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
ideas world expansion
You know, we certainly have a great budget on the show, but the expansions to world of the show really arise because, and this is kind of the idea of the premise of the show, where is each week you're kind of meeting . . . It's random access.
new-york character ideas
Each week the machine is spitting out a number for a new person or a new world within New York that you get to know. And the idea from the beginning was that some of the characters would stick around and become part of the lives of the show, and the world of the show itself will continue to grow.
years trying looks
I've worked in the movie business for many, many years, where you have lots of days and lots of money. It's really mainly about time. We always try to conceive all of our action from a place of, "What can we shoot that looks fantastic?," rather than trying to do the kinds of thing that you would be able to accomplish in a movie.
tv-shows people want
To a certain degree, with a TV show, people are looking for a certain amount of familiarity. You don't want to pull the rug out, but you also want to keep things fresh and keep changing it up.
talking people stories
I don't like to talk about messages so much with films simply because it's a little more didactic. The reason I'm a filmmaker is to tell stories and so you hope that they will have resonance for people and for the kind of things you're talking about.
fun space would-be
I thought it would be an enormous amount of fun to make a movie that heads out into space, which is something that we had never done before.
moon thinking mars
We're going to leave this planet at some point further than we have, we're going to go beyond the moon, we're going to go to mars. We all kind of know that on some level, I think actually. So there's an inevitability to human evolution, this being the next step.
moon age gone
You get to a certain moment where you realize all those humans who landed on the moon did so in between Chris [Nolan] being born and me being born and no one had gone back since, all these Super-8 films we grew up watching of rocket launches, you get to a certain age and you realize all the speeches about going back, they're speeches, there's no money there, we're not going back.
thinking space matter
I'm hoping that the suspension of the space program is just that, a suspension, and that it's not the final say in the matter, because I think we need it.
jobs school math
One of my first experiences with the space program was with the memorial that was built for the Challenger. When I was in 7th grade my entire class spent the entire school year preparing to launch a spaceship all together. We all had our different jobs that we had to learn how to do, we learned the math that you needed, we learned the practical skills that you needed, and I thought that was really cool. So I think that if you can take a tragedy and find the gold in it and turn it into something positive, that's great.
thinking important needs
I think that we, as human beings, always need to conquer our fears and reach beyond our grasp and I think it's very important that we don't become complacent or stagnant.
children real kids
I remember when I was a kid my first real confrontation with space travel was when the Challenger exploded and I remember how traumatic that was for me, because I remember watching that on the news and all the children in our class were watching.
expectations mankind greater
Mankind's expectations have to be greater than ourselves and that the further out there we go, the more we find out that it's about you and me.
running goodbye thinking
Even if you're not a parent, you have parents and you've been in those situations where there's a certain kind of goodbye - nothing this extreme exists, but I think that's what everyone holds onto, that common denominator that runs through this that everyone can understand.