Christopher Nolan Has ‘No Guilt’ About Loving ‘Fast & Furious’ Since It’s a ‘Tremendous Action Franchise,’ Admits ‘Tenet’ Is ‘Not All Comprehensible’
Christopher Nolan delighted cinephiles a few years ago when he revealed that he’s a big fan of the “Fast & Furious” franchise. The director said on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast at the time that he’s “got a very soft spot” for “Tokyo Drift” and praised Justin Lin’s entries in the franchise “as they got crazier and bigger and crazier and bigger and became something else, but something else kinda fun.”
While appearing this week on “The Late Show,” host Stephen Colbert asked Nolan about his enduring love for “Fast & Furious” and admitted that he had never seen any of the movies in the long-running franchise, much to the shock of Nolan.
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“I have no guilt about being a fan of the ‘Fast & Furious’ franchise,” Nolan proudly stated. “A tremendous action franchise … You’ve never seen any of them? I watch those movies all the time. I love them. I’m amazed you’ve never seen one of them. It’s only the last few where a specific arc and mythology develop. I would start with ‘Tokyo Drift’ and watch it as its own thing.”
Colbert also grilled Nolan about “Tenet,” the director’s 2020 action-packed spy epic that’s getting a theatrical re-release later this month for one week only. The film, led by John David Washington and Robert Pattinson, proved to be one of Nolan’s most divisive projects to date due to its time-bending narrative that many viewers and film critics felt was impossible to understand.
“If you are experiencing my film, then you are getting it,” Nolan said when asked about people not understanding his movies. “I feel very strongly about that. I feel like where people have experienced frustrations with my narratives in the past is sometimes I think they are slightly missing the point. It’s not a puzzle to be unpacked but an experience to be had, preferably in a movie theater but also at home.”
“You’re not meant to understand everything in ‘Tenet,'” he added. “It’s not all comprehensible.’
Considering the original “Tenet” theatrical run took place in the middle of the COVID pandemic, the upcoming one-week re-release, starting Feb. 23, will likely be the first time many moviegoers discover the Nolan film in theaters for the first time.
“The thing with ‘Tenet’ is, I think of all the films I have made, it’s the one that’s very much about the experience of watching films,” Nolan recently told the AP. “It’s about watching spy movies in a way. It tries to build on that experience and take it to this very magnified, slightly crazy place. A lot of that is about sound and music and this huge image.”
Watch Nolan’s full appearance on “The Late Show” in the video below.
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