In appreciation of Jonathan Nolan: The mind behind the madness

Christopher Nolan gets all the credit, but a serious assist goes to his brother and frequent screenwriting partner Jonathan. 

On their own, the Nolan’s are pioneers — full stop.

Christopher Nolan has fundamentally changed blockbuster filmmaking; a true successor to Stanley Kubrick’s throne, and someone who has turned moviegoing into a capital-E Event. Need an example of how massive Nolan’s legacy already is? Ask someone what Inception is and they’ll say Christopher Nolan movie first, Leonardo DiCaprio movie a distant second.

Few other directors live in that rarified air. He didn’t, however, get there on his own. The foundation on which Christopher’s towering movie empire rests was laid by his brother, Jonathan.

Jonathan has described himself as the right-hand to Christopher’s left (which is actually true, they’re both right and left-handed, respectively) and nothing could more simply explain the complexity of their brilliance.

Of Christopher’s ten films, Jonathan wrote six of them. All of the Nolan brother collaborations could be argued as the best in the director’s filmography. The Dark Knight is Christopher’s masterpiece, a massively impactful and important movie that has intellectual depths it has no business having. The visuals speak for themselves; Heath Ledger burning up the screen every second he’s on it, the massive set pieces like flipping an actual semi in an actual downtown of an actual metropolis. Jonathan’s script is the backbone of the popcorn action we see on screen, with the first six minutes of the movie being among the tightest scripted, most well-written introductions to a movie ever. Within a handful of pages, Jonathan outlines a story that is about all the things we’re not expecting it to be about — a hero’s story that’s actually anchored by its villain while actually about the city in which the story takes place.

Does that layered storytelling complexity sound familiar?

Oh yeah, it’s also a comic book movie which is something Jonathan weaves in with near-corny 1920s gangster flick dialogue that serves as exposition while also further coloring in the world in which this movie will take place. The stunning and sweeping IMAX shots of downtown Chicago are all Christopher, while the world that’s being filmed is all Jonathan.

Two of the best films Christopher directed were not written by Jonathan — Inception and Dunkirk — but it’s impossible to not see his fingerprints all over both.

Inception, while written by Christopher, very clearly draws from the mind-altering substance of Jonathan’s prior work. The layered dreamscapes, the precision with which a massively complicated idea is simplified without sacrificing its merits, and the raw emotion of the subtext are straight from the Jonathan Nolan playbook. A direct line — or as direct as you can be with the Nolans — can be drawn between the brother’s work on The Prestige and Inception‘s ambitious magic trick plot structure. Inception very much feels like Christopher trying to write a movie that harnesses Jonathan’s Galaxy Brain.

Dunkirk is a subdued evolution of that. The subtly of playing with linear structure is so seamless that it goes unnoticed in the first few viewings, and the layering of three levels of plot into one giant story is further mastering of Jonathan’s skill. It’s also a case of zigging where the audience expects a zag, a classic Nolan brother special that Jonathan perfected on the page which helped his brother be able to do it visually. It should come as no shock that Dunkirk was Christopher’s first film after Interstellar, an absolute mind-screw in which Jonathan took all of the weighty calculation of Inception and pumped it full of screenwriting steroids.

Lest we forget that Jonathan took one of the biggest blockbusters of all-time and coyly used it as a backdoor pilot that kickstarted his second — and perhaps most successful — act. The deus ex machina of Lucious Fox’s mobile phone mapping in The Dark Knight was essentially turned into Person of Interest, a critically-acclaimed television series that lasted for five seasons.

Like the progression of one of his screenplays, Jonathan is seamlessly weaving his first act with his second.

Person of Interest is no different that Memento, something that started as a nugget of originality that spawned a larger and more successful property. After establishing himself in the medium of television, Jonathan did what he and Christopher did with Batman in adapting a known property but deepening the grittiness and heightening the intellect — he created Westworld.

Now, the Nolan brothers are becoming ambidextrous. Christopher is writing his own films, and doing so having clearly been influenced by Jonathan’s mind-bending sensibilities. Jonathan is now in the director’s, clearly influenced by Christopher’s sophisticated approach to capturing cerebral chaos and mainlining it for a mainstream audience.

There’s no doubt that Christopher Nolan is a visionary talent and will be remembered as one of the finest filmmakers to ever live. But Jonathan is very much the Lennon to his McCartney, the architect of Christopher’s dreams who forged the sledgehammer which they continue to leave a dent in the pop culture world with.

For more Christopher Nolan, explore the Nolan Week hub on FanSided.com.