Why Christopher Nolan will never write a novel

Christopher Nolan has been discussing his love of the screenplay format, and explaining why he will never write a novel.

Christopher Nolan has directed some of the most acclaimed and successful blockbusters of the last two decades.

He’s also written or co-written the scripts for many of those movies, with Nolan having a screenplay credit on the Batman trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, and most recently Oppenheimer, for which he’s likely to receive an Academy Award nomination.

Nolan loves writing screenplays, with a few caveats, as he explained in a recent podcast interview. But that doesn’t mean he wants to segue into books…

Why Christopher Nolan will never write a novel

In a wide-ranging interview on the Scriptnotes podcast, Christopher Nolan tells screenwriter John August: “I enjoy the screenplay format very much. I could never write a novel. I wouldn’t know how to find an authorial voice in that way. I love the screenplay form because it’s stripped down. Bare bones. You’re writing thing as if they were facts. Things that happen.

“For me, it’s a really fun way to write. But there are these endless conundrums. Do you portray the intentionality of the character? Do you portray – a character opens a drawer, looking for a corkscrew… unless they pull a corkscrew out, how is anyone ever going to know that?”

The trouble with the screenplay format

Nolan then elaborates on the problems with the screenplay format, telling Scriptnotes: “I started off in my early scripts being very, very rigid. I wouldn’t even use a character name until somebody had called the character by name. That was very useful for me as a screenwriter, but also as a writer-director, because it meant that I was always aware of the fact of ‘have I communicated the information about who this character is, or haven’t I?’

“The problem is, you have to show the script to a lot of people who aren’t reading your screenplay as a movie. They’re reading it for information about what character they’re playing, or what costumes are going to be in the film, whatever that is. And so over the years it’s varied from project-to-project, but you try to find a middle ground where you’re giving people the information they need, but you’re not violating what you consider your basic principles as a writer.”

To read about the “odd approach” Christopher Nolan took to the Oppenheimer screenplay, click here. While for more movie coverage, head here.