Could Christopher Nolan’s Next Movie Be a Spy Thriller?
Most of the time, all you can do with a Christopher Nolan project is speculate. For every Dark Knight film, based on one of the most popular characters of all time, or Oppenheimer, based on Kai Bird’s book “American Prometheus,” there’s been an Inception or Interstellar or Tenet, films whose intricate plotting and heady ambition were kept more or less secret from the general public until their first trailers arrived. This is how Nolan likes it, and it also happens to be a great way to entice fans. Nolan is that rare director whose name alone guarantees interest, and it’s in his interest, and the film’s interest, to keep even its genre a secret for as long as possible.
This brings us to Nolan’s next film, which is set at Universal, the studio that released his Oscar-winning blockbuster, Oppenheimer. We know that the film will star Matt Damon, who reteams with Nolan after having a meaty role in Oppenheimer as Leslie Groves, the military man who put together the Manhattan Project and took a chance on the brilliant, difficult Oppenheimer to lead it. Damon also had a brief but juicy role in Interstellar as a double-crossing astronaut desperate to get off an uninhabitable planet. One guess as to the subject of Nolan’s upcoming film is a remake of the cult British TV series The Prisoner, which aired back in the UK in 1967 and in the US in 1968, created by Irish writer/actor Patrick McGoohan. The Prisoner has been knocking around Universal for a while, and its surreal mixture of spy thriller and sci-fi screams Nolan-—Tenet was an outright surreal sci-fi epic that was also the closest Nolan’s gotten to a proper spy thriller, and one could argue Inception, clearly sci-fi ,was at least adjacent to the spy thriller in its own way, too.
Yet sources told Variety that Nolan’s upcoming project is not a sci-fi epic, which would seem to rule out remaking The Prisoner. That does, however, leave the spy genre, and one piece of Nolan lore is that he considered jumping into the world of James Bond. Yet as Variety and other outlets have mentioned, Nolan is a director who gets final cut, and the Bond franchise, led by Barbara Broccoli, involves a more hands-on approach. This doesn’t rule out Nolaan deploying Damon in a spy thriller; Damon was Jason Bourne, after all. It’s also a very rich genre that allows Nolan to do a lot of the things he loves: weave together complex plots that often play with time, unleash mind-boggling practical effects, and give an ensemble cast juicy roles involving characters not being who they appear to be at first blush.
Nolan has made a string of astonishing sci-fi films, but he’s proven adept at a variety of genres, including the war epic (Dunkirk), the bio-pic (Oppenheimer), and the thriller (Memento, Insomnia). In fact, Memento, the film that put Nolan on the map, is not a bad film to re-watch for a taste of what Nolan could do with a straight-up spy thriller—it was an ingeniously plotted, generally thrilling race against time centered on a character with anterograde amnesia (Guy Pearce) working with only bits of information he’s left for himself to try and track down his wife’s killer. It wasn’t a spy thriller, but it was complex, thrilling, and genuinely surprising, all elements that the best spy thrillers need to succeed. And who’s going to doubt Nolan at this point? Not us, probably not you, and definitely not Universal.
For more on all things Christopher Nolan, check out these stories:
Christopher Nolan’s Next Movie Set at Universal With Matt Damon as Potential Lead
Legacy Forged: Christopher Nolan & “Oppenheimer” Have Huge Oscars Night
Christopher Nolan on Exploding Myths & Exposing Humanity in “Oppenheimer”
Featured image: L to R: Cillian Murphy (as J. Robert Oppenheimer) and writer, director, and producer Christopher Nolan on the set of OPPENHEIMER.
