The
11th film in my Comprehensive Analysis of The
Films of Christopher Nolan, is the time reversing spy thriller Tenet. One of the most ambitious films of Nolan’s
career, Tenet acts as a fulcrum point in the director’s filmmaking
journey. Forever, for historical reasons and consequences from his own
behavior, Nolan’s career can pinpoint Tenet by which his career hinged.
As with a spinning top that may or may not have toppled, Tenet asks more
questions than it answers. However, this time, due to the film’s complicated
release caused by the industry’s drastic shift in the wake of the COVID-19
pandemic, audience members (and maybe other studios) were unwilling to give him
the latitude his clout has previously afforded him; indicated by the film
holding the
lowest audience score of any of his previous feature based
directorial work.
PLOT
After a botched extraction attempt of a piece of unknown technology, an operative (John David Washington) is recruited into a shadowy spy organization bent on stopping the end of the world. Armed with the ability to reverse an object’s or a person’s temporal entropy, this new “Protagonist” and his recruits, must stop the future from trying to kill the past; as a radicalized arms dealer (Kenneth Branagh in a scene devouring role) attempts to bring that dystopian future’s goals to fruition.
All
of Christopher Nolan’s films come with an elevated amount of excitement and anticipation,
regardless of its source material. Nolan’s filmmaking process has been so deified
(especially his commitment to shooting on film and IMAX for a theatrical
experience; more on this later) that he’s
developed a cult following of
audience members and industry
insiders, that add another layer of
eagerness to an impending Nolan release. With all of that under consideration,
a Nolan film from a completely original script is a different animal entirely.
These self-described “Nolanites” become rabid with enthusiastic pretention, willing
to lash out at anyone who dares not genuflect in front of their cinematic celestial
god of celluloid. For some, any praise
is faint praise, and any criticism is blasphemy.[1] Thus, before any
information was out, they took to message boards, social media, and other fan
circles to sound the trumpets of benediction. Nolan was writing a new script,
and no matter the outcome, to them, it was going to be amazing.
Production
The idea for Tenet predates
the majority of Nolan’s other work. This is predominantly because the overall
concept was so needlessly complex and difficult to sell to a studio; until he
had achieved “blank
check” status. When
Nolan was a teenager, he had the idea of a film where the character would be
able to move through a film backwards, thereby experiencing the same events of
the film in a different way. In addition
to his lack of pull with the studios early in his career, for years Nolan did
not have a way to present this storytelling structure in a grounded way, which
has always been his desire. It wasn’t until working on Interstellar with
physicist Kip Thorne that he was able to both understand and use the idea of
chronal entropy. In his conversations
with Dr. Thorne, Nolan graphed on to this idea that all objects carry with them
their own time; and since we perceive time going in only one direction (regardless
of other equally plausible theories) would it be possible to have the flow of a
person’s time reversed? Hence, the Nolan’s teenage idea became semi grounded in
theoretical physics.
Photography
Once
Nolan’s idea was grounded (albeit vaguely) in theoretical physics; the next
task was for the production team to figure out how to capture this “in camera”,
as Nolan is wont to do. To date, Tenet
is a major tentpole with one of the lowest numbers of VFX shots (a paltry 280).
Notably, and characteristic of Nolan, what most people would fill in with digital
computer “magic”, he performs in front of the camera. Compare a CGI plane crash,
to the crashing of a 747 into a building in this film, and you will see a
difference. No matter how much sorcery you perform, that does not change what
objects are captured by the camera. Therefore, to maintain the visual
consistency and elegance of “in camera” effects, Nolan relied on his cast and
crew to do a lot of their actions, and acting, moving forwards and backwards. During scenes in which a person’s entropy is reversed,
rather than use visual effects or camera trickery, Nolan had his actors learn
the choreography of their character actions both forwards and backwards for
some scenes. This includes everything
from walking and speaking, to fighting and firing weapons. As laborious as this
sounds, the difference can be seen on screen, where the backwards and forwards
movement looks crisp and clean because that is what the camera is capturing.
Much of the uneasiness that the audience feels when watching this, is the
unease that comes with a challenge to our conventional cinematic perceptions.
This penchant for
practical effects pairs well with Nolan’s other predilection, shooting on film.
Retaining the services of Director of
Photography Hoyte Van Hoytema from his previous two films, Nolan and Hoytema shot
a record breaking 1.6 million feet of IMAX film, breaking the record they set with
their previous collaboration, Dunkirk. Tenet is the first narrative film
of an original script to have the majority of the film shot in IMAX. The
unfortunate drawback of this, and something that has, in my opinion, gone beyond
a simple aesthetic choice, is the sound mixing.
Sound
mixing and Score
One
of the reasons that IMAX cameras are not often used in narrative films, and
when they are used, are often regulated to panoramic shots, or to capture the richness
of an environment, is because the IMAX cameras are notoriously loud. They have
an operating ambience of a turbine engine. This has the consequence of drowning
out any dialogue, which has to be rerecorded through a process called ADR (audio
dialogue replacement). It is standard that any film shot with an IMAX camera would
need to utilize ADR in order to have any audible dialogue. For Nolan, however, the
more he used the IMAX camera to get the picture quality he wanted, he was
ultimately sacrificing audible dialogue due to his reluctance to use ADR. Yet
these struggles began about a decade earlier.
The
increased use of IMAX cameras during the shooting of The Dark Knight
introduced many challenges, chief among them being the size and weight of the original
IMAX cameras (before Nolan, and DP(s) Wally Pfister and Hoyte Hoytema’s
alterations[2]).
However, the dialogue sound
mixing did not start to become an issue until the prologue of The Dark
Knight Rises, where none of the audience
could clearly hear Bane’s Voice. Unfortunately, since then,
the
sound mixing problem has only gotten worse, causing other
directors to complain to Nolan himself. Fans of Nolan certainly
are accustomed to these issues opting to either, upgrade their sound system for
home viewing of a Nolan film, keeping the remote in hand and increasing and
decreasing the audio volume throughout the film’s run time, or watch the film
at a level tone while watching with subtitles (I opted for the latter). While
the sound mixing continues to dog Nolan, the scores for his complete
filmography have been spectacular, and Tenet is no exception.
Tenet’s
score was crafted by Black Panther alum Ludwig Goransson after frequent
Nolan collaborator Hans Zimmer was waylaid by his work on Dune. Goransson more than filled Zimmer’s shoes, as
we are not subjected to the same themes and note structure that often plague a
lot of Zimmer’s later work. Goransson’s intensely melodic orchestration with
the reverb and intensity of (what sounds like) machines running backwards, sets
the proper tone for this awfully specific Nolan film. One of the clear markers
of a great score, is when you can listen to it outside of the context of the
film and still feel that you went on a narrative journey. This score achieves
that from the first track of the Opera House, to the Techno Pop original song
“The Plan” by Travis Scott. It weaves
and auditory backwards and forwards tale; that captivates all on its own,
outside of the film.
COVID, HBOMAX and Nolan’s Savior Complex
In
March 2020, The COVID 19 pandemic came for the movie industry. Due to mandatory
national lockdown orders across states, all major theater chains began to close
a lot of their branches, some of them permanently. While one company, AMC,
barely staved off Bankruptcy. Yet, the major
loser in all of this is the indie film scene, and Independent theaters
in general. While they have remained on life support through the Pandemic due
to a resurgence of Drive-In style screenings. If this
continues, there is a danger in their elimination. To put this into context,
the entire global film industry has
lost 30 billion dollars in revenue ( A drop of 71%) compared
to last year, with the US market making up almost
½ of the losses (around 12 billion). Ironically, the bulk of
2020 global earnings came from China. What also accounted for these record
losses was that not only had production on all major studio films ceased for a
period of 6 months, beginning in March 2020, but there was a studio scramble to
delay films that were going to come out during the Summer of 2020, which was
now a dead zone. Tenet was
originally scheduled for release July 19th 2020.
As I have
mentioned before, Christopher Nolan loves the theatrical experience. It is a
consistent refrain in any interview or press junket in which he has been a part.
In his responses he has always expressed the importance of film going, as one
that is important to our collective human culture, and that other ways to watch
films and other media content cheapen the overall experience, becoming an
affront to what filmmaking is all about. Prior to the Pandemic, Nolan was one
of the few filmmakers who would always put their films in theaters, and given
his aforementioned affinity for IMAX, also allowed his films to be presented in
a variety of specialty formats, (IMAX, 70 mm IMAX) and because
he always shoots on film, his films can be presented in the
pre digital common formats of 16mm and 35 mm. This has been Nolan’s crusade for
the whole of his career, to the point that some
have suggested that he is “The Savior” of film, and movie theaters. Recently,
given the changes in the industry due to the COVID 19 pandemic, interviewers kept
bringing up Tenet’s release schedule, and method of release, so often that I
wonder if it was a consistency test for Nolan; to see if he will give a
different answer, or change his mind. He did not. While this feels like a
little bit of entrapment by reporters hounding him with the same questions
expecting a different answer, the longer this went on, the more the story was
framed like Nolan was putting the importance of the theatrical experience above
people’s lives. Suddenly,
Nolan was framed as a zealous villain; tone deaf to the suffering and
circumstances of millions of people.
Nolan rejected this interpretation, indicating that the issue was more
than just about his film. Stating:
“All I can
really take responsibility for is making the best film that I can. I think
cinema is bigger than any one film one way or another, and I think people tend
to simplify things a bit, particularly in a time like this. I’m just very
pleased that the studio feels they can let the film play in places where
theaters have been able to open. Obviously, that’s not the release we imagined
when we were making the film. But then, the world is not as we had imagined it
would be when we made the film, and we had to adapt like everybody else. I’m
just very, very pleased that audiences around the world are beginning to be
able to respond to the film, because, for me as a filmmaker, the film is not
finished until the audiences gets to see it and tell me what it is that I’ve
done.”
So, while not
completely tone deaf, it seems that Nolan’s adherence to his filmmaking
ideology, once thought quirky and nostalgic in the eyes of the public, in the
COVID era is seen by non-cinephiles as misguided.
Tenet
was theatrically released outside the US on August 26th 2020 and in
the United States on all formats Sept 3rd. Due to the pandemic, about ½ of all theaters
were shutdown. Therefore, when Tenet was released, they opened in a disappointing
2,800 screens[3]
with limited capacity. However,
the film managed to still make a profit exceeding their 205
million dollar budget (not including marketing) by 160 million for a world wide
theatrical total of 363 million dollars.
** Sociological Aside**
In
The United States, where the Pandemic is still raging (as of this writing and
months after the film has left theaters), the film made 56 million dollars-
twenty of that in its opening weekend. This means that A LOT of people risked COVID
exposure to see this film.
The
film was eventually released on VOD and Blu-Ray on Dec 15th (the
shortest time between theatrical and home release for any Nolan film).[4] Tenet remained at the
top of these charts as of this writing, 8-10 weeks since its release. Regardless
of its success in the past, in the COVID era, this model of theatrical releases,
leading to home viewing, seems to be becoming past tense.
On
Dec 4th 2020, it was announced in a statement AT&T, parent
company of HBO and Warner Bros. productions, that the
entire 2021 slate of movies produced by Warner Brothers would be simultaneously
released in theaters and on the streaming service HBOMAX.
The films would be available for HBOMAX subscribers only for 30 days after their
specific release date. This obvious reaction to the global pandemic, whose
death toll in the US (as of this writing) is approaching 450,000 in under a
year, has sent shock waves through the film industry. Many of the films on the
Warner slate would have been considered “big budget tentpoles”, films like The
Suicide Squad, Dune, and The Matrix 4 which are important for the maintenance
and stability of Theater chains. In their statement, WarnerMedia (under AT&T)
committed to the theatrical exhibition of films and framed their decision as a
purely economical one. Stating that they are attempting to reduce their losses
from theatrical releases which will most likely still run at half capacity
through 2021. It is unclear how much the company will be able to make back with
new subscribers to HBOMAX, let alone what the fall out of this will cost them
in cultural and social capital moving forward.
There
has been a lot of negative reactions to the AT&T decision in the last few
months, many of them coming from people who stand to lose a lot of money with
this decision; namely directors
and actors (who’s pay scale may be tied to box office performance) and Theater
owners. One of the most vocal about this decision was Christopher
Nolan himself, who’s relationship with Warner bros. up to this point was so
strong, that he is one of three directors (The other two being Clint Eastwood
and Todd Philips) that could make whatever they wanted without studio
interference.[5]
This relationship was immediately put into jeopardy when Nolan criticized the
decision for not including filmmakers in the conversation. In
an interview he was quoted as saying
“Filmmakers went to bed
the night before thinking they were working for the greatest studio, and when
they woke up they realized they were working for the worst streaming service.
Warner Bros. had an incredible machine for getting a filmmaker’s work out
everywhere, both in theaters and in the home, and they are dismantling it as we
speak. They don’t even understand what they’re losing. Their decision makes no
economic sense, and even the most casual Wall Street investor can see the
difference between disruption and dysfunction.”
With such a statement it is clear that Nolan was so
burned by this decision, as a clear anathema, and bane of his existence, that he
has decided to completely sever ties with Warner Bros.
a studio he has worked with since 2002 and where he reigned supreme, along with
Eastwood and Philips, as Warner’s Directing holy trinity. It is clear with his clout in Hollywood, and
now evidence of principle consistency and having the “courage of his
convictions”, Nolan will be able to produce and distribute his film anywhere he
wants. It has yet to be determined who
the real losers in this exchange are. The unknown variable is the complete and long-lasting
economic impact of COVID 19. AT&T’s decision may be the best for them in
the short term (which is typically how large corporations think) But, Warner
Bros will not be able to ride the Nolan gravy train to the next station, as
long as he keeps making films that people want to see. In the case of Tenet, the convoluted
nature of the film’s plot and the difficult social conditions of the industry
upon its release, created a perfect storm of complications that led to this
film’s overall failure.
SOCIAL ANALYSIS
Tenet
is a quintessential Christopher Nolan film. It requires your full attention to
understand the entire narrative structural apparatus, complete with all its
twist, turns, and in this case “rewinds”. The film’s theme, reinforced through
dialogue and every character, sees Nolan temporally inverting the cinematic
world he has created, but also inverting his style and rectifying valid social criticisms
of his films that have persisted for two decades.
Time
Time
has always fascinated Nolan for his entire filmography. Most of his films from Following
through Dunkirk, have used the variants of time as a story telling
device. Yet, it is the three films of Inception, Interstellar, and now Tenet,
which uses the actual manipulation of time as an important narrative hook.
Whether that be the perception of time through dream space (Inception), the
variable experience of time in relationship to gravity (Interstellar) or
the ability to move backwards through time (Tenet), these pictures would
be completely different; and unfortunately, flat and conventional, if they did
not play with the vagaries of cinematic chronology.
What
separates Tenet apart from Nolan’s previous films that use time, is that
it is not as meticulously explained. In a behind the scenes interview on the
home release of Tenet, Nolan admits to playing fast and loose with the
idea of time. Reality based consultation of Physicist Kip Thorne so heavily
used for Interstellar was a mere jumping off point for Tenet, speaking
in hypotheticals. This is because Nolan wanted to tell a spy story beyond
simple espionage. To use time as a method of achieving a particular goal. This requires a suspension of disbelief. We
need to both understand how the rules of this universe work, and we need to
accept that particular “future tech” allows for that to happen. The shift in entropy and the ability to move
backwards in time is Nolan’s least explained mechanic of any of his films. It
is this loose exhibition that has turned some critics and audience members off the
film. The film becomes so far ahead of the audience that he ultimately loses many
of them.
“What
happens happened”
Three of the most common theories of time are
those based upon the work of Einstein, Hawking and Nietzsche. Beyond the basics
of his theory of general relativity, which sees a relationship between gravity
and time; Einstein was famously quoted as saying “time is an illusion”. He
explains that humans have used the notion of time to develop and construct our
reality; imposing order on ourselves. But if we look at the universe more
cosmically, that perspective is quite different. Articulated in his book A
Brief History of Time, Hawking develops this illusion into what he calls “The
psychological arrow of time”; where our sense of time is flowing in one
direction. Therefore, this explains why we can remember the past, but not the
future, as the future has increased entropy (moving toward disorder), and our
understanding of time relies on the constructed order we place on it. Yet, Nietzsche’s
argument of eternal recurrence has seen a resurgence[6], reinforcing the notion that time, like history,
repeats itself through various cycles. Based upon these theories, from a
sociological perspective, we may be more inclined to side with Hawking’s Arrow.
However, that completely overlooks the
sociological understanding and critique of time; of which many
theorists have contributed; but few being recognized for their work.
Sociologically,
time is understood as the continuous passage of existence that can be measured
in periodic physical or social processes [through] units of social division (Jary
and Jary 1991:521). The division of time
is often social in nature based upon organizations of societies and the rules
and orders imposed on them.
Therefore, according to Giddens (1984) social time can
be delineated by:
1) The Repeated Day to Day – “The Reversable time”
of everyday life
2) The
rise, persistence, and fall of social institutions
3) The
lifespan “irreversible time”
4) Periodization
(“Times, Ages and Eras”)
Add to this:
5) The
Internalization of social values, economic, political, and religious structures
(cultural time dilation or “Time Reckoning”) (Bergmann 1992).[7]
Giddens (1984) and Bergmann’s (1992) point is that
regardless of how time exists relatively to gravity or to the organization and
structure of the universe, or how it does, or does not move toward disorder or
in inevitable cycles, our perception and experience of time is altered
by the limits and values that we place on it; without which we could not exist in
the world no matter how time truly operates. This was first pondered through
Georg Simmel’s temporal dialectic.
Georg Simmel
is an undervalued classical social theorist contemporarily with Max Weber. Predominantly
known for brilliant lectures and his ideas of group dynamics and his criticisms
of both a money economy and religion, Simmel is not specifically known for his
academic work on time. Yet, he found an interesting demarcation between objective
realities (fixed forms of life) and the subjective transformation of our social
and spiritual condition (dynamic and shifting substance of life). This is the
difference for Simmel between “timeless form, and transient content” (Scaff
2005: 6). It is here that Nolan’s temporal world of Tenet can be
understood.
The
ideas that Nolan is playing with are the ways we perceive and experience time.[8] The connective tissue
between Simmel’s work and Nolan’s film is in a unique line of dialogue. In
trying to hastily tell The Protagonist (and the audience) about the experience of
reverse entropy, a soldier says: “Remember, your entropy is reversed, not the
world’s.” Thus, from a Simmelian perspective on time, the world is the timeless
form, and humans (in the hyper reality of Tenet), are the transient
content. Since Nolan is less interested in the fundamental ideas of time, and
more interested in how it can be used as a narrative device, we rarely get more
than a simple reverse explanation that serves the story, rather than a consistent
world building continuity.
Characters
Nolan is not known for his rich and
developed characters. Identified as a structured and organizational filmmaker,
many of his characters have been criticized for their lack of depth and thinly
veiled allegories for people in the filmmaking process. At first glance, the characters
in Tenet look even more precarious (e.g., The main character is called Protagonist).Yet,
with his casting, plot machinations, and character pairings, Nolan attempts to
circumvent (some) past criticism.
The
Protagonist and Neil: The Doctor and River Song of the Nolan verse
Early
in the film, after being recruited by a shadowy organization known as “Tenet”, The
Protagonist (John David Washington) is told that there needs to “be a new
Protagonist” and that he was “as fresh as a daisy.” While this works
narratively, as a basic fish out of water story, this is also metatextual as John
David Washington is the first Black actor cast in a Christopher Nolan film; in
a spy genre picture that rarely sees Black men as the lead. [9]While this representation
is important and necessary, it is unlikely Nolan is making a statement here;
given his reluctance to do so on other projects.
When the Protagonist needs
to track down the sale of inverted munitions from an arms dealer in India, he recruits Neil (Robert Pattinson), a British
Spy who he initially keeps the realities of reversing an objects entropy from.
It is later revealed at the end of the film that Neil has moved backward in
time from years in the future. He was recruited by the Protagonist years ago (from
Neil’s perspective) when he first founded Tenet. One of the most amazing things about this
reveal, is that it is not only recontextualizing the entire film, but it deepens
the relationship between these two characters with the knowledge that we have
only seen half of their relationship. Neil’s
last conversation with the protagonist makes me want to watch the rest of their
story and how they “get up to some stuff” as Neil says. Their last goodbye is
both sad, poignant, and hopeful remembrance of a relationship that was, or has
yet to be.
Kat and Sator: The Dimensioning of A Female
Character
The
Characters of Kat (Elisabeth Debicki)[10] and Sator (Kenneth Branagh)
on the surface are virtually one note characters. They serve the narrative purpose
of being the “fridged” and the “foil” respectively for the Protagonist. Even
though they still serve these purposes, Nolan, decides to slowly add complexity
to these characters throughout the film. Thus, through their periodically
entropic reversals, Kat gains dimensionality and Sator becomes an inevitability.
One of the most frequent social
criticism that I have leveed at Nolan’s filmography is his lack of dimensional
female characters. Women are often regulated to being a motivational object, which
propels the narrative of the male lead forward. While this still happens in Tenet,
he also inverts the trope to allow the sole female character to grow out of
the limitations he has always placed on her in previous films. Kat, up until
the point when her entropy is reversed to save her from dying of a gunshot
wound, has only acted as the aforementioned “fridged” damsel. However, once the
principal characters reverse their chronology and move backwards through the
film we have just watched, she gains a drive and determination that, up until
that point, has eluded her. She becomes
the vengeance and karmic retribution for everything that Sator has done; killing
him while letting him know that he was the seeds of his own destruction.
Sator, at first glance is
a scene chewing bombastic sadist without empathy. He traffics in guns, gold and
inverted munitions. Slowly however, the film reveals his humble beginnings
as he was made into prominence from his future self. Through exposure to
radioactive material, Sator is dying. Becoming nihilistic about the world
because of it, he is willing to end everything, for all time. Yet, we
understand at the end of the film that he is just being used as a pawn by those
in the future to be the catalyst that will end the past. Thus, the main
antagonist, is just a cog in a much larger machine; and not the Machiavellian Ubermensch.
CONCLUSION
Initially, when I first watched Tenet,
I thought it was one of Nolan’s weakest films. Overcome with the horrible sound
mixing and the seemingly lackluster attention to characters and dialogue, I really
felt that this was one of Nolan’s first missteps. However, while I do not believe that this is the
best of Nolan’s filmography, the circumstances of this film’s release, the
conditions in which I was first exposed to the film (not getting the theatrical
experience), and the fleeting importance of this movie on the larger film
industry, altered my first impressions of the film. The more I learned about
the craft and care that went into making this film, and the lengths the production
team when to in order to make this as visually spectacular as possible, my appreciation
for the film grew immensely. This film needs to be seen more than twice. It needs
to be experienced and talked over with others. It is a shame that, due to our
current societal conditions, that can not happen, and this film will be lost as
something that audiences did not have the patience, or energy to fully
understand and appreciate. Here, is truly a case, where context… killed the
cinema.
REFERENCES
Bergmann,
Werner 1992 “The Problem of Time in Sociology: An Overview of the Literature on
the
State of Theory and Research on the `Sociology of Time'” in Time and Society
(1): pp 81-134 https://cspo.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/read_Bergmann-The-Problem-of-Time-in-Sociology.pdf
Giddens,
Anthony 1984. The Constitution of Society Cambridge, England: Polity
Press
Jary,
David and Julia Jary 1991. The Harper Collins Dictionary of Sociology New York: Harper Collins Publishing
Scaff
Lawrence A. 2005. “The Mind of the Modernist: Simmel on Time.” In Time and
Society (14) 1 pp 5-23 https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/handle/document/22303/ssoar-timesoc-2005-1-scaff-the_mind_of_the_modernist.pdf?sequence=1
[1] While
there is no direct causal link here, I think there is a correlation between the
attitudes and behaviors of rabid fan cultures (In this case Nolanites and
Snyder Fans) and those on the political fringes. Their similar indoctrination
to their respective venerated figures, and their unwillingness to be less than
fully supportive of their vision.
[2] He
made a shoulder mount, For an IMAX camera!
[3] A
typical release for a Nolan film in Not during a pandemic is 4,280
[4]
Which is how I saw the film, and why this review is so late compared to the
theatrical release of the film.
[5] Tenet
and inception being perfect example of this “blank check status”
[6]
Most Notably in a Season 1 episode of True Detective
[7] Think
of the way in which intersecting institutional ills like racism, sexism and ablism
temporally weigh on an individual both altering their perception and experience
of time; while simultaneously measuring their success and social validity as if
they were weightless.
[8] Essentially
that every object carries with it its own time, and that time is A. Flowing in
a particular direction. B. Through advanced technology that time flow can be
altered.
[9]
Since this is Nolan’s riff on James Bond does that make The Protagonist the
first Black 007 ( Since No Time to Die has yet to be released)?
[10]
Since I have no other place to put this in my analysis, I love the way that
Nolan lets Debicki be tall. Most directors, because of the fragile male egos of
Male movie stars, will try to make the male lead seem as tall as the female
lead, if not make the female lead seem shorter. Nolan and Costume Designer
Jeffery Kurland draped Debicki in long slender costumes and 6-inch heels. She
towers over everyone in this film, and it is glorious.
