Christopher Nolan was asked, during a Q&A at the Tribeca Film Festival, to choose which sequence from his films he considers his favorite. The log chase scene in Insomnia? The semi-flip in The Dark Knight? The docking sequence in Interstellar? Every single one of them?
Nope. The director answered as some may have expected, with the opening scene from The Dark Knight Rises, often discussed as his most impressive stunt sequence thus far in his directorial career. Call it the prologue scene, call it the airplane hijacking scene, call it what you want, Nolan is proud of it no matter what title you give it. “It took us about two days in Scotland,” he told host Bennett Miller and the crowd. He continued:
“It was an incredible sort of coming together of months and months of planning by a lot of different members of the team who worked for months rehearsing these parachute jumps and wind walking, all these different things. … The visual effects work in the sequence is very minimal. … I was really amazed by what the team we had put together had achieved using very sort of old-fashioned methods, in a way. I was very proud of the way that came together.” ~ via Long Live Cinema
In case you need a refresher on the sequence he’s talking about or just want to watch it again — whether to see the sheer spectacle of it all, to watch Aidan Gillen awkwardly point his gun at people, or to hear Tom Hardy‘s voice boom over what must be some sort of cloud-based public address system — here it is for your viewing pleasure.
It’s an impressive action sequence, no doubt, but it leaves a lot to be desired in other areas, and if we are talking about the best scenes in Christopher Nolan movies it’s not the one that comes to mind first for me. So what does?
Well I’ve decided to offer up six of my favorite sequences from Nolan’s filmography, some action- or effects-driven and some not, which you can check out in the pages that follow and then you can let me know what some of your favorites are. These aren’t in a specific order, but I did decide to save my favorite for last, so let’s get started and see where we end up, though I’m just as interested in reading which sequences top your list…
Interstellar
The Docking Scene
I already alluded to it above and frankly I’m a bit surprised Mr. Nolan didn’t single this one out himself. While the opening scene from The Dark Knight Rises features some impressive practical effects work, the docking scene from Interstellar is equally impressive technically, and superior cinematically. Even watching it again isolated in the clip above, I’m on the edge of my seat from the time I press play and once Matt Damon‘s character gets blown out of the space station my heart sinks, my jaw drops, and I sit in awe bouncing my knees at a world record clip as I watch Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) attempt to attach his craft to the Endurance.
If you had told me the best scene from one of the biggest effects-driven films of last year would include a space vehicle trying to dock onto a rotating hub, I’d have called you crazy, but here we are.
Inception
The Paris Cafe Scene
Some movies have a cool scene or two; Christopher Nolan movies often feel like large collections of them. When talk turns to Inception most point to the hallway fight scene as one of those cool scenes — its coolest, perhaps — and it is indeed cool, but I actually find the scene above even better. There’s just something about it that really appeals to me, from the combination of the practical and computer generated effects to the juxtaposition formed by the herky-jerky slow motion of the explosions occurring all around Ariadne (Ellen Page) and Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio).
The tremors and the fireless explosions all bring to life the anxiety that builds quickly within Ariadne when she realizes she is in a dream and can’t control her thoughts. The scene that follows is memorable as well, as Ariadne folds the entire city of Paris over itself, but the image of two people sitting and talking amid crates, carts, and storefronts exploding all around them is the one that sticks with me most.
Memento
Opening Credits
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Of all of Christopher Nolan’s films, Memento remains my favorite to this day. It is etched in my mind, one of the first movies I saw that made me consider how filmmakers could tell stories in nonlinear or otherwise interesting ways. Like so many other movies in Nolan’s oeuvre, Memento had me hooked from the very beginning. The opening credits sequence above runs backwards, mimicking in part the story structure of the movie and helping us understand that so much of Leonard’s (Guy Pearce) time is spent trying to work back in time from the present, to retrace his steps and understand how he got where he is and what motivated him to be there.
If you take each of its components separately they don’t seem like much: a close-up of a hand shaking a Polaroid; a pool of blood that flows back to the source; a bullet casing that spins and bounces back up into a gun. Put them all together, though, and you’ve got one hell of an opening sequence.
