulations, yeah, us too. Then again, when you are a sovereign nation, you, by definition, set your own rules. That's a hell of a way to get into a country. The only way to travel. On the plus side, there's no long line at the arrivals hall. I'm following you to passport control.

Lake Barrington fills various roles and positions on Sealand. Right now it's immigration and customs. He also happens to be the only permanent resident. There you are, sir. So now I'm official. You are. Welcome to Sealand. It wasn't always named Sealand, and it was never intended to be a country.

Originally called His Majesty's Ruff's Tower, it was a hastily constructed nautical fort. of several the British set up in the North Sea during World War II. HALLEY. Equipped with anti-aircraft artillery, these forts were designed to prevent German bombing raids on London. During the war, more than 100 Royal Marines were crammed into these towers for months on end. Descending the seven-story towers, it feels and smells, like a cross between a treehouse and a diesel-soaked submarine. First up, the first-class bedroom suite. It's a nice one.

Yeah, nice TV. Our claustrophobic tour continued downward. Now we're underwater at this point. So we've still got a couple floors to go. You hear ships going past, you hear the propellers going around. Ding, ding, ding, ding. Like many countries, there's a national cathedral. You have freedom of worship in sealand.

I think there's even the Quran here somewhere. On the bottom floor, the jail. Two days in the brig. Bread and mortar. I have to look at the Sealand Constitution and see what my rights are. Very limited. If you're wondering by now how this concrete island constitutes a country, stick with us here. This is Radio Caroline on 199.

Back in the 1960s, these same waters played host to the burgeoning, unlicensed commercial radio business that operated on ships and old forts, what the British government called pirate radio. It was the time of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the kinks. But the stodgy BBC, which had a monopoly on broadcasting in Britain, gave the rock bands just an hour of airtime a week. The younger set in Britain, millions of them tuned their radio knobs to the pirate stations. In 1965, Prince Michael's father, Roy Bates, an enterprising, swashbuckling World War II veteran,

commandeered a fort where another pirate station operated. It was the Wild West on the North Sea. The DJs may not be highly experienced, but they certainly pull their weight. Bates set up Britain's first 24-hour outfit. He called it Radio Essex. You're in tune with Radio Essex broadcasting on 22 meters. We're doing a job that's needed. The public wants us to do the job.

So do businesses. And I think while this demand is here, we'll remain in business. But not for long. The British government enacted a new law rendering all pirate radio stations. illegal. Bates was forced to shut down, but true to his nature, he was something other than scared off. He just would not back down. Form of surrender, if he had said, you know what, my mouth? He wouldn't know that word surrender. I mean, no. Far from surrendering, Bates seized another fort, Ruff's Tower,

which was outside UK territorial waters. Instead of restarting Radio Essex, he did something bolder still. On September 2nd, 1916, he declared it an independent state, Sealand, and declared himself its prince. It was his wife Joan's birthday. And it was, of course, a hugely romantic gesture to make my mother a princess. In addition to taking you out to dinner, I'm going to make you a princess.

He didn't take out of dinner, but he just made her a princess, yeah. Prince Roy and Princess Joan, along with their two children, Michael and Penny, set up home on Sealand. The sheer novelty of their lifestyle was a constant. source of amusement on the mainland. This newsreel is from 1969. The start of another day, even for the new royals, is no different than for millions of others, the request for a common cupper.

This is Bates, how is it possible to keep looking glamorous in conditions like these? It's no more difficult than anywhere else in the world. We're quite comfortable here. We have all the things I want. Make-ups, brushes and things. At age 16, Penny was less convinced. It was freezing cold.

cold and it had no electricity. To flush the toilet, you'd have to chuck a bucket over the side, drop it down about 80 feet, pull it up and flush the toilet. That was your toilet. Yes. The Bates family had big ambitions to turn Sealand into a tax haven, a luxury island and casino. And they went all in on the trappings of statehood, fashioning a flag, stamps, currency, an anthem, even a national motto, Imare Libertas, from the sea, freedom. As teens, Michael and Penny would spend months on sealand, holding down the fort, as it were, firing off warning shots and tossing Molotov cocktails overboard to fend off periodic attempts of invasion from rivals and buccaneers. When the press eventually came out and took photographs, my father called me down and he said,

now look, he said, how many times have I told you, you do not hold a gun. You do not hold a gun like that. You weren't holding the gun the right way. Then actually, if you look at the picture, the way I'm holding the guns is dreadful. Firmly settled on Sealand, the bases remained a nuisance to the British government. So much so, as a warning to the family, a team of royal engineers blew up a similar North Sea Fort. At Sealand's National Archives, which doubles as Prince Michael's dining room table, We were shown declassified plans drawn up by the British Ministry of Defense to take Sealand by force. The following units are to be available to the execution of the operation.

Royal Navy, two Wessex Five helicopters, crafts from HM Naval Base Chatham, Portsmouth, Medway, and a clearance diving team. It's crazy, isn't it? But it wasn't just the British government that wanted to dislodge the family. In August 1978, a band of rogue German and Dutch lawyers and diamond merchants launched a coup d'etat with designs of founding their own offshore casino. They arrived by helicopter with a film crew in tow, taking Prince Michael by surprise and then roughing him up. They tied my elbows together, my knees together, my feet together, my hands down to my knees, and they picked me up and they once said the other in German, let's chuck this bastard over the side.

He's too much trouble. You're a full-on political prisoner right now. Sealand had fallen. After three days, Michael was released. Did Michael and his father then return via helicopter, fully armed and flanked by a group of bruisers, to stage a successful counter-coup? Yes, yes, they did.

But I jumped and landed crash in the middle of the Germans. The saw-n-off shotgun hit the day. Boom! And all the Germans went like that. They surrender. That's it. You've reclaimed your principality. Yeah.

Disarmed, the plotters were released, all except for one. His name was Putz. And he was made to clean the bathroom, make coffee, and imposed a fine for treason, $37,000. His imprisonment brought a German diplomat to Sealand. But if you have German emissaries coming here to try and negotiate the release of this prisoner, doesn't that imply that sea land is a state that's having relations? Absolutely. It's de facto recognition, isn't it? It happened, yeah.

This diplomatic visit was critical for the Bates family. An international treaty signed in the 1930s established four requirements for statehood. One is recognition by another state. Sealand had already met the other tests. A government, check, a defined territory, check, and a permanent population. Check, thanks to Michael Barrington. So what's your position here? Well, I do most of the engineering work, electrically and whatever.

Apparently I'm head of Homeland Security. What are you protecting this place from? The British government or anybody else that decides to take us over. We're our country, after all, a small nation. You're ready to use weapons if you have to? If need be, yes. No hesitation. But in recent years, to keep Sealand afloat, the Bates family has updated their pirate radio sensibilities for the Times. In the early 2000s, they partnered with fringe,

entrepreneurs who invested millions with designs of turning sealand into an offshore data haven. Prince Michael's son, Prince James, showed us the old server room. We used to run things like gambling sites, porn sites. We had a few dubious people asking us to do things that we didn't really agree with. There was an organ transplant company like human organs that wanted to host out here, which my father was against. Gambling and porn is okay, but we draw a line at harvesting human organs. Yes, exactly. That venture failed dismally.

But today, James and his younger brother, Prince Liam, are still harnessing the power of the Internet. The Bates family won't disclose the size of the national debt or the yearly budget, but it is serviced through the online sale of noble titles. Become a lord or lady for $30. $600 will make you a Sealand Duke or Duchess. And people are buying these titles. What is that all about? I think it means so many things, there's so many different people.

Some people love the act of political defiance. Some people love the love story that ran through it with my grandma and grandpa. Some people love that, you know, David against Goliath. That national myth, the very idea of Sealand, has now far outgrown the country itself. As for the House of Bates, well, Roy and Joan have passed on. And the rest of the lineage lives in the small English resort town of South End-on-Sea. Princess James and Liam run a business harvesting cockles. Princess Penny runs a Botox Clinic nearby.

And seven years ago, Prince Michael married and welcomed a new princess, May Shee, a former artillery major in China's People's Liberation Army. Six decades after founding their private little country, the Royal Family remains committed to the bit. Is this a golden age for Sealand? Hopefully. The British Navy rolled up tomorrow and said it's time to reclaim Sealand.

How do you respond? Well, first of all, I'm sure they wouldn't, but if they did, I'd just get the best china out and make them a nice cup of tea. The Royal Family's latest gambit, an e-citizenship program that's signed up thousands of people from 134 countries.

Each pays $10 a month to help keep Sealand standing. Getting to and staying on Sealand. I'd be lying if I said it was the most comfortable night's sleep. At 60 Minutes Overtime.com. 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. 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 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 and how good movies. And 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, of, of Chris making movies. Nolan's younger brother, Jonathan, is a Hollywood director

who told us that Chris was handed the family 8mm 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. I didn't know that. Research. You know about research.

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yes. What did the film school tell you? Nothing. You just got a letter saying, no thanks. Well, 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 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 a mental. Yeah, we don't have to say it quite like, it's quite so sternly. I mean, it had something like the film. The story does have a happy ending. And no, it was, 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. 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 better, right to the point of the Odyssey, and I think we push 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 two million. million feet of IMAX film. Unbelievable. What do you think when you see that? You've seen it a hundred times. I've seen it 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 think of the set.

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 at 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 concerned, 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. just 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. 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 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 in moving the language of it forward somehow, that would be a great thing to be remembered for. Schlesinger, I'm launching a new show. It's called Money Moves, and your money is going to move. We're going to help you make better financial decisions. We're going to call out the BS. You're finding all over social media. We're going to give you actionable guidance to make your financial life clearer, less stressful. We're going to answer your financial questions and take the mystery out of your financial life. Follow and listen to Money Moves with Jill Schlesinger, wherever you get your podcasts.