Happy Sad Confused - Jonathan Nolan

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Jonathan Nolan has been writing and producing some of the most spellbinding films and TV for the last quarter of a century, from MEMENTO and THE DARK KNIGHT to WESTWORLD and now FALLOUT. He joins Josh to chat about it all plus how he emerged from the long shadow of big brother Christopher to earn his own place as a storytelling powerhouse. SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! ZocDoc -- Go to ⁠⁠Zocdoc.com/HappySad⁠⁠ and download the Zocdoc app for FREE BetterHelp -- Visit ⁠BetterHelp.com/HSC ⁠today to get 10% off your first month UPCOMING LIVE EVENTS ⁠Cabaret (Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin) May 20th in NYC -- ⁠Get tickets here⁠ Check out the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Happy Sad Confused patreon here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! We've got discount codes to live events, merch, early access, exclusive episodes, video versions of the podcast, and more! To watch episodes of Happy Sad Confused, subscribe to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Josh's youtube channel here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

D.C. high volume, Batman. The Dark Nights definitive DC comic stories adapted directly for audio for the very first time. Fear, I have to make them afraid. He's got a motorcycle. Get after him or have you shot. What do you mean blow up the building? From this moment on,

none of you are safe. New episodes every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, true crime fans. Tired of ads interrupting your gripping investigations? Good news. With Amazon music, you have access to the largest catalog of ad-free top podcasts included with your prime membership. After all, ads shouldn't be the scariest thing about true crime. To start listening, download the Amazon music app for free. Or go to Amazon.com slash ad-free true crime. That's Amazon.com slash ad-free true crime to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. I was actually kind of terrified at some of the things that had been left in that script

because they felt a little edgy for what we knew had to be a PG-13 Batman movie. And so it was one of those sort of be careful what you wish for a moment. We're calling Chris and calling Jordan, one of our friends and one of the producers on the movie to say, I just want to know what he sounded like. I was like, what's he doing with it? The character had been in my head for so long that you're sort of going, okay, where are we going to take this? Prepare your ears, humans.

Happy, sad, confused begins now. I'm Josh Harrowitz, and today on Happy, Sad, Confused, for nearly 25 years, Jonathan Nolan has made some of my favorite film and TV shows. Let's talk, Westworld, Memento, the Dark Night, and now, Fallout. It is my obsession. It will soon be your obsession. It brings Jonah Nolan to Happy Say Confused at last. Thank you, Josh. It's good to see you, man.

25 years, shit, I feel old. Well, I feel, by the way, I'm your... future. I'm basically two months almost to the day older than you. Today's my birthday, actually. You're my birthday gift. You look at better preserved than I am. Happy birthday. No, stop. Thank you. I'm your ghost of Christmas future. This is what 48 looks like. Oh, dear. Well, you're making it, you're pulling it off with a plum. Congratulations, man. We're going to talk a lot of things today, fall out first and foremost. But you, by the way, when I did my research before chatting with you today, and we've

tried it before, but never like this kind of long form thing. You haven't done a lot of this kind of thing. Like the long form. like sit down interview yeah no what's up with that I've managed to allude it to this point somehow I didn't manage to duck your phone calls no I you know I think part of the reason I'm behind the camera is I don't I don't like the focus on me so much I like I like to let the stories kind of kind of do the talking and frankly I'm not I'm not sure I'm as interesting as as the subjects that I've been lucky enough to work on okay I'll be the judge we'll circle back at the end this is this is like a free therapy session oh

Wow. Okay. Well, we made even more than 45 minutes in case, Josh. We're in for now. Okay, let's first talk Fallout. As if you couldn't tell, we're talking Fallout today. Here we are. Here we are in the post-apocalypse. This is a wild show, and I come at this, frankly, I'm not really a gamer. I don't really know the game. But it is a, I always talk about on the podcast liking big swings. This is a big fucking swing. It's a big swing. There are a lot of tones here that you kind of have to figure out. I mean, I don't know. When I was writing my notes, I'm like, it's a big swing. It's a big swing. It's a big swing. Mad Max. No, it's horror. It's like Joe Dante Harror. No, it's, it's Jetsons. It's so many different

things. Yeah. I mean, you've, you've tackled some really big properties before, Westworld, Batman. Does this feel like as big a swing as you've ever taken? Yeah, definitely. Without a doubt. It reminds me the most, and I've talked a little bit about this before, of where we sat in the Batman universe, not just in terms of the fan base, the amount of people who are obsessed with these games. And that's where it started for me was, playing the games with no eye towards adapting them, just as a fan, as a gamer. It used to be a gamer. Now I've got kids, so they...

Something else to give in that game. Something has to give. The gaming was the thing that went away. It's a big swing. It's a big swing. We like big swings. I knew the games. I knew them from playing them myself.

It reminded me the most, and I think one of the things I was excited about sitting down with Todd Howard for the first time, as a fan of what he did, he wanted to meet with me because he liked my work and I liked his and walked out of that meeting with a handshake deal to make this series. In part because when you're looking for adaptations, and about half of my career has been adaptation and half of it has been original. Sure. I like them both.

When you're looking for an adaptation, you want something with great substance. You want something that has something essential and something that's irreplaceable. Otherwise, why not just do your own thing? But you also want something that has a little bit of freedom, I think, not for everyone. And some people enjoy the more rigorous, you know, translation form of adaptation where you're really just bringing it to the screen. But for us, I've always had a restlessness to me that I'm looking for things where there's some latitude to do some storytelling, where there's something that's incomplete from the original medium.

Or just the awareness that you're not necessarily honoring something by just faithfully recreating it and adding images to it. I've always been a little uncomfortable with that version of it. There's some fantastic adaptations, some fantastic adaptations that have been incredibly faithful. I think of the Lord of the Rings movies, which are so beautifully made. and such a landmark achievement. For me, it's a slightly more dysfunctional thing of wanting to be in conversation with the thing that I'm adapting.

It does feel like this, again, not knowing the game so much from what I gather, it feels like you have the world, you have the feel, you have what you're going after in terms of like that, again, that really complex blend of tones. And that gives you license

then to kind of fill in the gaps and create characters that can play in this mad universe. 100%. And the unique, challenge but opportunity with fallout was every game in the franchise has been in a different city with a different set of characters right they all connect to each other they're all in this larger universe with a consistent set of events but

they're all quite different it's the sort of blind man with the elephant right you're telling this story discreetly and so it felt like a perfect and from that very first conversation with Todd the undertaking and the understanding for both of us what he wanted and what I wanted totally in line we wanted to original story set within this larger universe, which is exactly how they approach every franchise, every entry in the franchise. But even beyond that, the nature of the game itself. So there's some games that are, and there's some great games, that are basically just movies with playable bits. Right. Right. And you feel the style of the storytelling there goes in that direction.

And then there are games, and the games that cars on the table I'm more drawn to are these open world games, role-playing games, in which part of it is you're cultivating your character and you can take them in different directions. And there's a, not just in terms of their skill set, not in terms of the attributes, you're going to be a little sneakier, you're going to be a little bigger, stronger, aggressive, intelligent, but also the moral complexity of it. You can play these games as a good guy the whole way through, or you can play them as a heel the whole way through and have a very different experience and a different ending, depending

on how you go about it. You choose a different faction. So not only are each of the games different, your version of playing one of the games would be totally different than my version. And what that opens out, one, it makes for an incredibly engaging game. game. One that I played through, went up kind of obsessed with Fallout 3, which is the first time I had experienced the franchise. You play it through, as I often do with these sorts of games. I play it as a good guy first, because I feel like my parents are somewhere watching, judging

me. And then play it again, trying to be the bad guy, but kind of failing and getting squeamish and winding up maybe somewhere like, you know, ham-fistedly in the middle, breaking bad a little bit, but then trying to salvage it somewhere. To do honor to that is to reflect on the very openness of that. And so while there is canon here, there's no canonical version of each of the games. They're different for everyone who played them. The invitation there was extraordinary on that level, because here you have this beautiful world with all this incredible work. You're standing on the shoulders as we were with Batman. And in a weird way, wound up in a similar place to Batman where there were so many different versions of Batman. But when you sat down

and doing it, you say, okay, we're going to be faithful to which version of it. They're the core pieces of the Canada that you know you need to honor. But beyond that, you were sort of free to create. That's part of what's exciting about this. Working with Geneva and Graham, working with our showrunners, was the ability to create within a universe where you already have all of this incredible thought, all this beautiful design that's gone into it. And so you get, it's like being a kid in a candy store.

You have all these amazing things that you get to play with, but you also get to come in and add some of your own ideas and thoughts, some of the things that you're worrying about having nightmares about or, you know, or fantasizing about it gets to sort of play a role in where the narrative goes. Well, again, there's a lot to, there are a lot of different ways I could, avenues to go down here. But, like, one of the things that resonated with me, and again, we're basically the same age. Like, I grew up loving the work of Paul Verhoeven.

And there's a little bit of, like, the gonso, horror, sci-fi, political satire in this. Is that something that was on your mind? Did Verhoven make a difference in your life? A hundred percent. I remember listening to my brother's watching Robocop because I was too shit scared. I think when that film came out, we were probably what, like 11?

10 or 11, yeah, I think, yeah. Yeah, the scene where he gets his hand shot off. Give the man a hand, right? Just being like, what the fuck is happening? It was where I checked out. It took me another few months to come back and watch a rest out. For some reason, there's been a lot of online chatter

recently that I've seen about Starship Troopers, right? Sort of re-evaluating in the context of, you know, our total shit show of a modern world and trying to understand Verhoeven's intent in there in terms of, you know, what's he saying with these things? One of the things I find both, I find very annoying about this sort of interrogation of filmmakers, is trying to pin them down to like, what do you mean exactly, right? Well, this happened with Dark Night Rises, as I recall too. Well, the Dark Night in particular.

The Dark Night was something that everyone on the political spectrum decided was an apology for either their side or the other side, depending how annoyed they were by the movie. Yeah. I remember reading how we were an apologist for George Bush. Right. Okay. No, there's a level of discomfort that people have with movies and TV shows that they don't have with novels where it's like, you better, you know, you better make it very clear. We don't like this ambiguity.

Where are you in this thing? Whereas I think, look, I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. Like, I think that, you know, I have more questions and answers. And I'm more comfortable asking questions that I am answers. One of the things that was exciting to us about Fallout is, I think people tend to think, especially maybe non-gamerers, tend to think of gaming as this kind of like somewhat sort of soft, conservative in the sense that it's not risk-taking storytelling format. Where it's, you know, it's all kind of nice. And I think in late 2000s, when someone would ask me, hey, what was your favorite movie from the year?

As often as not my answer would be a game. There was a period there in gaming, and Fallout, for me, one of the most notable, but you had other games like Bioshock and Portal. And all these games that were really challenging the medium, but also taking risks with storytelling that kind of made the movie makers look a little wimpy in comparison, right? Really bold. But the money hadn't quite taken in yet. It hadn't quite, you know, all these businesses as soon as there's enough money on the line, you start to get a little conservative. Todd's always been pretty much, you know, out there on the bleeding edge of these things. But the games from the beginning, even before Todd got involved with the franchise, you know, Tim Kane onwards, the very first game.

I mean, Graham jokes about the fact the first game could have been written by ad busters, right? These are political stories. These are, in many ways, firebrand storytelling. They have things to say about America. They have things to say about, or rather, and the thing I'm most comfortable with, they have questions to ask about the end of the world and our place in it and what happens and what happens to all these cultural institutions. One of the things that was so exciting to me playing the game for the first time is you're aware of,

is it going to be Mad Max? You're aware of what the apocalypse is supposed to look like, and this completely resists that. It's not about absence and sparness and vacancy. It is for a minute, and then you realize that this world is heavily populated. There are lots of people left over, and this is Lucy's experience coming to the surface in our show, coming out there thinking, oh, it's going to be hearts and minds, there'll be a handful of starving kids left, and I'm going to organize them into our 4-H group, and we're going to learn how to plant corn, and then being blindsided by the fact that, you know, we weren't waiting for you guys down in your luxury vaults,

that the world has moved on, right, that it has begun to rebuild itself, in different ways, that there are different factions that have gone in different direction. It is, in many ways, more complicated than the world that was wiped away. During the Volvo Fall Experience event, discover exceptional offers and thoughtful design that leaves plenty of room for autumn adventures. And see for yourself how Volvo's legendary safety brings peace of mind to every crisp morning commute. This September, lease a 2026 X-E-90 plug-in hybrid from $599 bi-weekly at 3.9. 9% during the Volvo Fall Experience event.

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instant access to your sales, plus the funding you need to go even bigger. And real-time insights, so you know what's working, What's not and what's next because when you're doing big things your tools should to visit square.ca to get started and the complexity of that to me was was so fascinating in terms of the questions it gets to ask about what the where we're headed where this is all going Four of MyBox to addle it on how you, and add on it a lot of ideas with a hodod. I'll let it on your dog.

Pizza or Meltz? It's all by-kief. And the other part of your general, you'll take two or a mishroop. Chiarat your not end uptie. These are your and your which arethew, Pizzahat My Box the new

and your and your. Pizzah hat, I'lllop the day. Can we talk a little bit about, we mentioned Barrehoven, but I'd be curious to hear some of the other influences growing up. I've had Chris on the show a few times, so I've picked his brain a bit, but I know there's a bit of an age gap. Yes, he's much older. My brother, who's a writer as well, is five years older than me, so I do feel like very kind of close.

Those guys are like, those are like boomers. Well, no, I will say I'll give Adam Harrowitz credit. He introduced me to a lot of the film and TV that I loved. Was Chris the biggest influence on your early taste? Yeah, very much. Yeah, it's just the little brother thing, right? Like you're, thank God he had good taste because that's, you know, that's what I was stuck with. But there was a fun moment where, you know, because we sort of grew up together, but we kind of didn't grow up together.

You know, he went to boarding school in the UK and I went to high school, you know, everyone always asked by the accents first. Sure. Two parents happily married, American mom, English dad. He caught the English leg of the world tour and I caught the North American leg. And we were always friendly, became closer a little later in my childhood. You know, he'd been at boarding school the whole time. And I think it was part of when I'm probably in my early teens when he came home one summer and realized that I had a sense of humor, that we shared a sense of humor.

You know, one of the things about Chris is starting just in the last year or two. A little more apparent is how much of sense of humor the guy is. I think of the films is very serious. But we have been cracking each other up for many, many years. many, many years. We also didn't have a lot of points in comparison in our lives, right? Like he had, you know, he went to English high school and college and he never took the SAT, I never took the A levels, you know, so we were able to kind of bond across those things.

But culturally speaking, for me, as with any little brother, right? You start out sort of drafting off of their taste, then try to define your own, sometimes in opposition to theirs, or in our case kind of reaching out like little cultural magpie and he would find this thing over here and I'd find this other thing over here and kind of bring it back. You know, you're never as proud as you are as little brother when you found your own thing,

yeah, right? Found your own thing, but something that your brother kind of goes, oh, that's actually kind of cool. Right, is there an example you can think of? Because I know his, like, yeah, he talks obviously Ridley Scott, the Bond movies, Star Wars,

and these are like, you can't avoid these things in a young man's life, a young person's life. Yeah, 100%. I'm trying of the films that I brought to his attention. Our tastes are similar, but diversion. All of the above, everything there, and I've had the pleasure of going to watch, you know, when I was a kid, he would occasionally take me down to watch. When I was little, we'd go down and watch films in Leicester Square in London, right?

Which is the great sort of, you know, nightlife hub of your in London. And it has three terrific movie theaters there. We've had the privilege of having premieres a couple of them over the years. But I remember going down to watch. I think we went down to watch, who's the Tom Cruise movies, legend? Yeah. The Rhode East God Road. Yeah, exactly.

Chris was obsessed with a release God from a young age. We went down to watch Legend, and I think we were on the way, and the Goonies was playing at the Empire. And I had the temerity to suggest that we go watch the Goonies, which was roundly shot down. That's been kind to you, sir. I mean, respect to Legend, but... Yeah, if you wanted to point to a sort of a gentle tug one brother or the other, right?

I'm like, let's go watch the Coonies. Legend is a really cool movie with some beautiful sequences in it. But I think if you had to sort of look, you know, the continental divide there, the subtle continental divide, because it's more in common than not. Right. But that moment where I'm like, what about that one, might illuminate it better than anything else. So when for you did obsession with film and TV turn from obsession into, I'd like to try my hand at this? It's complicated, right? So if your older brother wants to do the same thing, there's a period of time where,

which you're like, well, I don't want anything to do with that shit. And from the beginning of my life, Chris has been making movies. He started making movies with my, with our dad's Super A camera at my mom's behest. You always like to point out with her idea. There's a moment like this in Spielberg's, in the wonderful Spielberg movie, Meet the Falman's. Similar moment, right? It's the mom who's at their wits end where it's like, what the fuck am I going to do with these kids in a rainy day in England and gives them the film camera?

Chris goes from that point onwards, and so when I turned up six years later, he was already making films. And so my earliest memories, literally, are of helping or hindering Chris making stop-motion movies in the basement. So film was always his thing. I realized fairly early on, and I fought it as long as I could. Again, as a little brother, you kind of look where everyone's going. The English degree felt like the family curse. And so I wanted to have, and I think my mom encouraged me to try to have something. Chris knew from the beginning.

I wanted a film director. our dad was self-employees, a copywriter, and I think my mom was eager to have someone else in the family who had a steady paycheck. And so I was encouraged to look at other things. And I think by myself, I was looking at other things. And I went to college originally to get a foreign service degree and thinking I would work for the government. Not a great idea.

And at some point in there, I had to take some time off. And I just realized that the thing that had always bailed me out of everything, right? I wasn't a terribly good student, was writing. whatever the subject was, I was sort of get by at the last minute by putting a few pretty words together and making it look like I knew what I was talking about. And I had fought it for so long that when I realized that writing was really the thing that I was best at and I found most rewarding, that then I took some time off college, it took a semester off, and came back and got an English degree.

And as part of that English degree, there were screenwriting classes. And I was drawn to them out of interest in this subject. Chris, at the time, was starting to shoot his first full-length feature following, which part of that time that I took off, I wound up working as a grip on the set, helping out. It was all friends and family making it and putting it together. And I came back from that experience, interested in filmmaking, I think for the first time looking at what Chris was doing and saying, it's kind of interesting.

And it was that summer. It all happened quite rapidly. I changed my degree, or rather, stepped away from school, took a semester off, realized that I probably needed to concentrate on the writing thing, and that was probably where my calling was. And then in the course of that, the traveling that I did that summer, while Chris was making following, I had this idea for a story about a guy who, you know, I'd gotten interested to integrate amnesia because somebody always is not a very common condition, but it's something

that they talk about a lot in Psych 101, which I had just taken because it's so illuminating about the human mind, the fragility of the human mind. So I had this idea for a story about a guy who couldn't remember anything, took to tattooing the clues on his body. But right from the beginning, I remember feeling almost annoyed. I sat down to write it. I was very interested in it. I sat down to write it and I thought, oh, shit, okay, this is the wrong, inspiration coming to

the wrong brother, right? This is a visual story. And I'm going to write a cool story out of it, but it really is inherently visual. Like, it would be so much more efficient to just show. show this guy taking his shirt off and realizing with kind of horror that he's turned himself into a canvas of evidence, this kind of futile, almost, you know, whimsical quest to try for someone who's a profoundly incapable of holding on their information to try to track down someone and a revenge story.

And so when we drove back, Chris was moving to, Emma was already there, Chris was moving out to L.A. finally, and I've been sort of pestering him to make the move. We were both born with American citizenship. I was like, you gotta come over, man. Don't be in England, it's not. So we drove my dad's car out together, because I had it in DC was just racking out parking tickets. And I was like, look, I've heard in LA you need a car.

So I picked him up in Chicago and we made the rest of the drive. And halfway through it, I started. He was talking about the films that he wanted to make. And I'll leave it to his next sit down with you and talk about the films he would have made otherwise. One of them was comedy, which is exciting. It was exciting for me with fallout was a chance to finally circle back

do something. It's a little closer to comedy than anything we've worked on before. But in that moment, we got to Minnesota and ran out of things to say to each other, I pitched in the story for Memento, and he got really quiet. And I knew, it's this little brother thing, right? When I'd show up with a piece of music or a movie or something that he hadn't found, you know, usually the relationship was so one-sided, then when you showed up with something and you realized, oh shit, this is kind of cool. They get a little quiet.

I knew with Chris, I had him with that one because the story was inherently visual. inherently cinematic. And so I went back to college and started taking screenwriting classes, and he took my early sketches for the story and started developing a screenplay out of it. By the time I graduated, he'd written the script, put the finance together, and we went straight into it. So long story short, it becomes a phenomenon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oscar nominated a screenplay, and it sets you both on this amazing path that we're continuing to talk about to this day. I'm curious, like, did you know what the path was after that? Like, did you have a sense?

of what you wanted to do with your career? No, we had, and it was the classic kind of overnight success where, you know, by the time we'd shot the film with Guy Pearce, but this incredible, Chris and Emma put this amazing cast together, and made the movie, and I thought, God, everyone, you know, I'd been in L.A. for all six months. I'd worked on the production. I wanted to get to know how production worked.

And we got to the end of it, and I thought, why does everyone complain about Hollywood? This is easy. We showed up, we had a good idea for a movie, we made a good movie. Yeah. And then we tried to sell it. because we had debt financed it with foreign pre-sales.

So it was going to get released, and it was released ultimately in the UK first and France and all these other territories. The profit was supposed to come for our partners and financiers was supposed to come for the North American distribution rights, theatrical distribution. So we screened it for everyone all on the same day, March of 2000.

I took Chris out for stake, Emma went to one screening, the Todd sisters went to another, Aaron Ryder, our producer went to a third, and they called me on my old Nokia cell phone, You know, Chris and I were waiting for the hoson. That's what Chris is still using, by the way, I think. Chris officially doesn't have a cell phone, right? It was almost me and M.

We were the ones, the saps who had to carry the cell phone around. You know, whenever someone got word that you were close to Chris, your phone would start ringing with calls for him. The calls came in and no one wanted to buy it. Started with Harvey Weinstein and all the rest of the... Is this like after Venice? This is after it's already screened? Before Venice.

Got it. This is the first time we showed it to some family members, and they thought it was cool, right? We screened up for all these movie theaters and we get completely blanked, right? No one wanted them. And the response from all of them was, oh, I thought it was great.

Okay, well, how much do you want to, you know, how much you want to offer, right? We would have taken, you know, at this point, not a lot of money. And the answer was, no, no, no, no, I get it, but the audience won't get it. And there was such contempt for the audience. This is really what motivated a lot of my career

and a lot of the way I've approached my career. There's such contempt for the audience. that the audience was a bunch of fucking idiots that they wouldn't get it and I thought to myself God I've met some of these executives like they're not what makes you think you're that much smarter

in the audience because you're not and we really felt from the beginning and growing up together watching all these weird movies together and weird shows that the audience was really smart and really well versed or at least there'd be enough of the audience

that was bored with what they were being served for a movie budget that small there might be enough people that you'd recoup your money on that who wanted to watch something that was a little more lean in. It was a little more, you know, pay attention. This is before the whole second screen experience, right?

It's your point. Nokia is only so much entertainment you get from it. You go to a movie theater. You're watching the movie. It's too dark to read a book. You're watching the movie. And we thought there were enough people in the world who'd want to watch a movie that made them do a little work

that we'd be able to get by. But at first, in that first moment, you know, we spent the next six months before Venice. From that moment to Venice, part of what was going on the background. I started writing a resume. I was like, oh, shit, okay. Well, I guess this didn't work out.

And I started trying to figure out. I made a promotional website for Memento because we didn't have enough money. I taught myself how to code in JavaScript and Flash. Part of that return to college was learning some coding. And so we made that themselves. And I was getting by making promotional websites for other movies. And then we went to Venice. And that was the first time that we had shown.

We did the festival circuit. What had happened in the background, as we were taking it to festivals, Steven Soderberg somehow had watched a print of this thing and started going to parties and just ridiculing movie executives about, have you seen this movie that none of you wanted to fucking buy? If we can't put this movie into the world, then we failed as a business. Stephen was an incredible evangelist on behalf of that film. And so we went to Venice.

That was the first time we showed it to anyone who we weren't related to, other than the muckety mucks who had passed on it. and had this extraordinary reaction to it. And kind of knew that it was, you know, validated our impulse, Chris's instinct, our instinct from the beginning, that there was an audience out there who really wanted to watch things.

There were a little more, lean in, a little more complicated. And the validation is in literally both of your works to this day. Whether you look at Westworld or Oppenheimer, they're all films that like demand more of an audience and know that the audience is, you know, with quality, storytelling is willing to put in the work.

Yeah, thank you. No, I think that that has always been our guy. right? It's always been this moment of like, oh, well, you know, you trust the audience is looking for something more involved, more complicated. And that's been a hallmark of everything we've done since. Even though we have a lot of time, I can't believe this. I'm going to skip by prestige. We're going to do that the next time because the prestige I love. And I know it has a special place. My first professional gig, yeah, yeah. I'm obsessed with it. We'll save it for next time because we have to talk to Dark Night a bit. So as I understand that, David Goyer and Chris do the first

pass on that. They do the story, basically. And then it's your, it's your, it's your time to do the first draft of it. So this is the introduction of the Joker. This is Heath Ledger. Now, was Heath in mind at that point? Like, when they bring the story to you, does Chris say, I think this could be Heath Ledger? I remember when that conversation took place.

I don't think so. I think that we, I was, and the story such as it was, it sort of started out fairly detailed, and then I kind of got more abstruse. Then we got to the third act, and there was kind of a hand wave. And it was like, and then he rides off from the suns.

It was kind of like, you know, It wasn't fully fleshed out, as it shouldn't be, right? Like, you know, it's kind of a, I think it's a mistake to try to be that prescriptive at that stage. So it was like a loose set, like what I was presented with was a handful of index cards on a board that Chris kind of walked me through. We're like, here's where we start, we get to this, and we get to that. And then he went off to make the prestige. I had worked on Batman McGins. I'd worked on Batman McGins from an early stage.

Chris had gone off and was in the prep. We were going to make the prestige. Jeff Robinoff was running Warners at the time, really, really, you know, the sort of godfather of those early projects with us at Warner Brothers. And Jeff was nervous that Chris needed more time to prep the film. And so I got called in, and I think Jeff said to my brother one point, he was like, well, you know, you like working with your brother, why don't we just, we'll happily pay for your brother to be with you and work on this thing.

So I sort of came in as a consultant and worked on that, but why don't know, we're not living in a hotel in London for months and months and months. of months trying to help figure out how this thing would work, because Chris had so much on his plate figuring out all of the prep, all the cars, all the, all the stuff, all that amazing world building that he was doing. And so when we came to the Dark Night, for me, from my perspective, having kind of been, you know, having spent the time of the first film, I think Chris was somewhat reluctant to do it, which is why I don't think the casting conversation started in earnest before I'd gone off to write a draft. He was making the prestige, and he

was, frankly, unsure about whether he wanted to make another Batman movie, right? I don't think he wanted to repeat himself, and I think he was looking at, I think he was very satisfied with the film you made. I think he was very proud of Batman Begins. I was as well, but from my perspective, I was like, it's like we've made this sports car. It's like we've built this sports car,

and don't you want to take it for a drive? The first film, 59 minutes of it, is Origin Mythos. The film is called Batman Begins. I'm like, don't you want to? So for me, the challenge, you know, I felt, it felt clear to me that Chris was, on the fence about making another movie. And so I felt with that first draft

that was kind of on me to prove... Proof of concept. This is worth doing. Yeah. Part of the early conversations were a subtle shift in genre. If Batman McGis is a classic adventure, we call it a comic book, there's a lot of different comic book. Sure. It's an adventure film.

It's him traveling around the world and finding himself and trying to figure out how does he respond to this terrible thing that's happened to him. What is he going to become? Second film was a genre shift into a urban crime film. And that to me was so exciting to take the same characters, the same actors, the same story, but shift it now into something that was more in the mold of, and I remember clear as a bell. I didn't see it with Chris, but we did see it the same year when Michael Mann's film Heat came out.

And I went and saw it in McClure Court in Chicago, opening weekend, and fully a third of the audience walked out. He was so loud, that gunfight, the middle of it was so loud. loud. That movie has made such an impression on me in terms of, and it's something, another thing that I recommended to Chris years later was The Wire. I'd watch the first season. He had not. It was one of those little brother victories, right? It was like, you really should check us out. He winds up. Very much in the same spirit as heat, you had this fully naturalistic world. Right. And by the end, it's a Greek opera. And you don't quite, that's a bit of a magic

trick with Michael Mann. And then again, with the wire, with David Simon, this disability to every beat feels plausible and real, keenly observed and naturalistic. But by the end, you've seen a Greek opera. There's been this invisible movement into something more operatic, more tragic. And so that feeling of, could we take the feeling of heat? Could you take the feeling of something? And the wire, I think, was running at the same time. We hadn't gotten to Omar yet.

There was very much Omar in the back, you know, you sort of concurrently looking at that and feeling, could you bring that feeling into the Batman universe? Could you tell a story in that key? And that, to me, that early draft, for me, it was a bit of a, a bit of a, this is what I think a Batman movie should be, right? I had no imagining at that stage, Chris was off working on the prestige, I was sort of left by myself with this thing, not really knowing how the third action work. And to me, it was a bit of a challenge. It was like, that's what I think a Batman's movie should be. Chris came back, and I think somewhere along the lines convinced himself that, okay, we're going to take this gamble.

We'll go back and do it one more time. And that's when the conversation started in earnest. To my great horror, they started making the movie, and almost nothing had been cut out of the script. It was pretty much exactly, you know, Chris had taken a pass as he always done and added some beautiful ideas to it. And then we started talking together as we were closer to it about, okay. Ontario, the weight is over. The gold standard of online casinos has arrived. Golden Nugget Online Casino is live.

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And hopefully, we can do movies together. Hot. Ideas like the Joker's multiple origins and you know back story but but I was actually kind of terrified at some of the things that had been left in that script because they felt a little a little edgy for for what we knew had to be a PG-13 Batman movie and so it was one of those sort of be careful what you wish for moments I remember calling down the first first day on set I wasn't on set and it's part of the reason I started doing television is I missed being on set

there's nothing for me to do it and I don't know desire to be on set where there's no job for me to do on set. There's nothing worse than being on set and just standing around with nothing to do. We're calling Chris and calling Jordan, one of our friends and one of the producers on the movie to say, I just want to know what he sounded like. I was like, what is he doing with it? The character had been in my head for so long that you're sort of going, okay, where are we going to take this? Yeah, an amazing experience. menu Pizza Hut My Box the new Four Chiarat My Box

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Today, Pizahat, I'llolp the day. Did you ever advocate for any villains we didn't see? Because there were all those rumors, as we well know in that time, that Warner Brothers was pushing Leonardo to play the Ridler in Dark Night Rises or became Dark Night Rises. Do you remember those conversations or did you have a horse in that race saying like, Hugo Strange or Penguin or Ridler? Did that ever get to a point where you felt strongly about a villain? We had these conversations.

Bain came out of a conversation with David and Chris. I was unsure about that at the story stage, but sort of, you know, really kind of, look, it's backseat driving, right? You're looking at it. I think Chris understood that he didn't want to go, you know, what we had done with, and what Heath had done with that character, you didn't want to go anywhere near it. I sort of started to play with ideas about the Riddler and what could be done with that character, but it did feel like it was close enough to the space of what we've done with Heath, that you

really needed to sort of, and again, there's another genre shift there, right? I think one of the things I was excited about with The Dark Night Rises was, okay, if you did this, you know, this kind of urban crime drama for the second film, the third one was, and we sort of find ourselves back in the space, it was a post-apocalyptic film. That was what I was excited about with that film, was the idea that you'd sort of go there, right? At Batman, it's always about, you know, Batman always saves the day, the city always survives, and there have been some examples in the comic books where they'd just kind of gone for a little bit. And I thought, why can't we do that with a movie? Why can't we destroy Gotham and see what

happens afterwards? In your head canon, after that last shot, and I love the ending of Dark Night Rises, how soon does John Blake pick up the mantle? Do you get into that bat costume pretty quickly? Yeah, it's a, it's a fun one. I know, I think there's always a need, the idea there of being that, you know, and look, you can talk about the politics of Batman. It's a complicated complicated question, but that idea in that universe that there's a need for a hero, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. But yeah, my imagination maybe takes a little bit of a moment to kind of figure out exactly or waits for the first clear evidence that maybe the police aren't going to be able to

handle something by themselves and then picks up the mantle reluctantly. We've always liked the idea of that as a kind of a reluctant hero. I mean, both you and Chris have a real way with endings. really leaving the theater, leaving a TV show, just feeling satisfied and answering some questions, but begging some more. Yeah. I would imagine, like, on the flip side, is there a sense of, like, we never got the closure on Westworld?

Oh, yeah. Where are you at on that? I mean, I guess that ship has just sailed. We're never going to see more. I don't know. You know, Evan's still around, has still around. I'm a bit of a completionist. No, I think you have to be, look, you have to deal with a reality that sometimes you don't

always get to in television in particular you know these are long-haul things we worked on on Westworld for eight years four seasons with a plan from the beginning and an idea of where we wanted to take the story but I think largely more than anything else gratitude for what we got to do from the beginning the first season was tough I mean this has been this has been covered covered before but you know it was the first piece of science fiction that HBO had done really I think ever and so there were some with that original regime that hired us, you know, that bought the pitch,

there was some real hand-wringing over, you know, what the show could be. Some, they had some ideas of what they wanted it to be. And we eventually came to loggerheads and had to shut down and had to sit there and cut and figure it out and have the confidence and the faith in ourselves and what we've made. And then eventually Casey Blois took over the network and came in. He came to us and watched five episodes. He was like, I don't get it. It's great. Let's go.

And we went back to work. But there was a lesson there. I think I've had a bit of a charmed life in film and television, my first series of person of interest. We got a chance to determine our own fate. There was a moment where we were told the great Peter Roth came to us and said, look, if you make it a little more procedural, if you make it more a case a week, it'll probably go for seven or eight seasons.

But I like what you guys are doing, so you guys do what you want to do. And we got a chance to finish that story, which I was very proud of. With Westworld, we knew from the first season onwards, this is a big swing. And so you better make each season count. You better make each season tell a complete story. Settle your debts and walk away. And if there's a chance to go back and tell more of the story, great. So if we never get a chance to do it, the experience of making that show was such an extraordinary one.

That cast, that crew, that collaboration with me and Lisa and all the rest of the amazing people who we got a chance to work with, very, very special. If there was a chance to go back and do it again, I'd jump all over it. One of the treats of this is the first three episodes you've directed here. And you haven't directed a ton. Directed a little Westworld, little person of interest. And I'm frankly a bit surprised by that. Is that an ambition? Like, is there a Jonah Nolan feature directing project that you want to get off the ground?

Yeah, we're having a lot of fun in television. And have a lot of, you know, TV kind of became for a while. And God bless my brother and I started the movie business. I love the movies. For a while, TV really became kind of the perfect storytelling medium because you had, and this really started with Dan and David on Game of Thrones. for that second season onwards, where HBO, God bless them, got behind physical production values of,

well, make it look like a movie. They went up shooting a lot of the places that we shot in Batman O'Gins. They were shooting on location, practical photography, and beautiful locations, and you saw television could be this very big, very cinematic thing. I mean, Game of Thrones at its height was incredibly cinematic. And inspired by that, Lisa and I looked at that

and sort of thought, okay, well, you can take these big swings. And there's no compromises, though we, you know, we had some challenges getting Westworld, the first season of West World of the finish line. You know, we got to tell the story we wanted to tell. There are very few compromises there. Yeah, and you'll get the scale. You have the cast. I mean, there's not much difference between, I mean, most films would kill for that kind of.

Chris would beg to differ. And I think that that first season is so beautiful. We shot on film. We shot where we wanted to shoot. Well, in that series, we shot in Utah, Singapore. Spain, all around the world, on film, incredible cast. Really felt for a minute there, like completely no compromises medium. But the compromise, of course, is that cinema, the theater, you know, television is always competing for your attention.

And that is challenging. Whereas a movie, the classic model of the theatrical release, you know, you get to put people in a dark box and get them to dream together. And that is uniquely powerful. So I love films. I would love at some point to revisit them for directing for me. It was a long road to get there in part because my brother, you know, sort of claimed that space early. But I got to a point where when I finally started working with directors who weren't my brother, I was like, well, I don't know if I could do what Chris does, but I know that I can do what these guys do.

And for me, the ability, screenwriting is a little like being paid to write recipes. And you never get to touch the ingredients. You never got to actually cook the meal. And so for me, the complete version of it was this way on West World with the pilot and eventually the finale. I directed the pilot for West World and then the finale of the first season was a chance to do the whole thing. Imagine the universe with Lisa and then with us as producers and me as director, get in there

and figure out how on earth we were going to bring that world, haul that world into the light. I mean, that really is the dream, is to have that monastic time coming up with the universe and then that incredibly extroverted social, collaborative time, on set, directing, working with incredible actors and incredible artists to kind of put it all together. There's nothing better. It must be satisfying, again, like Little Brother Syndrome, to like find your own path at a certain point.

I mean, you had it from the beginning, with memento. You were part and parcel of that. It began with you, literally. But that has to get, it gets in my head. It gets in any Little Brother's head to like, oh, I stand on my own two feet and I found my own path. Well, there was the beauty about the pivot for me to television. And that happened in part because I had worked on Interstellar,

which came to get her. I was hired by Steven Spielberg to make that film. Yeah, that's another conversation I want to have at some point. Yeah, 100%. But I, you know, when Stephen, when that project kind of fell apart and Stephen had to step away and stepped away from Paramount, we were at Paramount, I was heartbroken. And I, you know, I thought, God, I can't spend,

I'd gotten into the habit of you spent a couple of years writing these films for Chris, or working on these films and there would be something that came out of it. I spent three and a half years working out of your cellar and all of a sudden it was dead in the water. I said, look, I know a director. I want to make a phone call.

But in the meantime, I looked at my wife's experience working in television, the collaborative nature of it, but also the pace of it. You've got a fast yes or a fast known and you push forward. You create a little bit more. And I thought, more like speed chess. And I just thought, I miss being on set.

I miss the idea of, and I don't know if I had it in me to spend four more years working on something and not know if it was going to see. to light a day. Television in that moment was very appealing. And the beauty of being able to work, you know, like I said, Chris and I grew up in different countries, different schooling systems did not apply to the same colleges. And so for me to be able to find kind of my own medium to work in was also a bit of an opportunity to kind of carve out a little bit of my own identity.

So if and when, and these phone calls, frankly, have probably already come. Kathleen Kennedy, Star Wars, Kevin Feige, Marvel. No comment. Any interest in any of those? Just from a fan perspective, you grew up with that stuff, I'm sure. 100%. Look, look, you know, there's some incredible work that's been done in that space. I think for me, like I said, half my career has been adaptation. Right. Half of it's been original. I think the next thing for me is going to have to be something original.

You have that, you have that idea. It sounds like. And is that going to be a feature or TV? We'll find out. Okay. Okay. To be continued, like I got to like 10% of what I want to chat with. But we'll have another conversation.

Congratulations. Honestly, this show is so Vanada isn't the best possible way. I hopefully we teased it just enough, but we haven't even mentioned the cast, which features the great Goggins, and Ella's fantastic. Thank you. Iromotin, incredible. No, we got lucky with this one. We got some amazing.

Amazing. Familiar faces and some people who are maybe a little less familiar. We're very excited. Yeah, and honestly, whether you're a game or not, it worked for me, and I've never played the game. Oh, that's great to hear. That's great to hear. We're obsessed with the games. You're like, it's it going to work for people who haven't watched them. It's so specific. It's almost like an argot, right?

It's almost like its own language. Totally. I'm thrilled to work for you. All right, man. Congratulations again. Thank you. And so ends another edition of Happy, Sad, Confused. Remember to review, rate, and subscribe to this show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm a big podcast person. I'm Daisy Ridley, and I definitely wasn't pressured to do this by Josh. Are you looking for a movie review show where the critic is at the TV. top of his or her game, meticulously breaking down and explaining exactly why a film does or does not work? Well, good luck with the search. Because we're having fun here on Adam does movies. I talk to you like we just got done seeing a movie together, giving you the pros and cons, and I'm digging in the trenches, in the mud and muck, on streaming services, telling you which films are worth your time. Each and every week, I hit the big blockbusters, I cover the streamers, and I even tossed in some

movie news for fun. Because this show as Adam does movies. I'm obviously Adam. I probably should have led with that. But perhaps I have led you to check out the show on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, on YouTube. And hopefully, we can do movies together. Ho-ho-ho-hoo. Hot.