A strong advocate of film preservation and big-screen theatrical experience, Oscar-nominee Christopher Nolan is optimistic about the future of theatres. His latest action-sci-fi thriller Tenet is in sync with his immersive, non-linear storytelling style. It prompted us to understand and ask him about his fascination for all things complex — imagination, mechanism of time and its commonality with cinema. In an exclusive chat with Bombay Times, the filmmaker spoke about his brand of cinema being mainstream, experience of shooting in Mumbai, wanting to cast Irrfan in Interstellar and working with Dimple Kapadia in Tenet. Excerpts:

I like to do things that use convention to give the audience a certain jumping-off point. For instance (in Tenet), I have taken a spy film and the audience is familiar with that genre. There are conventions to that, but I take those for granted and use those to take the audience somewhere different, somewhere more complicated or somewhere they haven’t been before. That’s my ambition for whatever genre I am working on.

I make mainstream films for a wide audience. Hopefully, they enjoy that. I think having some complexities in the story, something potentially confusing, that’s the fun of filmmaking. I like to pull people in a slightly different direction than they are familiar with. You’ve got to remember that I have had years and years to think about and craft these films with a great team working on it. The audience only has two-and-a-half hours to take it away, so inevitably there’s a density to it. There will be things that people miss the first time around that they get to see the second time if they are interested. I am happy if people want to revisit my work. If there are questions left at the end of the movie that make them want to rewatch it, that’s a wonderful thing for a filmmaker. But at the same time, a film has to be inspiring and exciting the first time you see it. It has to take you some place and give you a reason to think about it more or see it again with friends.

I am fascinated with time because I have always lived in it like the rest of us. What I have learned over the years while exploring stories is that there’s a very unique relationship between time and cinema. My friend, visual artist Tacita Dean, said something profound during a presentation in Mumbai a few years ago. I was seated in the audience. She said, “The camera sees time.” I thought about it when I was writing Tenet and it struck a chord with me. It’s true. Before the film camera, humans had no way of seeing time differently… running something backwards, fast forward or slow motion. The birth of cinema itself lets us examine time in a way that we couldn’t before. This is why I feel time is the most cinematic subject.

Yes, I did meet Irrfan for Interstellar. I was looking forward to working with him. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to do the film. He was a great actor.

(Laughs!) Dimple is extremely self-deprecating. She is an actress of supreme poise and elegance. As soon as we met, we felt a connection. What I was looking for in Priya (Dimple’s character in the film) was hidden depth, elegant façade and a layered personality. She was able to project that. She gives you the shift you are looking for in her character. In our first meeting, I just put a camera on her and we tried to do a scene in different ways to project different psychology of her character. That’s what I look for in an actor as a director. She is the whole package. There’s so much charisma.

Mumbai has a mixture of different architectural forms — old colonial, Gothic to modern and an exciting skyline. The scale, density of the city and number of people living there... Mumbai is vibrant, unique and extremely striking. For a filmmaker who hasn’t been there before, to see it all with fresh eyes, you try to take it all in and capture it on camera as much as possible. Having seen the city from the ground, I wanted to take some aerial helicopter shots of the skyline. I was able to do that and that was a unique opportunity. The Mumbai shots speak for themselves. They are one of the grandest scenes in Tenet and we have shot all over the world.

People will always love the feeling of coming together to watch a great story. The pandemic has made us unable to do that for some time, but in the long term, it’s something that you will always want to do. This phase has been very hard on exhibitors and people working in theatres. But I feel people’s desire to watch films on the big screen is undiminished. People are hungry to get back to the theatres when it’s safe to do so. In the long run, I feel very optimistic about the future of films.