Looking at the World in a New Way: The Making of Tenet (2020) Movie Script

Background!
I've been making films
for the big screen for a long time now.
That's what inspires me creatively
as I'm writing the script,
as I'm thinking about what this is
going to be, as I'm casting it.
Everything is about
that "larger than life" experience
that we're intending to
give the audience at the end of things.
You have a set of ideas as a filmmaker
that you're working on longer-term.
And they could take decades
to come to fruition.
The time has to be right
in all kinds of different ways.
This film is so complex and ambitious.
I just don't think he would've been
able to pull it off ten years ago.
It's definitely a product
of the many years of experience
that we all have at this point.
I think, for me, Tenet was wanting to
get back to
a broader sense of filmmaking.
Dunkirk was a large-scale film,
but it was very specific to
the one time and place.
Without being too reactive to that,
I wanted to
go all around the world again.
Nathan is a big part of the very early
pre-production on the films,
when Chris is still working
on the script.
Fairly early on,
they'll just go off on scouts.
I always...
At the beginning of the film,
we go wandering, looking for the film.
And it was just one of those things,
"Let's just go there, see what happens."
They spend a lot of time walking,
just absorbing the environments
that they see,
and it's really valuable time,
because it's that time
before Chris has figured out
the answers to all the questions,
and it really does shape the movie.
It shapes the script.
Tenet is a classic spy story.
I grew up loving spy movies,
particularly the Bond films.
But to make it sing
to today's audiences,
I felt like,
for me to really engage with it,
I wanted it
to have bigger possibilities.
I wanted to do it in a way
that I was excited about.
What we did with Inception
for the heist genre
is really what Tenet attempts to
bring to the spy movie genre.
The film deals
with this concept of inversion,
which is the idea
that the entropy of an object
or a person, indeed, could be reversed.
This isn't Interstellar, you know?
I did have Kip Thorne read the script
and he helped me out
with some of the concepts,
but we're not gonna make any case
for this being scientifically accurate.
But it is based roughly on real science.
Every law of physics is symmetrical.
Every law of physics can run
forward or backwards in time
and be the same,
other than entropy.
So the theory being that
if you could invert the flow of entropy,
you could have an object that
the direction of time
is reversed for that object.
This screenplay is
in my entire career,
the one that I have read more times
than any other screenplay.
Memento was like that,
and Inception was like that.
You read the script,
and they're actually
quite hard to parse on the page.
One of the reasons
I kept going back to the script
was to enjoy and delight in the fact
that so many things paid off.
It kept yielding the penny-dropping on
why we were there
or why that person was involved.
The thing that really felt good to me
about the script was how fresh it was.
It just didn't feel like
anything I had seen before.
I think he is dealing
with time head-on here.
He's bringing up
how we understand physics,
how we've learned behavior,
how we love, how we hate,
how we react...
All of those things,
due to how time is perceived.
The thing about inversion is
it's very much cinematic.
It's something that
you have to see on the screen
to fully engage with.
That's the reason I felt like
it would make a compelling movie.
You could read the screenplay
and see where it was gonna go,
but to feel it
and actually experience it,
we have to make the film.
I didn't wanna take on the spy genre
unless I felt I could
bring something very fresh to it.
Something we talked about a lot
at the script stage was,
these characters in fiction,
they are very often portrayed
with real cynicism. They're
very hard and cynical characters.
And yet,
there's a degree of selflessness
and self-sacrifice to what they do
that speaks
to a different set of ethics.
For me, a lot of the inspiration
was John David Washington
and realizing what he could do
with this character.
I get told by my agents
that, "Christopher Nolan
wants to have a meeting with you."
So I was like...
I didn't think it was real.
I didn't know what it was about.
I end up meeting Chris, and then
we end up talking for a couple hours.
Last thing he said
after that meeting was like,
"Well, good luck."
I was like, "That's it.
I guess I did terribly."
His read on the script
was immediate and precise.
He and I both felt that
we had the opportunity here
to try and create a character
with more warmth and generosity
as a motivation
for going to the extremes
and doing the most extreme things,
but for the greater good.
The Protagonist is
a sort of aspirational figure.
He is suave and he is confident
and he's got a certain swagger,
but he's also got
a very accessible humanity.
You just love him. You just love him.
I do, anyway.
I wasn't trying to be warm
or charismatic or anything.
I'm actually kinda...
I'm kind of a nerd, so...
But jumping into the psyche
of somebody like that,
I think it is inherently
just displayed that way
because he actually cares.
JD was the first person that we cast,
and then we cast
the rest of the film around him.
Michael Caine,
I'm just trying to hold it together.
I'm sitting across from him.
I'm like, "Just be in character."
But I found myself
watching the performance.
I'm like,
"I'm just gonna watch for a second."
Seeing him play a scene
opposite Sir Michael...
It was really a thrill
to watch these two play off each other
and to watch Michael do
what's he done so well for so long.
Chris went over there and hugged him.
Afterwards said,
"That's a wrap on Michael Caine."
It was such a beautiful moment.
I was really feeling it and dug that.
It's just lovely to have
a little bit of Michael.
We had Rob Pattinson, whose work
we've been admiring hugely
in recent years.
He just has done
such challenging and interesting work
in the last few years
in independent films.
You're looking at this guy
who's wanting to challenge himself,
who's wanting to do things
very different.
I met with Chris. We were talking
for three-and-a-half hours.
Still no mention of a project.
So, I waited.
And I kind of left,
and then my agent was like,
"So how was it?" And I'm like,
"I don't know. I mean,
he's a really nice guy."
He didn't mention a movie at all,
so maybe it was a really bad meeting.
It was very important to me that
we travel the world
with the film because
it's about a threat to the entire world,
the entire human race.
We needed an international cast
to continually remind you of that.
Dimple...
She is very famous in India
where film culture is really amazing.
I go up to my nephew and I tell him,
"I've been offered a Chris Nolan film."
So he goes, "Auntie, Chris Nolan!
You, you like Prestige. Chris Nolan."
I said, "Okay. Chill.
It might be a crank call.
Let's not get our hopes too high."
The difficulty of casting Priya
was very much logistical.
India's just a long way from Hollywood.
The best way to do it was to
just go there and meet Dimple in person
and talk about it
and have her do a scene for us,
which she graciously offered to do.
The highlight was that
he had the camera in his hands,
and that was like
a real high point for me, okay?
He's taking the audition.
I saw Elizabeth Debicki in Widows
and I said to Chris,
"You have to see that movie for her
'cause she's just incredible."
And he agreed and was like, "Oh, yeah.
Let's see if she'll be willing."
With Kat, I feel
like Chris wrote a very strong woman.
She's an incredibly intelligent person.
She's very intuitive. She can
be manipulative if she wants to be.
She has this dry gallows humor,
which I love,
which was a pleasure to read
in a female character.
She's certainly someone who's used
to getting what she wants in life.
But she's been held captive
by this person.
Chris Nolan repeatedly told me
when we spoke about it first
that this guy really was
as bad as they get.
"An appalling piece of humanity,"
is how he put it.
It reminds me somewhat of
what Heath brought to the Joker
when we made The Dark Knight
because it really wasn't
the type of villain
where you get overly concerned
with the justifications
for the behavior.
It's really much more about
a destructive presence in the world
and having to respond to that.
If we see an Achilles heel in him,
it's an emotional quality.
Love, I would say,
for his estranged wife Kat.
But he is ruthless.
He is ruthless and he is egotistical,
and it's truly terrifying
inside an intelligent being.
An intelligent being
capable of reckless risk-taking.
We have to go to some very dark places
with these characters.
So, I was very grateful to
have Ken as my scene partner,
because I felt like
we both understood the seriousness
of the imagery that
we were putting on screen.
He does have a point of view
that has a certain logic to it,
and the interesting thing
about what Ken brings to this character
is that he makes the character
very difficult to sympathize with.
It actually makes it
quite hard to accept
any of the point of view or truth
that he might be trying to expound
to justify what he's doing.
Because he's so clearly doing everything
for the wrong reasons.
There's something
so powerful about belief.
We've seen these characters,
Sator and Protagonist,
they both believe that they're right.
Their motivations might differ,
and obviously their tactics
are definitely different,
but they truly believe in the tenets
that they stand on.
And these themes
are highlighted and displayed
in this film beautifully through
the characters, through the writing.
And what keeps you interested,
what keeps you invested in the story
of what's happening with inversion
are the characters.
- Two, one...
- Action!
This is my third film with Chris.
You read it,
and you realize when you read it
"Oh, shit, how are we gonna do this?"
Because he's gonna
wanna do this for real.
We all know that Chris is very big
on getting everything in-camera
and doing things as real as possible.
You prep a movie with him
and set up for it
different than any other movie.
You have to look at every single thing,
like assume you're doing it
until told otherwise.
This is how we make films.
If we can build it, we do.
If it's impossible, we have to
rely on our friends at VFX.
We use visual effects to combine
filmed elements as much as possible.
We're using a minimal approach,
rather than going full CG.
We feel like audiences,
where 20, 30 years ago,
they might've recognized those tricks,
they're out of practice of seeing them.
Now we're used to just seeing CG,
wall-to-wall built environments.
So you can pull the wool
over their eyes again
by using old-school tricks.
I think a lot of what we do
is about texture.
The audiences are always aware
on some level
of the difference between
things that are animated
and something that's been photographed.
That has a patina and texture
and a flavor and a taste to things
that is unfamiliar to people.
I think that has an impact long-term.
It's the reason you can keep going back
and watch the movie, and it doesn't age.
I think all his movies
get stronger with time.
I have to credit being able to
shoot the way he shoots.
Every film, you're trying
to challenge yourself
because you're trying to give
something new to the audience,
but you're also trying to advance
your techniques in some way.
When you do look at the movies
and the trajectory,
it does feel like
each of them builds on the last.
It was very obvious that this script
was going to be technically
very challenging in many ways.
Film storytelling is very linear.
You go from A, you go to B.
But in this script,
people go from B to A as well,
and sometimes they meet along the way.
Just reversing film...
That's a trick people are familiar with.
And it doesn't really
quite tell our story.
The manipulation of time
photographically
that we needed to engage in,
it's similarly analogous to
the way we approached zero gravity
in Inception and Interstellar,
for example.
It's using a variety of techniques,
so that there isn't one particular trick
that the audience tunes into,
and then it starts to feel artificial.
We used a lot of different techniques
to achieve that,
including a lot of
in-camera photography,
performers performing backwards
or cars driving backwards.
The camera running
both forwards and backwards,
depending on the needs of it.
And also CG to put in the appropriate
reaction to the world around.
We really tried to create something that
feels possible,
plays as plausible to the eye,
but what's happening is
actually quite impossible.
We started the shoot
with the scene
in the Rotas vault because
it was relatively contained,
but extraordinarily complex.
That first week's shooting
was literally preschool.
I've never had any job where so many
of the finest professionals in the world
at what they do,
would show up on a given day
and, honest to God, they didn't have it
right what's happening in that scene.
Here we go.
That's no slur,
that's no call on anybody.
It's just that complicated
and that different
from movies that came before.
It was a baptism by fire for sure.
That first week was tough.
It was really tough.
But it truly did set the tone.
Chris was very happy with it,
the dailies looked fantastic,
so it was a real morale-boosting way
to start such a huge adventure.
It's a testament to the skill
of the different department heads that
each technique that was at our disposal
tended to work equally well.
And so on a case-by-case basis,
every shot of every sequence,
we had to decide
which technique to apply to a given shot
to achieve
the appropriate narrative effect.
The camera literally sees time.
Before the motion picture
camera exists
there's no way for people to
conceive of slow-motion
or reverse-motion.
Cinema itself is the window onto time
that allows this project
to come to fruition.
It's literally a project that can only
exist because the movie camera exists.
So, the jumping-off point for
how you visualize these things is
reversing the film in the camera.
With Chris, it's always
an in-camera approach.
By limiting yourself,
by doing everything in-camera,
you always keep connected to reality,
and also the physics of reality.
Action!
Every film that we make,
we move further
in the direction of making IMAX cameras
be a part of our package in the same
way that any other camera would be.
At this point,
they're the workhorse for us.
It has this extraordinary strength
and power in terms of
how deeply they can
take the audience into the story.
It's a very imposing camera.
Feels very important when you're
shooting something on IMAX.
There's a nice pressure to it.
Everyone is very precious
about the film.
You have to change the mag of film
every few minutes.
So, every take is
a lot of time afterwards.
It makes you bring
your "A" game pretty quickly.
People always talk about IMAX,
"It's big."
For me, it's also something else.
It's a way of looking
at imagery and story
that is not only supposed to connect
with you in an intellectual way,
but also in a visceral way.
You have to feel it.
And that is something that
the big format very much does for me.
We had two 65 mm cameras
from Panavision.
We shot most of our dialogue sequences
with those cameras.
And our big action sequences,
we'd shoot with IMAX.
We used more cameras
and shot more 65 mm negative
than I think any project's ever shot.
And it totaled, up to this point,
close to a million and a half feet.
So, it's pretty impressive.
We wanted to
not only shoot IMAX this time,
but we wanted the IMAX cameras
to run backwards.
This was challenging.
IMAX cameras, for as far as I know,
has never really run backwards.
Definitely not for
a production like this.
IMAX was very helpful to start
a new engineering project with us,
and we built mechanics in their
magazines and in the cameras
to enable us to shoot backwards.
Because of it, we've had to rethink
a lot of things about how you load mags,
how you make the camera electronics
work in reverse, all that stuff.
When we're shooting, sometimes
we'd work with a backwards mag,
sometimes we'd work with a forwards mag.
And you should definitely
not mix those up,
because disastrous things will happen.
Hoyte, with his engineering brain,
'cause he has
a wonderful engineering brain
as well as a great photographic eye,
is always looking for and coming up with
ways to break down the barriers
between where the camera can go
and where the actors want to be.
And on this film, he and his team
were able to get the camera
absolutely everywhere that I could
possibly want and conceive of.
We used the EDGE arm
for the vehicle chase sequences.
We also had the EDGE arm on boats.
We shot aerial.
Steadicam.
Handheld, a lot of handheld,
that Hoyte loves doing.
Hoyte, he's athletic.
These IMAX cameras are heavy,
they're not light.
He's in there with this.
There was a take where I was fighting,
and I kicked him once,
and I was like, "Oh..."
He was like, "No, no.
Keep going. Keep going."
I was like, "I kicked the DP,
and he's totally with it."
Chris and I and the core crew,
we are there,
and we are on those freaking boats,
and we try to be as close as possible.
I think some of that love he has
for film and this process
and connecting with
the people he works with is in
how he sets his lighting,
in how he finds things with the camera,
in how he's able to find the strength
to carry that bad boy
and run with me or move when I move.
More than any other project,
this is just, for me, every day,
learning, learning, learning.
That is very gratifying in itself.
It's by far the most complex thing
that I've ever shot.
Not necessarily
in terms of purely action,
but in terms of the concept of it,
and in terms of how we wanted
to lead people through the story.
It's a huge challenge.
Where you're seeing a sequence
more than once
or from more than one point of view,
we wanted to never just simply
reverse the film,
we wanted to create a new sequence
and make fresh choices about
how to shoot it,
what perspective to shoot it from.
We would say,
"Okay, so we're seeing this from
the Protagonist's point of view.
Which Protagonist?
How do we want the earlier Protagonist
to experience the later Protagonist?"
And if you follow
a very complicated line
with stuff happening and
going backwards and forwards,
suddenly it becomes very important
how you as a viewer
are led through that story.
There's something very particular to
this approach to time
and the mixing of directions of time
that render it really, really, difficult
or impossible to intuit.
It therefore becomes a film
that's much easier to watch
than it was to make.
There's nothing simple
about a Chris Nolan movie.
We, as the crew, have to
just jump in with both our feet.
It's just not as simple
as forwards and backwards.
It's the interaction and combination
of things going backwards and forwards,
and going backwards
also means backwards in time
and all that's implied in that.
You needed a road map, as it were,
to get through this movie.
So, what visual effects does
often on a lot of films is,
is get involved with previs,
and quite often, that previs is
what I like to call technical previs.
It's more like a GPS map, if you like,
of the entire sequence and all of
the different elements coming into play.
And on this film, it became obvious
fairly quickly that that was gonna be
a really useful thing.
In fact, so much so that I felt like
that was gonna be all I would do.
Andrew Jackson is one of
my favorite visual effects supervisors,
for the very simple reason that
he doesn't see his job starting
the moment you wrap.
Even though
he's the visual effects guy,
he just has ideas and suggestions
that are gonna help us get
more creative stuff,
as opposed to just saying,
"Hey, we're gonna do this
all visual effects."
I mean, Andrew Jackson
gets every piece of information,
as he always does on all our films,
and then we just use what is necessary
to a minimum,
so you're not trying to
fake something into the shot.
I brought Bodie in,
so that he could focus 100% on previs,
and I could go back to actually
supervising all of the visual effects,
which is my job.
The fact that you had
someone dedicated on the movie
to just explaining
what the hell's going on
indicates what kind of movie this was.
Throughout every kind of setup
in the whole film,
the forwards and backwards had to work.
'Cause there are parts of this film
where there are at least
four of the same person.
- At least four.
- At any one moment in time.
Continuity in every film is important.
I tried to put every scene
into a day or a night,
and then just go chronologically
through the story.
However, something that happens here
may also happen here,
but in reverse.
So, later in the movie,
they're watching the same event,
but from a different perspective.
The previs became
the only way that you can actually see
the timelines in both directions
at the same time.
And to explain it to people quickly
when you needed to.
So much of it is visual.
Like actually seeing it,
you're like, "That makes absolute sense.
Yes, that's absolutely
how it should be done."
It was really a great tool,
but to imagine that you'd open it up,
take a look, and go,
"Oh, that explains everything."
That was not the case.
The joke on set became
that we'd ask him a question
about the car chase,
"Does this happen before this?"
you know, whatever.
The first answer would always be wrong.
It was striking the degree to which
your instinct would tell you something,
and you'd be absolutely convinced of it,
and then after really puzzling it
through and looking at the sequence
and looking at it objectively,
you'd realize that
you'd started with a misapprehension.
I've never worked on a film before
where I've seen so many people
discussing the intricacies
of the plot at length
and debating,
"Oh, what about if this happened?"
"I think we're wrong.
I think we've got to stop."
It took a village, in a way,
for everybody to keep everybody honest.
That never got any easier,
and that's unique to this film.
But that continually reinforced
my passion about the concept
and my interest in the concept.
'Cause it always felt like something
that not until it's finished,
not until you experience it
do you fully understand it.
And that was an exciting thing
to be involved in.
It was all very well and good for us
to struggle with the concept,
but to struggle with the action,
one of my first thoughts
upon finishing the script was,
"This is gonna be the toughest stunt
coordinator job George Cottle ever had."
It was my first real meeting
with the other HODs.
Chris was talking to me about
how he thinks would be the best way
to first approach it,
and I was like, "Okay." So he's like,
"So, you should put a fight together
of one guy fighting another guy,
moving forward,
and then play that backwards."
And I was like, "Okay."
So I'm making my notes.
I'm like, "Okay, so fight forward
and play it backwards."
"Then take the other guy away
and have the guy who was first attacking
watch the video of him
doing it backwards,
then have him
do the routine perfectly backwards,
then have somebody attack him
as he's going backwards."
I'm like, "Okay, attack him
as he's going backwards."
"And then flip that film,
and that's your fight scene."
And at that point,
I just stopped writing
and looked up and
everybody at the table started laughing.
And even Chris was like,
"I lost you, didn't I?"
And I'm like, "You did. Yeah, you did."
In writing the script, obviously
I had to visualize a lot of the things
and give it my best guess
as to how it was going to feel,
how it was going to work.
But as far as the specifics
of what's that actually gonna look like,
until George and his guys started seeing
what looked good this way or that way,
it really was impossible to know.
I had a team of four stunt guys
and a couple of stunt riggers
and we just started coming up
with very simple moves
to see what it looked like
forwards and backwards.
At the end of every week, I'd put it all
together and I'd sit with Chris,
and he'd be like, "I like this.
I don't like this. That works well."
The first thing we learned is that
if you have
such skilled stunt performers,
as we did,
they can perform things forwards
and backwards, they look the same.
I encouraged George and his team
to look to the world of dance
and dance choreography, things
like that, really think outside the box.
We brought in somebody who was amazing.
Like the move on the floor
where he's going all crazy
and going for the gun? That was
something that she'd come up with,
and we showed it to Chris,
and he's like,
"I love that.
That needs to be in there."
The training was paramount.
Nobody's ever thrown
an inverted punch before. So how does...
How do you make
that real life, you know?
Every rehearsal we did
with actors, we would video it,
because there'd be times
where they would do a fight or a move,
or even just a simple run backwards,
and they'd be like,
"Oh, my God, that looks stupid."
This is actually the most I've ever
looked at "playback," 'cause I had to
just for mechanical purposes.
You needed to have that
reassurance on hand and be like,
"No, look, that's pretty good."
And they're like,
"Oh, great. Okay, perfect."
That's it.
Even the stunt guys found it tough.
They worked a long time
to get to that level,
and we only get the actors
for three or four weeks
to get them to that same level.
I take my hats off to them.
They did a fantastic job.
Yeah!
The film was incredibly demanding
for all the actors,
having to figure out acting backwards,
talking backwards.
For fights, for running,
and, yes, for speaking.
Sator has a Russian accent.
And to speak in reverse
in a Russian accent at pace, at length,
while fighting and walking backwards
is unquestionably a challenging thing
for an actor to do.
I feel like speaking backwards
with a Russian accent now
will become like
new actor code for like,
"But have you done your homework?"
"Can you speak backwards
in a Russian accent?"
It was so many days of like,
"Stop. Hold it. Let's talk about this
before we do it again."
JD Washington was great
because he came to play.
I asked for my hot sauce an hour ago.
He was a professional football player.
And we didn't break him,
but we definitely
pushed him to his limits.
The first week was all the vault fight,
and it was intense.
Ultimately, JD has to learn that fight
in four different variations.
Forwards as the Protagonist
in current time in the suit,
we also shot that in reverse,
then in the antagonist suit
coming out of the machine,
and he has to do
that whole fight forward,
and he has to do
that whole fight backwards.
When you watch the film,
it just plays so seamlessly
that you don't realize
how much time and effort
went into putting the pieces together.
That was insane.
That was like...
It was a different demand,
a different ask as an actor,
which I thoroughly enjoy.
But it was stressful
because you wanna get it right.
The thing about
physically talented performers
is you wanna get a gauge
on what they can do themselves
because if you have an absolute divide
between what the actor can do,
and then
what the stunt performer can do,
if the actor's only
really walking and talking,
and every time he breaks into a run,
you have to get someone else in,
it's pretty limiting
in terms of how you shoot things.
Every movie we've ever done,
the actors always talk a big game.
They always want to do their own stunts.
This was an amazing group of actors
because they all
not only talked a good game,
but they gave a good game, too.
On a warm evening in Mumbai,
we had a couple of shots to get
where we're getting bungeed up
onto a building.
Rob and I had to
do that first part of it.
JD and Rob showed up and they're like,
"What have you got us into now?"
And we walked them
to the top of the building,
and they were like,
"Okay, show me once."
So I got their doubles
to show them the little thing,
and they were like, "Okay, all right."
I think that's one
of the benefits of being so exhausted.
You just don't have any energy
to be terrified.
...two, one... Action!
That, I wasn't
nervous about. That was just fun.
It felt like a roller coaster.
I love roller coasters.
But the jumping off, that was scary.
I was like, "Chris, do you wanna
hang a platform and have JD jump off,
so you get that moment?"
He's like, "Great. Fantastic."
It was ten-foot wide by eight-foot.
When you hang that over the building
250 feet in the air,
it looks like a postage stamp.
John David, who'd gone through
everything with the stunt guys,
and the harnesses, and the safety,
and where the platform was,
all that stuff done.
So then I'm talking to him
about performance.
Chris was giving me
some notes 'cause I say a line,
I gotta do some things
before I jump off,
and I'm always sharp.
I'm usually on it,
and I kept... I just hit him with a,
"Yeah, okay, okay."
But I wasn't taking to the note.
To me, it just felt like
he had a different idea
about how he wanted to play the scene,
and he was sticking to that.
He realized when I finally got it,
like after take seven or something.
He started laughing to himself,
and he told me,
"Oh, I realized
you were scared shitless."
I was like,
"Yes, Chris. I was."
I was so scared.
He was terrified about
being asked to jump off a skyscraper.
I was like, 'Fair enough."
Rob Pattinson had to do
an incredible amount of driving.
He's a very self-deprecating guy, Rob.
He pretends as though
he can barely drive.
I think I did one day of training
of driving backwards,
made my teacher feel so sick
he had to stop.
And so I assumed, "All right,
that's nixed my driving for the movie."
The stunt team did
an evaluation on him,
and they were really impressed,
and so he ended up
doing a lot of his own driving.
We've done very large-scale
car action in the past.
My interest in revisiting it was,
"Well, what happens
if you can turn it on its head,
look at it in a different way?"
You're challenging everybody involved
to come up with ways
of making this fresh and making it new.
When we started seeing some ideas
for the car flip...
We've all seen cars flip
hundreds of times.
The key for us, again,
was the flip had to make sense forwards
and it had to make sense backwards.
It was another case of,
"We're gonna just have to do this."
Scott Fisher and his incredible
effects team started building these cars
and turning the drivetrain around,
so we could drive them
at high speed backwards.
The first time we did it,
it just blew everybody's mind.
To watch that happening in reverse,
it just looked incredible.
Traveling to Estonia
and putting those pieces together,
we were ready to go.
Those guys over there
started setting up
all the actual vehicles for the movie
with the same kind of stuff
that we had tested.
This vehicle
we see flipping on the road.
What you can see here
is a special effects rig.
A cannon that's used
to flip the vehicle.
They did a great job
getting all that stuff done
and testing them and
making sure they were safe to operate
through that whole thing
because once we start there,
we're on the freeway
for almost two weeks straight
of nonstop car stuff.
Shooting in the day,
you have the problem
of where are you gonna find a road that,
that city is able to let you
shut it down for weeks at a time?
The city of Tallinn in Estonia
was kind enough to give us
a great big long stretch of highway
for much of the day.
That was a first for me.
Like, "When will we ever be able
to do this in life?"
Shut down the whole entire freeway.
We knew early on that
we would be doing a lot of pod work.
It's basically
the little cabin of a driving seat,
pedals, and a steering wheel.
We knew with the cars
going forwards and backwards
that we would need the pods
to be able to be inside the vehicle
for when they're going backwards,
so the guy can hide.
And we'd also need it on the roof,
so we could then shoot inside
at any angle,
anywhere Chris wanted to be
with the IMAX camera.
The spacing's looking perfect so far.
The stunt drivers have known
and worked with each other for decades,
so the guys just had it so dialed in.
Much like earlier with the fighting
and almost being a dance,
it was so similar in a way
with the vehicles.
In going to Tallinn, where a Hollywood
production had never been before,
there was an excitement
and an enthusiasm to help us out
and to really show that
you could do something on a grand scale.
It's hard to imagine that being possible
in any other city, really.
Well,
Chris always envisioned this film
as a globe-trotting action epic,
and obviously, the best way to do that
is to actually travel yourself.
In spy films in particular, I think,
one of the reasons that
we're so drawn to the genre is escapism.
And it's the idea of these characters
who get to live in a world
that we don't get to live in.
Yes, you could
recreate India in a soundstage
or London in a soundstage,
and you're not gonna capture the essence
or the authenticity.
Being able to go
to seven different countries
gives it such a nuanced sense of realism
'cause you're actually there.
What you saw is what we experienced.
Prep on this film was really complicated
because we were based out of LA
and making plans
for all these huge action set pieces
that were gonna be happening
all over the world.
We were going places
during the busiest times.
Summer in Amalfi,
monsoon season in India.
We basically had to make sure that
we had the best people on the ground
in every country, and we certainly did.
Chris wanted this Brutalist,
Eastern bloc vibe
that we got from Tallinn.
It's just phenomenal.
I mean, it's got a very vibrant culture,
has all kinds of interesting Soviet-era
bits of architecture.
As we prepped the film, we put
more and more things into Tallinn.
We shot the concert sequence
there at Linnahall.
It was built for
the Soviet Union's 1980 Olympics.
It's Brutalist architecture, and it
sits out overlooking the Baltic Sea.
Actually, I think
it's one of my favorite buildings
we've ever shot in.
In the end, what you see as an audience
is a fragment or is a shot,
but you are filming a reality.
You wanna buy into that reality.
When you send in a SWAT team
or when you send in the actors,
you want them to understand
the overall architecture of the place.
So, in that way,
a real location always helps a lot.
India is a great place to shoot,
but it had its challenges.
Shooting at night in monsoon seasons,
where it's very, very wet, over
a big area that we needed to light up.
This was very challenging.
Coming here and putting it all together
and putting it in such a massive way.
Everybody's just gobsmacked
at what he's doing out here.
It's absolutely awesome.
The building sequence we shot
in a building called
the Vardhan building.
There are only
two little elevators in there,
that would sometimes stop
or just not come, for no reason.
And so, you would make the decision,
"Am I gonna walk up
the 18 floors or not?"
The Indian people that we worked with,
they were just very, very good
and hardworking people
that knew exactly
what needed to be done,
and that made stuff happen for us.
We were able to get
some really remarkable images,
including some of the first aerials
in a film of Mumbai ever.
It's not something
they'd allowed in the past.
Crucial plot elements happen
in quite unusual places in the movie.
I mean, who knew there was an enormous
wind farm in the middle of the ocean
just off the coast of Denmark?
Before I shot Dunkirk,
I was traveling with my family,
and I saw this wind farm from a plane,
and I wrote it down, filed it away.
Shooting Dunkirk, we were right next
to an offshore wind farm,
and some of the only visual effects
we really had to do in Dunkirk
were erasing the windmills
from the shots.
And it was a bit of a shame
because they look fantastic.
And so that cemented
the visual potential for me.
I really want to shoot
one of these offshore wind farms.
One of the things that
we had done on Dunkirk
was we had shot a lot of boat scenes.
Anytime you're shooting
with boats and working on the water,
it's incredibly difficult.
I don't think I ever would have
wanted to try something like
shooting out at the wind farm
on the icebreaker
if we hadn't done Dunkirk.
A lot of the challenge for us
was finding these ships,
their availability
for the times we needed them,
and then finding out how we were
gonna effectively shoot them.
The icebreaker, for me,
stood out right away,
because it was so unusual
and the paint scheme is so unusual.
And because these boats work.
This boat's not sitting around,
waiting for someone to call it up
to work on a movie.
So, to find our icebreaker
that had this look to it,
and then to get the boat to work
during the times we need it
was really awesome.
Dunkirk had been, I mean,
really one of the largest
marine units ever assembled for a movie.
And having done that with Neil,
I thought this job would be
relatively easy for him.
But the reality is
when you start writing in luxury yachts,
and icebreakers,
it gradually started to add up.
We had 120 ships on this movie,
which is staggering,
and more than half of those
were on camera.
When it came
to picking our mega yacht,
we had a lot of options.
A lot of these boats exist,
but generally
they're owned by people who are not
interested in letting you rent them.
A lot of them are meant
for cruising the coast
and sitting at the beach, and Planet 9,
which we ended up going with,
was very utilitarian.
This boat meant business.
It is literally a world travel machine.
It's got an ice-rated hull
that can go anywhere in the Antarctic.
I gave it a very slightly
militaristic aspect. It feels defensive.
It doesn't feel like a toy.
It feels like
it has a functional purpose.
The Amalfi Coast at that time of year,
it was almost impossible
to get around by car.
We would move the crew
starting at 3:00 a.m.
out to the yacht to work all day.
Food, water,
anything that was needed, film,
everything came by shuttle and by boat.
This is the first time Planet 9's
being involved in this kind of thing.
Normally, a yacht only takes 12 guests
and here we are out at anchor
with 100 of you on board.
So, it's been a pretty amazing,
very, very different experience for us.
The real challenge of filming
on a luxury yacht like that
is everything on that boat is finished
to this extraordinarily expensive
and high degree.
It was a bit like shooting in a museum
or a china shop.
Everything here is custom.
The furniture is built inside the ship.
The wallpaper, the lighting,
the carpets.
Doorways are really narrow in a boat
and the furniture's very large.
This is to protect the woodwork from us.
We had to protect the doors
and the walls
because they're fabric or leather.
Right now, we're preparing for a scene
where we're gonna bring
an MI-8 military helicopter
and perform some operations
on this deck.
We're expecting downdraft speeds
of almost 100 miles an hour,
which is really substantial. That's
a basic, I believe, a Class 2 hurricane.
Well, the helicopter's too heavy to land
on the deck of the yacht.
The yacht has its own helicopter
that can land,
which is very, very small in comparison.
And it was massive.
Those things are supposed to land
on an aircraft carrier,
not on a mega yacht.
And so, in the end,
through tests and rehearsals,
they ascertained that they could
just touch down on the deck
low enough for people to get in and out.
No one, absolutely nobody
has pulled that off before,
and I don't think
you will ever see that again.
Of course, in the film's it's a very
quick thing, a very throwaway thing.
But that's the nature
of this type of filmmaking.
This is a real yacht, this is
how a character like Sator might live.
To be on these boats is to
get a strong sense of character,
which is manifest
in these incredible vessels
that either keep him castle-like,
Neptune-like on the sea,
repelling all invaders,
or cutting through his environment
in this deadly, shark-like,
high-velocity way.
There's definitely a level of casting
that goes on with these ships.
And especially for Sator's character,
with the yacht,
his personal racing sailboats.
Somebody of that caliber
is gonna have the best.
What I was looking for
in the script was that bridge
between the glamorous, frivolous world.
Yachts add something
with physicality and danger.
The F50s. It's the baddest sailing
craft on the water. It's a rocket ship.
They were quite terrifying, actually.
You go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I know it's gonna lift off the water."
And then the first time we did it,
I went, "Holy hell."
Like it's so...
It goes really incredibly high up.
I made a few calls to some guys
I knew that had sailed
previously in America's Cup and it
turned out that some of those guys
were now these professional sailors
on the SailGP circuit,
which is basically like Formula 1,
but for sailboats.
When we first started talking to SailGP,
we wanted to get them to Amalfi
'cause we were already there.
We said,
"All right, we'll go to you guys,
when you guys go to Southampton."
These boats just can't travel.
It's a big deal
to get these boats to move, and just
to get them in and out of the water
is a whole process.
They come in,
they set up these big tent cities.
They've got... They unpack their boats
that they have in containers.
Imagine a boat that
really doesn't want to float,
and that's what you're dealing with.
This boat wants to fly.
So, you put it in the water
when you use it,
and you take it out of the water
when you don't want to use it.
Obviously, the SailGP guys
have never done anything like this.
They've never been asked
to do anything like this.
I don't think sailing at this level
has been in a feature film ever,
so this is a first.
It's also been a learning curve
trying to film these.
So, I think all of us have learned
from both sides.
It was a meeting of
these two crazy worlds,
like a film crew meeting
a traveling circus
of the world's best athletes
and the fastest boats on the ocean.
Like throwing people off
of one of their boats
is just their idea of a nightmare.
It's like, "No, you can't throw somebody
off the boat."
"No, no, no.
But that's what we need to do."
"Yeah, but he can't fall off the boat."
"No, that's what we need him to do."
There's a whole extraordinary
set of safety protocols
that we needed to know how to do,
and the actors needed to know how to do.
So, we all went through
that safety training
before we were allowed
to get near the boat.
For the first time in the shoot
we, as a film crew,
were very much subjected
to what is possible with these boats.
The fact
that these things go 50 knots,
anything that you have on the water
that can keep up that fast,
isn't gonna be stable enough
for any kind of camera platform.
It's not actually that cold.
No, it's not that cold.
It is that wet, however.
The real breakthrough
was to have Andrew Jackson
go a week early to work with SailGP
and look at camera placements.
We were able to do things with these
boats that they had never done before,
just because they've never had to
and no one had ever tried.
We were able to remove the wing
and tow the boat
and get it up on the foils,
which was very stable and very safe.
That was the scenario where
it was safe to involve the actors
and be able to photograph them
actually foiling,
actually lifting off the water.
We knew we were gonna
have to do some of the sequence
on this other vehicle.
The buck rig was a supplement.
Basically half of the ship
bolted onto a real powerboat.
It was really just for close-up stuff
and for dialogue.
In the end, it all paid off,
it all worked actually very smoothly,
and we were able to get the sequence
in a relatively short amount of time.
I think Chris is unique in that he can
look at things like enormous boats
and just the quality of light
in a place like Amalfi
and do something magical
at the service of a story
that goes for his sweet spot,
which is how do you make great cinema?
Not just tell stories in pictures,
but how do you make
the experience of cinema?
To be actually in the thing,
to feel the thing physically
move around you
or feel the boat rock under you,
it just obviously, organically feeds
the truth of a performance.
A lot of these sequences
you read in the script
and you just think,
"Yeah, would be cool in a movie,"
and then you get to set and it's like,
"Yeah, we got a 747
we're crashing into a building."
"That's how we're achieving
the 747 crashing into a building."
Writing the plane crash,
I knew I wanted to try
and do it in some ways in-camera.
It read on the page
as the most exciting sequence,
and I definitely was scratching my head
about how we were going to achieve it.
One of the first things
I asked Chris was,
"How big do you want the plane?"
He laughed, and I said,
"I think I could get you a real plane."
We wound up visiting an airport
in Victorville
where they have all kinds of planes
that are being sold for scrap.
When I looked at 737s, they looked
a bit small compared to the 747s
and the MD-11s
I was seeing on the other side.
It's like, "Well, maybe we could
just go shopping there instead."
When we first talked about
crashing a plane,
I thought maybe a Cessna.
Maybe a 707, something small.
But we went all-out, 747,
almost 300,000 pounds.
To see a plane like this
actually makes you realize
what we're all flying in, when
we're flying. These things are huge.
I don't think we tend to
get the scale of it
when we're just walking in
through the gangplank.
Our main focus, when we got there,
was the brakes.
Of course, that's the part
they take off right away,
when a plane is decommissioned.
Here's a finished bogie
with four of our eight brakes.
We have four on this side,
four on the other side.
These rebuilt, real-deal calipers
from Boeing.
The same system we use
to remote-drive cars
with pods, you basically put that,
stuck it in the belly of the plane,
and one guy steered,
one guy dealt with the braking,
and we propelled it
by pulling it on cables.
So, this is our cockpit.
There's nobody up above, obviously,
and we drive, we steer from here.
Braking systems here on the right.
We have a couple cameras facing forward.
Back ones, we can see the position
of the wheel at all times.
We actually have several different views
we could switch between,
so we can see forward,
we can see backwards.
A couple of shots involve
guys climbing out of the escape hole,
and they're near the wheels and stuff,
so we want to be ready for
any kind of an emergency or panic stop.
There was an enormous amount
of prep that went into that sequence
because we were shooting
at a working airport,
and they're not traditionally
in the business
of crashing planes for real.
From a safety point of view,
we made sure that everything was good.
Just working with Scott Fisher
and his team,
making sure that we knew
all of our parameters for safety.
There were sections
we had to go through the cars,
stop, go through the guy unloading.
Blowing this stuff out the back.
Dropping the gold out.
That's the thing on Chris' movies.
You do it, it works, you move on.
Yeah, I think I'll enjoy it more
when I see the movie.
I was like,
"How they gonna pull this off?
There's no way they're gonna
crash this thing into that building."
It's still a damn 747, okay?
It's really a big object.
Chris and myself, we're very much
one camera at a time people.
Of course, if you blow something up,
and you can only blow it once,
we would shoot with several cameras.
We have so many cameras, you're
not going to be able to watch this
and it not potentially be photographed.
So, wait for the movie to
come out next year, okay?
Everybody in place.
And roll cameras.
Three, two, one... action.
I think from a wardrobe point of view,
the film was
extraordinarily challenging.
With this type of movie,
you're looking to establish
an iconic presence at the heart of it,
and that was something that
I knew Jeffrey would be able to do
and put together a great team.
I read the script
at least four or five times
before I even spoke to Chris
because we knew we had
to do something new, something special,
because it is an amazing piece.
We started talking
about characters first.
What they're doing,
why they're doing it,
what their relationships
are to one another.
And then individual characters.
Well, the clothes do identify
where you are and what we're doing.
When you look at the Protagonist,
he continually changes.
He takes on different personas.
He's on the border of James Bond.
He's secret, yet he's out there.
All those things come into play
when you dress a person like that.
And I came up with
a very good, iconic look
that worked for JD
and works for the movie.
I didn't feel like I had to think about
it. They just felt so a part of me,
a part of the character.
I felt sexy, to be honest.
The Polo shirt has turned into
our, quote unquote, iconic look.
It has a great deal of strength,
yet it doesn't overpower you
with the tie and the shirt.
There's something slightly relaxed
and a lot of confidence,
and on JD it looks great.
Neil is a slob. He's just rolls in
every day, doing what he does.
I thought that Neil's the type
of person who appreciates chaos.
I felt like he couldn't take himself
too seriously.
His first suit that you see him in,
in India, is this linen suit.
Where you see it's just
been aged and worn down,
as if he's never cleaned it.
It's just like he wears it every day.
And that's the real Neil.
He's got the skinny little tie
that he ties like a schoolboy.
But then, when he goes posing
as a wealthy businessman,
he takes on a different persona.
Yet, a little bit of Neil
still peeks through.
So, you've got a double-breasted suit,
which is perfectly tailored
and everything.
But if you look at the fabric,
there's a little playfulness to it.
So, that character is still there,
even though he's pretending
to be somebody else.
With Sator, you could go so many ways
with that character.
You see, you hear Russian oligarch,
and you think wealth, lots of money.
Or you have a guy who says,
I'm so wealthy, I don't care.
It gave you a clue to the inside
of the mind of this character
and how he feels about the world,
how he reacts to the world.
The original designs for him
were more over-the-top.
Whereas after a serious discussion
with Chris,
I took it all down
to a much lower level,
which works for the character. It makes
him very individual to who he is.
Kat's journey in the film varies from
these moments of great strength
to fragility, to softness.
She's very conservative.
You could easily go
very Russian oligarch's wife.
You could go extremely designer.
But because she isn't that person,
the marriage has fallen apart,
she does not love this man anymore,
she's not in that world.
She comes from a stately place.
So, we kept her that way.
When you watched Elizabeth,
she had such graceful movements.
Like almost balletic.
I thought, here I have a 6'3" actress.
My feeling was to just own it,
and I said to Chris,
"I think we should just go with it."
So I made the clothes
flatter that physicality of her.
The wardrobe of this type of film was
always gonna be very important to me,
and Jeffrey has an excellent sensibility
for combining something
with a bit of glamour,
something with that little
extra aspirational quality almost,
but with an idea of
how that can be reconciled
with the real-world texture
that we're trying to get across.
I think part of the success
of what the movies look like is Nathan.
Nathan and I have
a shared North London background.
We speak that same language
of industrial design
from our childhoods.
He's been with Chris a long time.
Their synergy's just top-notch.
Traditionally, our methods are always,
you try and find something real
and shoot it, and then
use a little bit on stage.
Nothing new, old techniques.
So it just grows
the scale of the whole place.
To make the audience believe,
you have to make
the futurism of it believable,
and therefore
you have to make it familiar.
It's like something that you feel that
that could exist,
and for art department,
and I'm sure for Chris as well.
It's just more fun to build the stuff.
Nathan has that talent for building
things that you instantly believe in.
They're visceral.
They feel like real places.
The first time you read this script,
you have a lot of questions,
not the least of which are...
"Turnstile?
How does that work?"
We wanted to integrate
the process of inversion
into the texture and the tone
of the rest of the film.
The idea of the two rotating things
was something that
Nathan came up with
in terms of how to mirror things.
How to make it look like a reflection
at the same time as actually
a unique half of what's going on.
There's an evolution
of those turnstiles,
so they'd start off small,
and they keep getting bigger.
The early ones started off
as two cylinders
that rotate,
and you're able to transfer across,
and then the next one's bigger,
same idea,
but you're able to transfer across
something really large.
Then they look more like a slot machine
and go round and round vertically.
You could stop 'em and start 'em
and change the speed and the pacing,
depending upon
what was needed for the shot.
We try on every film
to do things in-camera
as far as possible.
We honed it down
into using scale tricks,
so we don't have to build so big,
and we can
deceive the eye
with our forced perspectives.
For example, in Barbara's office,
you're able to fool people
because you have the real set,
and then, at a certain point,
it fades into painting.
They brought in a painter
from England who did it freehand.
You're like, "Whoa!"
What you're doing
is putting three dimensions
on a two-dimensional surface
in order to give the impression that
it's one continual plane.
For the final battle sequence,
the scale of that set alone
was just immense.
There was a mine just behind
Joshua Tree in Eagle Mountain,
100-year-old mine,
and it had the core batch
of existing ruined architecture
where we could really develop that site
and twist it into what we wanted.
There were a few existing buildings.
In the model,
the ones that were existing
are represented in the light gray.
All the dark gray
are buildings that we built.
We've created some miniature buildings
that are 30 or 50%
of what a full-sized building would be.
This building here
is about 50% of full size,
and it just extends the city
even further than what we've done.
When we got into the cave sequence
where they enter the cave,
it had to tie into
our Eagle Mountain set.
That cave was amazing.
That was mind-boggling.
We are at Stage 16 at Warner Bros.
This is the largest stage in Hollywood
in terms of volume.
This is the link piece
to Eagle Mountain.
We've built a few caves in our time,
and we've learned over the years
how to achieve that grand scale.
So you feel it's big,
but it's an illusion.
What you're looking at down the end
is a forced perspective.
So it looks like it goes on forever,
but it doesn't.
So as we come in,
this perspective now is all forced,
so it's like Alice in Wonderland.
So here we go... See?
So we just scaled these down,
3D-printed them, and then,
Ed Strang, our scenic,
just painted a little backing
to make it go even further.
So, now we come out into the main cave.
This is now the hypocenter.
We've used fiberglass molds,
foam carving,
and then, as we got higher,
we used lightweight Vacuform,
and then plastered the whole thing
to link it all together.
So, there's lots of
different techniques.
In typical Chris fashion,
he made this big set,
he got to the end,
he wanted to blow it up.
So we did our best we could
to blow that thing up.
All these things just
helped inform me as a performer.
It felt like it was so real that it was
easy to lend yourself to that reality
and just go for it.
And that's a credit to Nate-dog.
He knows what he's doing.
Three, two, one. Up.
- Cut.
- And that's a cut.
- Cut it.
- Cut.
Three, two, one... action.
The battle at Stalsk-12 at the end,
that's the area of the film
where you're paying off
the concept for the audience
and you can take it to
a bigger scale of action.
We shot it at the end
because we knew that we would have to
learn how to do all this stuff
before we got to that sequence.
When we arrived there,
we felt ready to do that,
ready to apply it to
a real big set piece.
For me, I was like, "This is Dunkirk
on steroids or something."
I've never been on
a movie of this scale,
especially something that is
not a part of any franchise.
It's extraordinary.
The environment is as realistic
as it's gonna get.
It's much easier
because you are in a real circumstance
and you can feel it
and you don't need to
create your own fantasy.
Every set in every location,
they all bring their own challenges.
In the reality of Tenet,
a building can explode,
but a building can also rebuild itself.
We took the most practical approach.
We had a one-third scale building
that we blew up the bottom,
and we had a one-third scale building
we blew up the top,
and then we had a full-size building
that was the beginning
and the aftermath.
When you've done
a lot of movies with green screens,
it just feels like such a privilege
to be doing it. It feels like...
Yeah, make the building...
...that explodes itself
and comes back together.
It feels very, very real,
essentially 'cause it is real.
Eagle Mountain was at
the tail end of our shoot.
It'd been a long shoot,
everybody was tired.
You're in the middle of nowhere.
And you're like, "Oh, my God.
It's just gonna be so daunting."
And then, all of a sudden,
the four Chinooks started up.
And it was just, "Oh, my...
This is really happening."
Even my seasoned stunt guys who have
seen some pretty epic stuff were like...
You can just see 'em all standing up,
and holding their guns,
and like, "Yeah, let's do it,"
and it just really helped
charge the whole crew
to push through that three weeks
of Eagle Mountain.
We were out in the desert.
It was hot,
guys were in full gear,
the complication there
was having to run sequences
both forwards and backwards.
To try running out in the desert
over rocks this big,
not looking where you're running,
and trying to make it look like
you're running in the right direction.
That was definitely a challenge.
It's scary because
the scale is so big on this movie that
to reset four
military helicopters and 600 extras...
There's been a few shots where I've...
I've just... You just fall.
I was like, "I'm so sorry."
It's a credit to George and company
just being able to get everybody
on the same page
to move in unison,
backwards and forwards.
I think these scenes
are heightened in a way
that it has everyone constantly
having to think and work as a team.
Eagle Mountain, that was
graduation masterclass for all of us.
It was like a culmination
of everything we learned
put together
in this really physical place.
Every department head
coming to Stalsk-12
brought an expertise they'd developed
over the last six months,
and so they were able to pull off
a lot of really extraordinary things.
When you work with new people,
there's always a moment of terror
as you lose your...
The comfort blanket of the people
that you've worked with before.
Ludwig and Jen,
both are absolutely incredible,
and they both were involved
very early on, during the shoot.
I mean, they brought really
fresh energy, new perspectives.
Jen Lame has done some
extraordinary work prior to this film,
and it's easy to look at
a large-scale action film
and see the editor's influence.
It's much harder to look at dramas,
to look at smaller-scale things,
and understand fully
the influence of the editor.
But good work is good work,
and what I was looking for was somebody
with a different point of view,
who would have a fresh take
on this type of material.
I knew Ludwig's other work,
and what was interesting is working with
a younger composer, somebody who had
a completely different set of references
for film school.
The great thing
about our initial meeting was
that wasn't in any way a bad thing.
It was a totally positive thing.
It was like, "Okay, we're both gonna
bring interesting things to the table."
Most times, when I
start working with a new director,
you get thrown in
right in the middle of the process
when they're editing the movie.
This was a little bit different because
he contacted me
before they started shooting.
One of the challenges that I pose
to any composer I'm working with is
I don't use temp music.
I don't love using temp score either
because then you get used
to something... I don't know,
it always feels weird to me
to import CDs
of other composers and put them in.
There's something wrong about that.
Chris was like, "Okay, well,
do you wanna start working?"
"Do you wanna start...
Can you start writing some demos?"
I went to work straight away.
He was able to give me tracks
as we were finishing planning the film
and things I could listen to
as we were actually shooting.
Talking a lot to John David Washington
about his character,
just getting his take
on the Protagonist,
that's also extremely inspiring.
The last day of shooting in the desert,
we're surrounded by
thousands of extras in military gear.
Robert Pattinson's driving this truck
up the hill,
and four helicopters just...
Dreading like, "Okay, how I'm gonna
write music for this scene?"
We've maintained the tradition,
which used to be industry standard
until relatively recently,
of screening film dailies
wherever possible.
John Lee has figured out ways
over the years of bringing dailies
to some of the hardest-to-reach spots
in the world.
We're in Amalfi right now,
and we've found this school
and this is the gym.
Lucien, our projectionist,
travels with this huge kit of stuff.
We screen it at wrap. Four or five times
a week, we have a big screening.
It was such an amazing experience
to be able to watch film dailies.
Focus, take notes,
think how I would use that
when I get it in four days.
You can't hide in IMAX.
Some of my old tricks,
maybe, of doing certain things.
You really need to be aware
of what the end result is.
I hadn't done a lot
of fight sequences.
On top of that, a forwards person
fighting a backwards person.
It happens twice.
I was nervous about that.
We shot each sequence twice.
I literally directed the scene twice.
Talked to Jen early on about a rule
which we were able to
almost never violate.
I think we once had to do it,
but to never use the same shot
in both sequences, reversed.
Now the film's on home video
and people are able to scrub the edits
and look at it backwards and forwards,
they'll see all kinds of differences
in the sequences.
I felt like I had to keep referencing
the footage over and over again,
to the point where
I would watch it so many times
that I would have to step away
and go for a walk and come back
because it was daunting.
Editing is a misunderstood profession
because it's seen as
a technical job in some senses,
but the technical part of it
is the least of it.
It's really about having a sense
of story and character,
and how those things all mesh.
And Jen has that absolutely beautifully.
She's an extraordinary editor.
Another reason why I was excited
to work on a Chris Nolan film
is because of the music.
Chris is so involved with music.
Watching him work with Ludwig
and getting rough edits of pieces.
He came up with
a brilliant, brilliant score.
What I have always felt
about music in film is that
it shouldn't be a coat of varnish
that's applied to the thing at the end.
It should actually be something
that's in there
in the construction of the film,
because you want it to be
one of the building blocks of the film.
The big airplane heist, for example,
when they crash a 747 into a building.
I wrote that piece of music
just based on the script,
and it just felt like,
"Okay, did you actually shoot this scene
while listening to my music?"
Because everything matches up perfectly.
That way,
you build everything as a whole,
and you're seeing how
the different elements are working
as an organic whole.
I think that visiting the set,
seeing the designs early on,
reading the script
obviously ahead of time,
and spending as much time as possible
with the rest of the creative team,
understanding how
these decisions are made
and contributing and feeling the thing
grow as a whole,
that cohesion is very important to me.
The proudest thing for me is
now I can look back on the experience,
reading that script
and genuinely sitting
in that room and thinking,
"I have no idea how we're going to
do half of this stuff,"
to then completing it
and Chris being happy...
that's incredible.
It just goes to show
what can be achieved
when you take the time
and you have the right people
and you put
all of those ingredients together.
It was ambitious, there's no question,
but we were surrounded by
the absolute best in the business.
And we felt great about the huge talents
that were helping us
make the movie come to life.
I remember Chris,
after one of the meetings,
he was like, "It's gonna be hard."
He said it just like that.
And I laughed, but months later...
Yeah, you were right, sir.
It was very hard.
Working on
a Chris Nolan movie for me is
like watching a Chris Nolan movie.
It both felt like the hardest job
I'll ever have in my life,
and the hardest work I've ever done,
and the most fun I've ever had.
And I feel like
that's what you feel like
when you watch a Chris Nolan movie.
You're like, "Man, I need to
see that again. That was crazy,
but I had the best time ever."
It was undoubtedly
the most complicated thing
that I've ever been involved with.
But it was very inspiring to see
how the different department heads
and the people working for them
rose to the challenges.
It made for a very inspiring
environment on set.
Chris is so knowledgeable about film.
He directs everybody, every department.
He's not just directing the actors
and their performance,
he makes sure that everybody understands
why you're doing something
forward and backwards,
and the effect
it's gonna have in the film.
Chris always sets the tone.
He sets the tone for me
and for the actors.
He's never sitting down on apple box,
or he's never shying away
from testing out a rig.
He can just keep shooting.
If the rain's coming down,
he's loving it.
You lose the right
to complain about anything.
I mean, it's a good move on his part.
It's infectious. You can't help
but to want to keep going
and give it your all.
You come to work,
you come to play, luckily,
because that part of it is important.
This is a fairly brightly
puritanical approach to art.
There's this really nice tone that
we're all in it together.
We're all making this crazy film,
and let's not be too precious.
Let's stay safe, and let's do this.
When you're a kid,
and you think about the way
they make huge Hollywood movies,
this is what I would imagine that to be.
This massive team of people
that travel the world,
go to these incredible locations
and shoot all of this amazing stuff,
that is Tenet in a nutshell.
- And a cut.
- Cut.
More than any other film we've done,
everything we went through
and all the resources we had
are there on the screen
for the audience to enjoy.
And I feel very, very good
watching the finished film
that it's a grand-scale entertainment.
And, for me, that was always
the ambition for the film.