Christopher Nolan is a genius when it comes to filmmaking. Creating projects unique in every sense, he has perfectly understood the art of cinema and uses it to its full potential, making masterpiece after masterpiece. While his most recent film, Oppenheimer, is based on true events, he is best known for dominating the science-fiction genre. His films have a reputation for having extremely complex and well-thought-out storylines, which oftentimes confuse their viewers.
This has become almost a joke surrounding his works, the most famous being the case of Interstellar. There was, however, one other film that managed to infuriate audiences to another level. Nolan’s 2020 film, Tenet, confused the viewers so much that they got angry at the plot itself, not understanding the majority of what the film was trying to say, and criticizing it, regardless.
Despite this being one of the biggest topics of conversation around this movie, it was not the world-building and the uncertainty around it that caused the most amount of problems while shooting. It was another major plot point in the film; the confusion around the follow of time and how it affected the actors and production alike.
Christopher Nolan Had Actors Act In Reverse For Tenet
One of the most unique yet confusing parts of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is its approach to time as a concept. Throughout the film characters can manipulate time to their own needs, being able to rewind and fast-forward through time. A very important part of the film is the portrayal of this on screen, which is done through objects like bullets being shown with inverted entropy that returns them back to their guns.
“Yeah, the film is literally running backward through the camera. You know when it really got complicated is sometimes we have film running backward and certain people actually acting backward to appear forward later. And then, we again reverse the film in the prints. There was always a lot of layers of achieving stuff.”
The shooting of this was more than a little difficult. The cinematographer on the 2020 film, Hoyte van Hoytema, talked to CinemaBlend about how exactly this was approached behind the scenes. He confessed that the film rolls used in the cameras were often running backward. This was not the worst of it as oftentimes actors were required to act backward to better fit the scene. The objects that were reversed in the film were filmed normally, with the rest of the world working backward for their sake.
Specific Vehicles Were Made To Shoot In Reverse
The actors weren’t the only ones who had to adjust to the unique form of shooting, as drastic changes were made to the objects that were featured in the shots. Hoyte van Hoytema used an example for this, saying that the cars were altered to be able to drive backward. Steering wheels were added to the back of the cars featured in the film so that it would make it easier for drivers to drive backward.
“Like building cares that had steering wheels in the boots so they actually could drive backward. But at the same time, we would shoot it in reverse so that it actually appeared as cars driving very fast forwards, just because other stuff that we then wanted to see backward was more complicated. So there was a lot of layers in that film that were very much sort of fun and very hard to crack. Everyday was like such a brain challenge.”
This was then shot and reversed to make it seem as though the cars were going really fast normally and something else in the shot was in reverse, when in actuality, it was quite the opposite. The cinematographer mentioned that the reason for such a complicated filming structure was to make the reverse shots easier to capture.
Knowing how much detail goes into each and every project made by Christopher Nolan, only adds to the reasons why fans love him so much.
