Christopher Nolan on the Promise and Peril of Technology
By the time I sat down with Christopher Nolan in his posh hotel suite not far from the White House, I guessed that he was tired of Washington, D.C. The day before, he’d toured the Oval Office and had lunch on Capitol Hill. Later that night, I’d watched him receive an award from the Federation for American Scientists, an organization that counts Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of Nolan’s most recent film, among its founders. Onstage, he’d briefly jousted with Republican Senator Todd Young on the subject of AI regulation. He’d endured a joke, repeated too many times by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, about the subject of his next film—“It’s another biopic: Schumer.”
The award was sitting on an end table next to Nolan, who was dressed in brown slacks, a gray vest, and a navy suit jacket—his Anglo-formality undimmed by decades spent living in Los Angeles. “It’s heavy, and glass, and good for self-defense,” he said of the award, while filling his teacup. I suggested that it may not be the last trophy he receives this winter. Despite an R-rating and a three-hour runtime, Oppenheimer made nearly $1 billion at the box office, and it’s now the odds-on favorite to win Nolan his first Best Picture and Best Director statuettes at the Oscars.
“Don’t jinx me,” he said.
I had come to ask Nolan about technology—both its promise and its perils—as a theme across his filmography. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript of our conversation, in which we discuss the similarities between Nikola Tesla and Robert Oppenheimer, the techno-optimism of , how anticipated the social-media age, and why
