THE ARCHITECT AND THE DJ A Conversation on Nolan & Tarantino VOICES: HOST A — measured, structuralist, loves pattern and form HOST B — visceral, instinctive, defends the gut over the diagram A: Here's a pairing nobody asks for and everybody should. Nolan and Tarantino. B: They have nothing in common. A: They have everything in common. They're both filmmakers obsessed with structure. They're both filmmakers who broke through in the late nineties with films that scrambled chronology. They're both filmmakers who made their reputations on the idea that the order in which a story is told is more important than the story itself. B: Sure, but Memento and Pulp Fiction are doing completely different things with that idea. A: Are they? B: Yes. Pulp Fiction scrambles time for pleasure. It's a magic trick. You watch Vincent get killed and then you watch him alive and the joy of the film is the joy of the loop. Memento scrambles time as a moral problem. It's not a trick. It's a prison. Leonard cannot escape the structure of the film. The structure of the film is what's wrong with him. A: So one uses fractured time as celebration and one uses it as condemnation. B: Right. Tarantino chops time up because it's more fun that way. Nolan chops time up because he believes that's how consciousness actually works. They reach the same technique from completely opposite directions. A: Okay but here's where I push back. I don't think Nolan believes time works that way. I think Nolan wishes time worked that way. Nolan's entire filmography is about a man trying to impose architecture on something that doesn't have any. Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet, Oppenheimer. Every single one of those is a film about a person attempting to engineer their way out of a situation that engineering cannot actually solve. B: And Tarantino? A: Tarantino isn't interested in engineering. Tarantino is interested in the bit. The set piece. The riff. He's the closest thing American cinema has produced to a jazz musician. He has a head full of standards and he sits down at the keyboard and he plays them in a new order. That's what Pulp Fiction is. It's a jam session. B: So Nolan is the architect and Tarantino is the DJ. A: Yes. And I think that's the real fault line. Nolan builds a structure first and pours story into it. Tarantino has a stack of records and figures out the order on the fly. B: Except I don't believe Tarantino figures it out on the fly. Tarantino's screenplays are some of the most precisely engineered objects in modern cinema. The man writes longhand in notebooks and the things he produces are clockwork. Kill Bill is clockwork. Inglourious Basterds is clockwork. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is clockwork. He is not improvising. A: No, but the energy is improvisational. That's the difference. Tarantino's films feel like jazz even when they're scored to the millisecond. Nolan's films feel like math even when they're emotionally devastating. Interstellar makes me cry and I still feel like I'm being walked through a proof. B: That's because Nolan does not trust emotion to land on its own. Nolan needs Hans Zimmer to tell you when to feel something. Tarantino needs Urge Overkill or Chuck Berry or the Royale With Cheese needle drop and the emotion is already in the song. Nolan composes feeling. Tarantino curates it. A: That's a great line. Composition versus curation. But it cuts both ways. Tarantino's curation is profound because he has the deepest record collection of any director alive. Nolan's composition is profound because he can build a feeling no song has ever been written for. The end of Interstellar is not borrowed. It's made. B: Fair. A: Let me try a harder one. Both of them are filmmakers of obsession. But what they're obsessed with is opposite. Nolan is obsessed with knowledge. The Prestige is about a man who needs to know how the trick is done. Memento is about a man who cannot retain knowledge. Inception is about implanting knowledge. Oppenheimer is about a man who learns something and cannot unlearn it. Every Nolan protagonist is fighting for or against knowing. B: And Tarantino? A: Tarantino is obsessed with vengeance. The Bride. Shosanna. Django. Cliff Booth in his weird cowboy way. Every Tarantino protagonist is settling a score. Knowledge versus vengeance. Head versus gut. B: That's clean but I don't fully buy it. Reservoir Dogs isn't about vengeance. Pulp Fiction isn't about vengeance, not really. Jackie Brown is about a woman who wants to get free, which is closer to escape than revenge. A: Fine. Let me revise. Tarantino is obsessed with justice. With the cosmic ledger getting balanced. And his films are the fantasy of a universe where it does. Nolan is obsessed with the impossibility of justice. With the cosmic ledger that cannot be balanced because we cannot even read it. Oppenheimer is the purest example. The man who built the bomb cannot make the world un-build it. The film is a two-and-a-half hour scream into a ledger that will not balance. B: That's good. That's really good. But here's where I disagree with you about Tarantino. I don't think his films are fantasies of justice. I think they're fantasies of cinema. He doesn't believe Hitler should have died in a movie theater. He believes movies should be the place where Hitler dies in a theater. The justice is happening inside the medium, not in the world. Inglourious Basterds is not a film about World War II. It is a film about what cinema is for. And his answer is that cinema is for the things history could not give us. A: Then what is Nolan's answer? What is cinema for in Nolan's hands? B: Cinema is for the things consciousness cannot hold. That's why his films are about memory and dream and time and the bomb. He is using IMAX cameras to film states of mind that the mind itself cannot fully experience. Dunkirk is what fear feels like when you cannot run. Interstellar is what love feels like when it has to cross dimensions. Oppenheimer is what guilt feels like when the guilt is the size of a species. Nolan is making films about emotional scales that ordinary cinema cannot reach. A: So Tarantino uses cinema to rewrite the past and Nolan uses cinema to expand the present. B: Yes. A: Here's the thing that connects them. Both of them believe cinema is a serious art form that has been condescended to. Tarantino fights for the dignity of the grindhouse film, the kung fu film, the spaghetti western, the things the academy waved away. Nolan fights for the dignity of the blockbuster, the genre film, the science fiction film, the things the academy waves away. Different fronts. Same war. Both of them are arguing that the pleasures of popular cinema are real pleasures and serious pleasures and that to dismiss them is to misunderstand the art form. B: That's the strongest case for the pairing you've made yet. A: Thank you. B: Let me add one. Both of them are also filmmakers who have absolute conviction that the theater matters. Nolan won't shoot digital and won't release straight to streaming and gives interviews about projection standards like other people give interviews about their kids. Tarantino owns the New Beverly. He programs the New Beverly. He shoots on film and resists digital with the energy of a man defending his own family. They are the two loudest voices in American cinema arguing that the theater is not a delivery mechanism. The theater is the art. A: They agree on the church even when they disagree on the sermon. B: That's a hell of a way to put it. A: Last question. Who's the better filmmaker? B: That's not the question. A: Then what is? B: The question is which one of them is going to be more important in fifty years. And I think the answer is uncomfortable. A: Go on. B: Tarantino changed how a generation of filmmakers wrote dialogue. You can hear his children in everything. The Coens absorbed him, Rian Johnson absorbed him, every prestige cable show with a long talky scene absorbed him. He changed the shape of the sentence in American film. Nolan, for all his genius, has not produced imitators of the same caliber. He has produced people trying to do what he does and failing, because what he does requires resources and intelligence in a combination that is very rare. Tarantino made a style that scales. Nolan made a style that doesn't. A: So Tarantino wins on influence. B: Tarantino wins on influence. Nolan wins on individual film weight. There is no Tarantino film that hits like Oppenheimer hits. But there is no Nolan film that has the cultural fingerprint of Pulp Fiction. They are both going to be studied in fifty years. They will be studied for different reasons. A: One for what he made. One for what he changed. B: Yes. A: That's the ending. B: That's the ending.