Big budget gives director Insomnia

By CATHRIN SCHAER

Some men notice cars, others look at women, but Christopher Nolan has a thing for a juicy moral paradox.

Nolan is the British director behind last year's word-of-mouth hit, Memento, in which Australian actor Guy Pearce played a man with amnesia who is torn between right and wrong while searching for his wife's killer.

And now the 32-year-old delivers his first Hollywood foray - Insomnia, in which Al Pacino plays a Los Angeles detective posted to a case in a small Alaskan town where the endless summer daylight plays havoc with his body clock. He's also - you guessed it - torn between right and wrong while searching for a young girl's killer.

So what's going on - why this preoccupation with subjective morals and murderers? Is Nolan an incredibly serious but twisted, obsessive-compulsive sort of guy who spends his days pondering existential issues and wondering whether he's doing the right thing?

The man himself, who's been compared to Hitchcock and described by critics as the "the genuine article, weirdo-genius-wise", chuckles softly before answering.

"No, not really," he says. "I'm no more tortured than the rest - and certainly less than some people. I think the reason these kinds of stories speak to us is that we all run up against them in small ways, all the time.

"Human beings are very mysterious and I'm not interested in making films where the characters are simple and uncomplicated and easily understandable - because life's not like that. We're always being confronted with situations that cause self-examination - as in, what's the correct thing to do? We're always rationalising what we do."

And as for his penchant for murder - who wants to see a movie about whether you should stop the car after you've hit someone's pet late on a dark and stormy night?

"That's the beauty of the psychological thriller genre," Nolan explains. "It changes the context and removes the story from daily life so it's easier for people to tap into. It takes that moral dilemma and makes it more accessible to a wider audience.

"It is," he concludes, "the grey area between pragmatism and idealism that's interesting to me, where there are no easy answers."

Nolan is happy enough to admit he's recently had to work in this grey area a little more than usual. Because, with Insomnia, the director who made his name with unorthodox film noir has finally made it to big-bucks Hollywood.

The half-English, half-American started making films when he was about 7. His father worked in advertising and owned a Super 8mm camera, which Nolan and his brothers played around with. "My dad, who is a creative guy, really encouraged us to explore that side of ourselves."

Back then, the brothers' Action Man dolls were the lead actors. And no, Nolan says they weren't torn between good and evil. After the siblings saw Star Wars, the subject material started to centre on spaceships and distant galaxies instead.

"Basically, I've spent my whole life making films in my free time, and they've sort of got bigger and hopefully better as we've gone along."

As a student studying English literature in Britain he made 16mm short films. After university Nolan made his first longer film, Following, in which a blocked writer talks to strangers for inspiration, but eventually ends up, you guessed it, torn between right and wrong.

It was at this stage that Nolan began to develop the trademark juggling of chronology and fractured storytelling that became such a brain-teaser in Memento.

"In everyday life that's very much how we receive information," he said at the time of the film's release. "Like a newspaper article where the headline tells you the whole story. And the next day you read a story about the same story, so you're really just filling it in and growing it in all directions. [The Following] attempted to tell the beginning, middle and the end of the story at the same time."

Working with actors he had met through university, Nolan acted as director, co-producer, co-editor and cinematographer. He could afford to pay for 15 minutes of film stock and processing every week, and with everyone working on the project just one day a week, the 71-minute film took a year to complete.

Obviously things have changed a lot since then. Around the time The Following was released Nolan's wife-to-be was employed by Working Title Films in Los Angeles. So he figured it was an opportune time to cross the Atlantic.

At this stage he was already writing Memento, based on an idea for a short story by his younger brother, Jonathon.

Production companies seeking "something like a new The Usual Suspects" noticed the script, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Memento was received with critical acclaim in 2000 and Nolan even picked up an award for his screen writing at last year's Sundance Film Festival.

By then he was already working on Insomnia, adapted from a 1997 Norwegian film of the same name, in which an homicide investigator from Oslo sent to the far north finds the constant daylight of the Arctic summer a little hard to take.

In the American remake Pacino - looking, as one reviewer says, "like a thrice-boiled teabag" - plays the conflicted policeman, Hilary Swank is an eager local cop and Robin Williams takes an unexpected but nastily convincing turn as the genial bad guy.

That's three Oscar-winners. And a budgetary leapfrog from the director's own credit cards for The Following and US$5 million ($10.72 million) for Memento to US$50 million ($107.26 million).

So you've got to wonder how Nolan is coping with this escalation. "Well, my mother would probably be impressed. But really the job of the director is to focus on what is in front of you.

"Regardless of the budget, the audience are not going to see the number of trucks or the expensive sets. So you have to screen that out too and just be thinking about telling the story."

A growing friendship with Steven Soderbergh, who acted as executive producer on Insomnia, was particularly helpful to Nolan. Soderbergh's career path has been similar - he was discovered when his indie feature sex, lies and videotape became a hit in 1989 and went on to make more mainstream movies, such as Erin Brockovich and Ocean's Eleven while winning a best director Oscar for Traffic.

"He's somebody who's successfully combined an independent spirit with mainstream projects," Nolan says, "and he really helped in taking me through the process of how to deal with a major studio."

Nolan says having a bigger budget also made itself felt in a technical sense, in that he could create "a more enveloping effect for the audience".

That's very important to him as it's similar to the effect that Star Wars had on him as a child - he was transported to other worlds.

"And you also get to access some of the most accomplished actors in the world," he notes. In theory working with Pacino, Williams and Swank should be intimidating, Nolan agrees.

"But in fact, the job of being on set can be incredibly grinding and you really just have to lose yourself in it.

"And they were all incredibly professional. They put you at ease and just get on with the job. I came away feeling that the reason they've achieved that level of success was because, not only are they incredibly talented, but incredibly hard-working as well. And very mindful of the process of film-making, of what I'm going to have to do for them and what they're going to have to do for me."

Despite Nolan's reassurances that no, nothing's really changed and he hasn't sold out to Hollywood, there's also no doubt that Insomnia isn't Memento. Both films share Nolan's dark humour but this tale is told straight.

The director believes comparing his films is an absurd thing to do anyway.

"The film is different from Memento in superficial ways - and in some substantial ways too - but there is a similarity," he argues.

"Having made a film in which the audience is very aware of the ways in which they are being manipulated I relished the idea of doing something structurally straight."

Though it's usually a joke at his expense these days, Nolan says he still gets people asking him what Memento was all about.

"And a lot of people who saw it got really hung up on the puzzle aspect of it. Taking a more direct approach [with Insomnia] makes the plot more understandable while similar questions about moral ambiguity are still raised," he notes.

"To me a bad film is one that's predictable in all the wrong ways, where you can see where things are going scene by scene. In Insomnia the story has a roughly old-fashioned arc but you're not going to supposed to know how it's going to get there," concludes Nolan, who's currently working on a biopic about reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, starring Jim Carrey.

"And in a broader sense the thing I value most is sincerity. I can't stand films made with no sincerity and no passion."

So, after all that time making independent movies, you must have been wondering whether you were doing the right thing with this big-budget project. "Yeah, all the time, every five minutes."

And although Nolan would probably say the solution to any juicy moral paradox such as this is highly subjective, dedicated movie-goers are most likely to think that he found a few good answers in Insomnia.

* Insomnia opens on Thursday.