Christopher Nolan isn’t willing to give his actors free rein — even if that actor happens to be Timothée Chalamet.
The Oscar-nominated Marty Supreme star — who appeared in the British director’s critically acclaimed 2014 sci-fi adventure Interstellar as the younger version of Casey Affleck’s Tom — spoke with Nolan ahead of a recent Imax 70mm screening of the film at the AMC Universal Citywalk in Los Angeles.
During their conversation, which was shared on YouTube, Chalamet asked the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer filmmaker, 55, whether he gives certain actors “a little more bandwidth.”
“No, I don’t indulge people like you doing crazy s***,” Nolan replied. Citing a specific example, he recalled the time Chalamet, now 30, was filming the scene in which his character records messages from home for his father in space.
“There was a particular thing where you were hitting a dark tone,” the Inception director remembered. “It felt too much for me. I didn’t particularly like it.
“I told you about it, and you went ahead and did whatever the f*** you wanted and carried on,” he added. “But I was like, ‘He knows what he wants to do and has an idea.’”
Interjecting with laughter, Chalamet admitted: “I don’t even remember that! That’s crazy. I didn’t even think you knew my name, man. This is unbelievable.”
“I might not have known your name,” Nolan quipped, “but I knew what you were doing. It wasn’t about being stubborn. You had planned what you wanted to do. You planned your choices and you didn’t want to abandon that on a casual whim for me. You wanted to test that and challenge that and see if I kept coming back, which I didn’t. I’ll find a logic to that in the edit suite.”
He continued: “Actually, to be honest, the edge you were giving is what Casey was then putting into the late performance. I couldn’t necessarily see that at the time because we hadn’t done any of that stuff yet. And as a director, you are looking for an actor to interpret the script in their own way and bring their point of view on it. And you have a point of view.”
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Nolan clarified that it is “not really about letting people off the leash” but “it’s about trying to give them what they need as a director.”
Interstellar, which follows former NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) as he’s sent to explore the galaxy in search of a planet suitable for human life, earned a handful of Oscar nominations, including Best Visual Effects and Best Production Design. It also starred Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, and Matt Damon, and marked one of Chalamet’s first roles in a major feature film, before his breakout performance in Call Me by Your Name (2017).
