Most people’s impulse buys are a new jacket, a pair of shoes or some just-released gadget, but when director Christopher Nolan goes impulse-buying, he buys airplanes. And then he crashes them into buildings in the name of art.
Christopher Nolan has made a reputation for himself for refusing to shoot action scenes in CGI, no matter how insane they are (remember, he hijacked a plane with another plane and then dropped one out of the sky in The Dark Knight Rises). This isn’t to say he doesn’t use computer generated images in his movies, but rather that he prefers to do practical stunts instead of making everything happen on a screen or against a green background, in the studio.
For his upcoming movie, TENET, Nolan found himself again playing with planes like a kid with toys. For one of the action scenes, he tells Total Film in a new interview, he aimed to put up miniature set-builds and use real images with computer generated ones, to show an airplane smashing into a building. At the end of the day, after crunching the numbers, he went out and got himself an actual Boeing 747, specifically for this purpose.
“It’s a strange thing to talk about – a kind of impulse buying, I suppose,” Nolan says. “But we kind of did, and it worked very well, with Scott Fisher, our special-effects supervisor, and Nathan Crowley, the production designer, figuring out how to pull off this big sequence in camera. It was a very exciting thing to be a part of.”
Nolan says the plane was an old thing, so it’s not like he (or the studio, more like it) spent a fortune on it. Scouting teams found an entire fleet of them, so he used one of them to make the scene more convincing on camera.
Robert Pattinson, one of the movie’s leads, says in a separate interview that the plane crash scene was one of the craziest ideas Nolan came up with for TENET, but adds that every action scene felt like the climax of an action movie.
The first full trailer for TENET is available below and, yes, it does include this particular scene with the plane crashing into a hangar and bursting into flames. The film is still on track for a July release, and Nolan is hoping audiences will want to see it in IMAX.
Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends. Full profile
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