His cinematic style is distinct, with complicated narratives, often featuring the oscillation between different time frames — all this is the reason why Christopher Nolan has taken the modern day cinematic landscape by storm and earned a much deserved fan base. While his oeuvre is impressive, he credits it to his amazing team. The filmmaker, whose film Tenet released in India, understands that packing so much information in his films tend to get overwhelming for the audiences but adds, “hopefully, we put things there which people might notice in the second or third viewing.”

I had a fantastic experience working with the local crew while shooting for The Dark Knight Rises. Then, I got an opportunity to come to Mumbai a few years ago, where we did a forum about future of cinema and I was struck by Mumbai and the look of the place, textural and architectural styles and the history in every angle of the city. As a filmmaker, it really excites your imagination and it left me wanting to come back with a camera and crew. I think the aerial view and the whole landscape that we added of the city in Tenet are one of the most fantastic visuals of the film.

The process for me is a lot of time. I do a lot of diagrams. I need to know what the genre is. In Tenet, the important part was looking at the spy film genre, looking at the James Bond films I grew up watching. I thought to myself, ‘okay, how can I use the genre, and how can it help me take the audience on this journey’.

For me, it is very exciting that people go back and re-watch my films again and again to get them. As long as I have done my job of giving the first time viewer an exciting and entraining experience, I am happy. If I can’t entertain people the first time around, then I don’t think they’ll be interested in coming back. I take years to work on the stuff and I have a lot of people helping me do it. There are a lot of ideas that go into my films and the audience has only two-and-half hours to take away. Hopefully, we put things there which people might notice in the second or third viewing.

I try to not write with actors in mind as that would be limiting for actors. I try to write the character on page and don’t let real actors be a factor. When I finish the script, I have this amazing moment of looking at the performances of so many talented actors and think about what this actor could bring. Be it John David Washington, Dimple Kapadia, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, these are all people I knew would take what I had written and make it so much more real.

I don’t think so. It was a privilege to work with that character but it was 10 years of my life. I have other types of stories to tell as filmmaker.