Christopher Nolan’s leadership approach boils down to 5 key lessons

Actors who’ve worked with Nolan say he leads by example.

“He won’t ask anyone to do anything that he’s not a thousand percent willing to do himself, twice as hard,” Robert Downey Jr. said in a 2024 Vanity Fair interview with fellow “Oppenheimer” stars Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt.

Murphy said one of the most memorable examples of Nolan’s leadership came during the filming of a scene for “Dunkirk,” when his character was found on the bow of a sunken vessel.

Because of the bad weather, the Marines and stunt team were hesitant to let Murphy climb aboard. Rather than asking Murphy to take the risk first, Nolan volunteered himself.

“Chris was like, ‘OK, I’ll get up there.’ So he got up there, did it all, and they checked it out with him doing it. Then he was like, ‘OK, put Cillian up there then,'” Murphy said.

“That’s just one example. There are so many of them,” the actor, who has been in six Nolan films, said.

Nolan continued to live up to that while filming “The Odyssey.” Rather than taking a helicopter, he made the same 1,000-foot hike to set as the rest of the cast and crew.

Actors who have worked with Nolan say he creates an environment conducive to doing great work.

In a 2020 interview for Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series, Anne Hathaway said Nolan keeps his sets chair-free.

“He doesn’t allow chairs, and his reasoning is, if you have chairs, people will sit, and if they’re sitting, they’re not working,” Hathaway said.

Despite the scale of his productions, Nolan always manages to wrap up “under schedule and under budget,” Hathaway said. “I think he’s onto something with the chair thing.”

While promoting “Dunkirk“ in 2017, Mark Rylance told The Independent that Nolan is “very particular,” saying that he doesn’t allow chairs or water bottles on set.

Barry Keoghan, who also appeared in the film, said the items were considered distractions and the lack of chairs “keeps you on your toes, literally.”

Nolan has said that he finds modern technology to be distracting. He doesn’t own a smartphone or use email, and writes his scripts on a computer with no internet connection.

Actors who have worked with Nolan say his commitment inspires them to be equally present.

“If I see Chris Nolan, I throw my phone. And this is even when we’re not shooting,” Robert Downey Jr. said in the 2024 Vanity Fair interview.

“Still — to this day!” Emily Blunt added.

That expectation extends to Nolan’s sets, where phones are famously off-limits. In a 2017 interview with Esquire Middle East, Nolan said mobile phones create “an illusion of multitasking.”

“There’s a mass belief that if you’re texting, you’re somehow not interrupting the conversation — you’re not being rude,” Nolan said.

Nolan’s films have grossed billions of dollars worldwide, but actors who have worked with him say you’ll never know it from the way he lives.

Michael Caine, who has been in eight Nolan films — more than any actor — said in a 2014 Guardian interview that success hasn’t changed the director.

“He’s made all these millions of dollars, but he lives exactly the same way. He still has the same watch he always had, still wears the same clothes,” Caine said.

Speaking to Vanity Fair in July, Samantha Morton, who plays the Greek sorceress Circe in “The Odyssey,” described the director as a “master, but he doesn’t profess to be a master.”

She said she learned a great deal from working with Nolan, in particular, the way he carries himself with “this humility and this decency.”

Morton also praised the director’s work ethic: “Chris is the first on set every day. He’s the last to leave.”

Working with great people means trusting them to do what they do best. Actors who have worked with Nolan say he gives them the freedom to bring their own ideas to a role.

During a 2024 appearance on the “Happy, Sad, Confused” podcast, Gary Oldman, who played Commissioner Gordon in Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy, said the director only gave him two acting notes over the seven years they worked together on the series.

One of them was simply: “Let’s do that one more time. There’s more at stake,” Oldman said, recalling Nolan’s words.

“He does leave you alone. He expects you to do your work,” Oldman, who was also in “Oppenheimer,” said.

More recently, Matt Damon, who stars as Odysseus in Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” said the director gives actors the “creative freedom” to shape their own performances.