‘My kids would probably say I’m a complete Luddite’: Christopher Nolan’s relationship with technology is an antidote to this frenzied digital age

Christopher Nolan has a strained and often complicated relationship with technology. The Oppenheimer director can be the perfect embodiment of old-school when insisting on using old film reels instead of digital photography or banning actors from bringing smartphones to his movie sets, and yet, even he can’t deny that all these tech innovations have made his hellishly difficult job of bringing all these imaginative worlds to life much more plausible.

It’s a method that has proven its merit time and again. If you can get something that feels more authentic and life-like with a little extra trouble, and if you happen to be one of the greatest directors of all time, it will seem like a no-brainer. But apparently, it’s not just extravagant CG effects or cheap editing tricks that frustrate Nolan.

We’re talking, after all, about a creative who refuses to get a personal smartphone or email for himself. You might think that makes the day-to-day task of managing a film production a nightmare, but Nolan himself shrugs this off, saying that if he wants to contact someone, he’ll just borrow someone else’s device.

He even writes his scripts on a computer that isn’t connected to the internet, he tells The Hollywood Reporter in a recent profile dedicated to Oppenheimer. It would be distracting otherwise.

“My kids would probably say I’m a complete Luddite. I would actually resist that description. I think technology and what it can provide is amazing. My personal choice is about how involved I get. It’s about the level of distraction. If I’m generating my material and writing my own scripts, being on a smartphone all day wouldn’t be very useful for me.”

Nor would it be useful to anyone else, but most people never stop to realize it. But then, most people aren’t Christopher Nolan.

In this age of technological frenzy, where we’re constantly wired and tapped and feeding on different media, those words might sound like something an ideologue would say — or someone who takes himself way too seriously — but coming from the lips of the man who came up with and directed works like The Prestige, Inception, Dunkirk, Interstellar, and The Dark Knight trilogy, make them seem worth a second thought.