Jonathan Nolan
Jonathan Nolan
Jonathan "Jonah" Nolanis a British-American screenwriter, television producer, director and author. He is the creator of the crime drama series Person of Interest. He has co-written several screenplays with his elder brother, filmmaker Christopher Nolan, including The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, and Interstellar, and his short story "Memento Mori" was the basis for Memento...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionWriter
work
Some things work better as a book, some things work better as a story, some things works better as a film.
ambient cameras capturing human people
People are fascinated, for whatever reason, by human drama, and the idea that cameras are capturing ambient stories.
book books contains created home humans ideas language matter mechanism sort thousand time wisdom
Look at anyone's bookcase at home, no matter how modest, and you're going to find a book that contains wisdom or ideas or a language that's at least a thousand years old. And the idea that humans have created a mechanism to time travel, to hurl ideas into the future, it sort of bookends. Books are a time machine.
best bunch encounters ends happened lands pilots richard sailors spaceship third
'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' ends with the spaceship lands and Richard Dreyfuss' character best on, but a bunch of pilots and sailors from the 1940s get off. You kind of wanted to know what happened next.
I was a big Batman fan when I was a kid.
movies transports
I often want to go to the movies and see something that transports you beyond the infinite.
apparatus cameras grown large moved response surprised troubles
I'd grown up in the U.K., where the surveillance apparatus went into place in the 1970s in response to the Troubles with the IRA. When I was a kid, we moved to Chicago, and I was surprised to see you could live in a large city in which you didn't have cameras on every street corner.
feast filmmaker job pack pick possibilities script
I consider my job as a screenwriter to pack a script with possibilities and ideas - to create a feast for the filmmaker to pick from.
work
I don't like things I work on to have political didacticism - there are questions, but not messages.
durable good human terms
In terms of long-term durable storage, the human mind, paradoxically, is pretty good, but it's very fragile.
I'm not a big fan of visual effects.
audience believer feels
I'm not a big believer in doing too much research - I think you can get lost in it. You can get constrained by it, which I think is a mistake. But if you've done your homework, the audience feels it.
affiliated either wikileaks
I'm not affiliated with either Wikileaks or Anonymous - of course, it's not like I would tell you anyway if I were because the whole point is to be anonymous.
song responsibility thinking
We're gonna play a little bit of a game here [Person of Interest movie]. Greg and I felt like we had responsibility when we wrapped up the pilot, to have a roadmap for where the show went. When we pitched the pilot, we knew what we wanted the last episode to be, the last image, I think we even know what the last song is.