Too much sound and fury in Christopher Nolan’s movies

In 2006 the director Christopher Nolan filmed an adaptation of one of my novels, written a decade and a half earlier. Other than providing the source book, I had no involvement with any part of the filming. Unlike some novelists who have a Hollywood film made, I was not at all disappointed with the result: it struck me as an intelligent, skilful and imaginative adaptation, both similar to but also subtly different from the novel. That it has since become something known as ‘Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige’ seems slightly odd from my point of view, but that’s the name of the game. Another decade and a half further along, The Prestige still looks pretty good to me. Some people describe it as his masterpiece, which is probably debatable but close to what I think.

One develops a sense of natural involvement with anyone who becomes a collaborator, even if they appear long after the main event, and I’ve followed Nolan’s subsequent career with interest. He has risen in the Hollywood canon, and is now widely recognised as that unusual thing: an auteur director working within the studio system, producing a body of work that has a personal, identifiable stamp while satisfying both worldwide audiences and the suits in Hollywood.

Tom Shone’s portrait of Nolan is a transcription of hours of interviews, clearly sympathetic from the outset, and Nolan dutifully opens up. The book is broadly structured in sequence around the films he has made: he speaks of everything he once intended, then carried out and has now achieved, but the information is shallow. We hear of an interest in Batmobiles and shipping containers and quirks of relativity. Few secrets of cinema are revealed that most filmgoers couldn’t work out for themselves. We learn of a boarding school dorm here, a few short stories there, a lot of James Bond films somewhere else.