Jonathan Nolan
Jonathan Nolan
Jonathan "Jonah" Nolanis a British-American screenwriter, television producer, director and author. He is the creator of the crime drama series Person of Interest. He has co-written several screenplays with his elder brother, filmmaker Christopher Nolan, including The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, and Interstellar, and his short story "Memento Mori" was the basis for Memento...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionWriter
best bunch encounters ends happened lands pilots richard sailors spaceship third
'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' ends with the spaceship lands and Richard Dreyfuss' character best on, but a bunch of pilots and sailors from the 1940s get off. You kind of wanted to know what happened next.
movies transports
I often want to go to the movies and see something that transports you beyond the infinite.
durable good human terms
In terms of long-term durable storage, the human mind, paradoxically, is pretty good, but it's very fragile.
develop hard takes time
I'm a big gamer. I know the lead time and how long it takes to develop a game and how hard it is to get it right.
effect fan mass observing people social
I'm a big fan of the Mass Effect games, and that's all about social manipulation and observing people and alliances and relationships.
feast filmmaker job pack pick possibilities script
I consider my job as a screenwriter to pack a script with possibilities and ideas - to create a feast for the filmmaker to pick from.
work
I don't like things I work on to have political didacticism - there are questions, but not messages.
apparatus cameras grown large moved response surprised troubles
I'd grown up in the U.K., where the surveillance apparatus went into place in the 1970s in response to the Troubles with the IRA. When I was a kid, we moved to Chicago, and I was surprised to see you could live in a large city in which you didn't have cameras on every street corner.
I was a big Batman fan when I was a kid.
people
It's always gratifying to hear that people are excited by something that you've been excited to make.
song responsibility thinking
We're gonna play a little bit of a game here [Person of Interest movie]. Greg and I felt like we had responsibility when we wrapped up the pilot, to have a roadmap for where the show went. When we pitched the pilot, we knew what we wanted the last episode to be, the last image, I think we even know what the last song is.
ideas world expansion
You know, we certainly have a great budget on the show, but the expansions to world of the show really arise because, and this is kind of the idea of the premise of the show, where is each week you're kind of meeting . . . It's random access.
new-york character ideas
Each week the machine is spitting out a number for a new person or a new world within New York that you get to know. And the idea from the beginning was that some of the characters would stick around and become part of the lives of the show, and the world of the show itself will continue to grow.
years trying looks
I've worked in the movie business for many, many years, where you have lots of days and lots of money. It's really mainly about time. We always try to conceive all of our action from a place of, "What can we shoot that looks fantastic?," rather than trying to do the kinds of thing that you would be able to accomplish in a movie.