Christopher Nolan Admits Audiences Are “Not Meant to Understand Everything” in Tenet

As proven in films like Memento, The Prestige, and Inception, filmmaker Christopher Nolan has offered audiences a number of compelling narratives full of many twists and turns, and while his 2020 movie Tenet similarly sparked confused and frustrated reactions from audiences who hadn’t entirely understood its ending, he recently recalled that this isn’t the point of his movies. Instead, Nolan expressed that by merely experiencing any of his films, audiences are “getting” it. He also addressed the ending of Inception and how some viewers aim to find the “answer” to the spinning top in the final moments, which he compared to the unknowable elements of Tenet.

“If you experience my film, you are getting it. I feel very strongly about that,” Nolan shared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. “I think where people encounter frustration with my narratives in the past, sometimes I think that they’re slightly missing the point. It’s not a puzzle to be unpacked. It’s an experience to be had, preferably in a movie theater but also at home, hopefully in an unbroken period.”

He added, “It’s an experience to be had, that is the point of it, that’s the feeling of it. Everything else, if people are interested to talk about it or debate it more, if ideas resonate, that’s a huge bonus. But, for me, it’s really all about that emotional experience of watching the film with an audience.”

Tenet was slated to be one of the biggest movies of 2020, though the coronavirus pandemic and closure of movie theaters around the globe saw its release be much more limited than expected. In the film, the concept of individuals moving at different directions in time, both forward and backward, created both impressive action sequences and a complex narrative, so as more audiences are discovering the film, more audiences have questions about it.

“You’re not meant to understand everything in Tenet. It’s not all comprehensible. It’s a bit like asking if I know what happens with the spinning top at the end of Inception … I have to have my idea of it for it to be a valid, productive ambiguity, but the point of it is that it’s an ambiguity … The point is that the character doesn’t care if it falls or not.”

Nolan’s latest film, Oppenheimer, marked one of his more straightforward cinematic experiences in that it chronicled a significant portion of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and the development of the atomic bomb.

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