‘Proud’Nolan’s big-budget directorial debut was 2002’s “Insomnia,” which starred Al Pacino as an LA cop sent to investigate a murder in Alaska.Veteran director Steven Soderbergh recommended Nolan to Warner Bros, and later recounted a conversation he had with Pacino on the movie’s set.”I can tell you right now, at some point in the very near future, I’m going to be very proud to say I was in ‘a Christopher Nolan movie,'” Pacino told Soderbergh.The movie’s success enabled Nolan to pitch Warner his gritty, realistic vision for the new Batman films the studio was planning.The resulting “Batman Begins” kick-started a trilogy of Nolan-directed movies starring Christian Bale as the caped crusader.Part two, “The Dark Knight,” is often considered the greatest superhero film ever made. It was certainly the first to gross $1 billion, and the first to earn an acting Oscar, a posthumous prize for Heath Ledger as the villainous Joker.The third, “The Dark Knight Rises,” drew less critical acclaim, but remains the biggest commercial hit of Nolan’s, in a career filmography that has grossed more than $6 billion.In amongst those films, Nolan released “The Prestige,” a period thriller about two duelling stage magicians, played by Bale and Hugh Jackman, and “Inception.”Nuclear”Inception,” a wildly ambitious heist movie in which Leonardo DiCaprio and Marion Cotillard hop between nested dream worlds, consolidated Nolan’s reputation as a unique Hollywood filmmaker who could obtain big budgets and total creative control for original movies — and still return a profit.It won four Oscars, including for its stunning visual effects, and earned Nolan his first individual Academy Award nominations since “Memento.”His next original sci-fi, “Interstellar,” claimed another visual effects Oscar, and kick-started Nolan’s ongoing collaboration with esteemed theoretical physicist Kip Thorne.Nolan then turned his attention to the past with “Dunkirk,” a tense retelling of the storied World War II evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Allied troops from a beach in northern France.The movie earned Nolan his first best director nomination, and its 1940s period setting foreshadowed “Oppenheimer.”Likewise, his next movie “Tenet” — another ambitious, original sci-fi — introduced Nolan’s concern with nuclear armageddon.But it was reading “American Prometheus” — the 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb — that launched Nolan on the path to a film that would finally bring him Oscar glory.He bested Martin Scorsese (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), Jonathan Glazer (“The Zone of Interest”), Yorgos Lanthimos (“Poor Things”) and Justine Triet (“Anatomy of a Fall”) for the best director statuette.
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