Fandor has posted a video about Chris Nolan‘s favorite films, or those “which may have helped shape his unique directorial sensibility.” 2001: A Space Odyssey (fine), Koyaanisqatsi (potrzebie), The Thin Red Line (“Malick’s portrayal of mental states and memory”) and….wait, Lewis Gilbert‘s The Spy Who Loved Me? Nolan quote: “At a certain point the Bond films fixed in my head as a great example of scope and scale in large scale images.”

Maybe, but The Spy Who Loved Me was the first Bond film to (a) embrace flagrant fakeness, (b) an ironic air-quote attitude and (c) a kind of japey, self-mocking comedic tone. Goldfinger was the first Bond film to pass along a self-amused, partially self-satirizing approach to rugged secret-agent machismo — The Spy Who Loved Me was the first to look the audience in the eye and say, “You may have gathered or deduced that we were having fun with 007 before. Well, from here on we have absolutely no genuine investment in the classic Ian Fleming James Bond realm — it’s all a fucking joke.”

When has Chris Nolan ever come within 1000 miles of Gilbert’s sensibility in anything he’s ever directed?

October 16, 2017by Jeffrey WellsNo Comments