Christopher Nolan on Hollywood Studios Playing It Safe: ‘The Biggest Risk of All Is to Play It Safe’

The acclaimed filmmaker reflected on his own early career risks, from pitching the unconventional "Memento" to his concerns about an industry that consistently plays it safe.

Christopher Nolan is calling on Hollywood studios to push their limits and give audiences "something new." The celebrated director shared his views during a recent interview with the New York Times, urging the industry to embrace risk rather than retreat into familiarity.

"If you're really interested in movies and the history of movies, the one thing you see absolutely is that you have to take risks to succeed," Nolan said. "The biggest risk of all is to play it safe. That's what, consistently in mainstream movies, doesn't work. The audience is looking for something new."

To illustrate his point, Nolan recalled pitching his 2000 breakout film "Memento" to his wife and longtime producer Emma Thomas. Though she responded positively to the script, she had reservations about its reverse-chronological structure, worried it was "taking a lot of risk with the story structured backward."

"I was able to say to her: No, I can do this. There are a lot of filmmakers who can do it in a more straightforward way. Actually having something new to bring to the table mitigates the risk, it gives you a way to distinguish yourself," he explained.

Despite those early doubts, "Memento" eventually connected with audiences after a difficult road to distribution. Through that experience, Nolan came to see the real obstacle not as the story itself, but as the intermediaries — the financiers and studios standing between a film and its viewers.

Once a project reaches its audience, however, everything else tends to fall into place. "If you can get to the audience — I mean, I'm not making any predictions for this movie, but in the past we've been well rewarded for having faith in the audience," he said.

Nolan was speaking with the New York Times to promote his upcoming epic "The Odyssey," which boasts a star-studded ensemble including Matt Damon, Elliot Page, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron, and more.

The highly anticipated film is set to hit theaters in just under three weeks, on July 17.

Nolan is far from the only industry voice sounding the alarm. "Blade Runner" director Ridley Scott has argued that Hollywood is "drowning in mediocrity" — a situation he finds so dire that he has resorted to rewatching his own back catalog.

"The quantity of movies that are made today, literally millions. There's not thousands, there's millions, and most of it is [expletive]," Scott said during a career retrospective at BFI Southbank last October.

Martin Scorsese struck a similarly bleak note in his September 2023 cover interview with GQ. "Well, the industry is over," he said. "In other words, the industry that I was part of, we're talking almost, what, 50 years ago? It's like saying to somebody in 1970 who made silent films, what do you think's happened?"

Studios, Scorsese added, are no longer "interested in supporting individual voices that express their personal feelings or their personal thoughts and personal ideas and feelings on a big budget. And what's happened now is that they've pigeonholed it to what they call indies."