Even the stars of Tenet struggled to comprehend Christopher Nolan’s movie

Опубликованно 29.08.2020 00:50

Tenet lead John David Washington confessed to news.com.au that it took him a while to get there – if he’s even there yet.

“Like all Christopher Nolan movies, after the fourth or fifth viewing, with great depth, it starts to fall into place for me,” he said. “On a certain level, I understood it, especially when we were working – I definitely understood my character so I would try to lock in on what The Protagonist was doing in relation to the story.

“As far as the overall theme of it, it took some time. I’m still learning!”

British director Nolan is renowned for crafting movies that are puzzles within puzzles, from the reverse narrative of Memento to the plot-twist of The Prestige to subconscious layers of Inception.

Tenet is no different, introducing a concept called “time inversion” in which characters and objects can move backwards while everyone and everything around them maintains forward momentum, following cause-and-effect.

If you think about it for too long, your head starts to hurt - and for the lucky Australians who saw previews this past weekend (the first in the world to do so), their heads already do.

Washington, son of Denzel and star of Spike Lee’s Oscar-nominated BlacKkKlansman, plays an unnamed character known as The Protagonist, an operative tasked with stopping an apocalyptic threat posed by Kenneth Branagh’s Russian oligarch and arch-villain Andrei Sator.

Tenet is Nolan’s nod to the spy genre with more than a drop of a globetrotting Bond movie in its veins. It just also happens to have what Doctor Who calls “timey wimey” stuff.

Tenet is seen as the ‘saviour’ of cinemas hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic

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Branagh said he was exhilarated when he first read the script, calling Tenet “no espionage film I’ve ever seen before”.

“When I saw it for the first time a couple of weeks ago, I felt as I did when I first read it,” Branagh continued. “I just went completely with the ride, I felt like I had 50 cups of coffee, and was amazed to have been involved in something on such a scale and pace.”

Branagh likened Nolan’s story to a Russian babushka doll with a smaller doll inside and then another and another.

He didn’t seem to understand all of Tenet either.

“I totally went with its complexity and was happy to. Having worked with Shakespeare for half my life, I say to people, it doesn’t matter if you understand all of it, you can feel it all and go with it. So I went with it, intuiting what I intuited, and loved it.

“One of the things I respect about Christopher Nolan is he completely respects the intelligence of the audience.”

Nolan remains one of the few directors in the Hollywood system who has close to a blank cheque to make the kind of movies he wants to make. Not many filmmakers would be handed hundreds of millions of dollars to write and direct a movie with so many intellectual hurdles for your average non-physics-degree-holding cinemagoer.

In the weeks after Inception came out in 2010, the internet was flooded with diagrams, graphs and other visuals trying to explain the barely discernible levels of a movie in which thieves steal information by penetrating your subconsciousness.

Christopher Nolan on set with John David Washington

It’s that ambition in original storytelling which has earnt Nolan so many fans, whether they came on-board in his early years with The Following, Memento or Insomnia, or if they bought in during his Dark Knight trilogy. Nolan’s take is why they’ll sit through movies they know they won’t likely understand on the first go.

For Nolan, he believes he’s just making the kind of movie he wants to see.

“I’ve always had good luck just following my instincts because I’m a member of the audience too,” he told news.com.au. “If I want to see something different and original and exciting and maybe challenges me, I trust there are other people out there in the world looking for that too.

“We go to the movies to be entertained and excited and taken on a thrill ride. That’s the most important thing, but if there can be more layers, things that spin around in your mind after you’ve seen it, I think that’s a win-win.”

Even if, like Washington and Branagh, you can’t fully comprehend Nolan’s conceptual ambitions, there’s no denying the filmmaker can weave a spectacle, full of jaw-dropping set pieces such as bungee jumping into and from a Mumbai penthouse.

It’s the marriage of the cerebral and the thrills that earns Nolan the kind of adulation that more straightforward action directors such as Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich can’t inspire.

Branagh, who has also directed almost 20 films including Thor and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and previously worked with Nolan on Dunkirk, attested to Nolan’s skill for spectacle.

“He knows that part of the fun of a movie like this is it really delivers on the blockbuster, edge-of-your-seat stuff,” Branagh said. “I mean the sound in this movie is incredible, the soundtrack, the music, it gets right under your skin. It’s immersive, it properly is.”

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Kenneth Branagh plays a menacing, low-voiced villain in Tenet

Nolan has been working on the idea for Tenet for a very long time, with it ultimately coming together about six or seven years ago. But Nolan knew it would still be some time before he was ready to take it on.

“Logistically, a very complex film like this, a giant blockbuster with lots of action and everything, I certainly didn’t want to take it on until I had a lot of experience doing the kinds of action scenes we knew we were going to have to do in this film, and then turn them on their heads.

“That was going to be a huge challenge to film. Having done car chases and planes crashes in other movies, I felt ready to take those on and take them to the next level.”

It was quite the learning curve for Washington, who had the responsibility of not only anchoring the story but of performing the most “inverted” stunts.

“Everything you learnt, you had to learn it backwards,” Washington explained. “Something I never do when I’m working on a film is look at the monitors after a take but in this case, I had to, just for the physicality, to try to match what I did. It was a very new experience for me.

“Our stunt people have been in the industry a long time and no one has ever done this kind of movement before. No one has had hand-to-hand combat fights where one guy is going forwards and the other one is going backwards and then vice versa. We’re making movie history.

“It was intense, it was hard, it was very physically taxing – a war of attrition on the body. I needed massage therapy, ice baths, all of it to push through the finish line, because it required so much.

“And I’m now more comfortable with heights! That was required of me too.”

John David Washington had to learn to fight backwards

Tenet is seen as something of a “saviour” for a global movie industry hit hard by coronavirus, with cinemas shut and productions halted as social distancing mandates came down around the world.

For months, Hollywood studios delayed the release of money-making tentpole movies. But Tenet didn’t initially budge from its original mid-July release date, a beacon in a sea of doom and foregone box office revenue.

By the time the release was pushed back to late August, Tenet had already been branded as the movie cinema chains will reopen for, and the one to lure audiences back to (spaced out) seats. With Nolan being a passionate advocate for the big screen experience, it was highly unlikely Tenet was ever going to skip theatres and go straight to digital.

But it was touchy for a while there as virus cases resurged in many territories, putting in doubt whether Tenet would even be out this year, or whether it would be pushed to 2021 like so many of its compatriots.

Washington wasn’t sure it was coming out anytime soon. “I thought maybe next summer, maybe Christmas?” he said, growing increasingly excited. “So great relief is what I’m feeling doing these press junkets because it means it’s happening! It’s finally happening!”

Tenet is full of things that go bang

Nolan is diplomatic when asked if the pressure to perform well is weighing on him, especially in the COVID era when Tenet is being used as a yardstick for whether or not more studios will back releasing blockbusters at this time.

“Any big release, and I’ve worked on a lot of big films over the years, carries enormous pressure, and as a filmmaker you can’t internalise it too much. You have to concentrate on the things you can control and all I can really control is what’s on the screen and how specifically and passionately I’ve made that.

“With Tenet, I’ve really tried to put as much of myself into the project as possible and get as much as possible for the audience on screen.”

Branagh admitted he too felt moments when he wasn’t sure what was going to happen with Tenet’s release – his own film Artemis Fowl was diverted to streaming platform Disney+ during the pandemic – but was glad once he saw it on a big screen knowing it would come out in that format.

“I feel like it was such a tonic to be in this world of escape and to travel the world with Christopher Nolan and see seven different cities in this kind of detail and have that experience. So I’m glad it’s happening.

“I hope it gives people pleasure.”

Tenet is in cinemas from Thursday, August 27 (excluding Victoria)

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