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Jonathan Nolan saw This is coming. As a screenwriter, he worked on many of his brother’s works Christopher NolanMovies, from Interstellar to Dark Knight films. Together with his wife, Lisa Joy, he created HBO Western world and executive produced Amazon Prime’s He falls. But before that, he cut his TV teeth A person of interesta CBS procedural about a lone tech billionaire who creates a piece of surveillance software meant to stop crime before it happens. It was a fantasy, but it was hard not to feel foreboding.
with He fallsnow in its second season, Nolan also has his sights set on the future. Based on the video game series of the same name, the film revolves around a post-apocalyptic America where everyone must survive in any way possible. It’s also wickedly funny and full of 1950s-era retrofuturism.
So, what does Nolan expect to happen in the coming decades? a lot. On the one hand, he doesn’t believe that artificial intelligence will replace human filmmakers. In fact, he believes it could help aspiring directors get a foot in the door. (Although he says he would never use it in his writing.) He would also like to see (most of) social media go away, but realizes that may never happen.
On this week’s episode of The Big Interview podcast, I asked Nolan about all of these things and more. Below you’ll find his thoughts on writing Batman movies, classic cars, and what he’d actually bring to his doomsday lair.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Katie Drummond: Jonathan Nolan, welcome to the big interview.
Jonathan Nolan: Thanks for having me.
It’s a pleasure to have you here in person in New York. It’s very cold. I’m from Canada, so my barometer is a little low, but…
I’m from Chicago. I tend to think of New York as cold and wimpy.
No, no, this is real. As I got older I became weaker and weaker. So I can’t bear (it).
I’ve been in Los Angeles for 25 years. Completely useless.
So we are both completely useless. It will be a great conversation. We always like to start these discussions with some warm-up. In fact, this might come in handy today of all days. But this is just an exercise for your brain, some very quick questions. Are you ready?
The reason I became a writer is because I wasn’t good at answering quick questions. So I’m going to spoil this.
Oh good. This will be the entire hour.
That’s it.
What is the most frequently used science fiction trope?
Oh! Travel faster than light.
Why?
Because it’s kind of a convenient story, and I think we used it in it InterstellarBut we use it a little bit backwards, which is the wormhole. It’s not exactly the same feeling, but it’s actually the same thing. It’s just a way to skip the boring parts.
What is a book that you return to again and again?
Recently, I went back to all the banks Ian Culture books. Years ago, I was looking for positive portrayals of artificial intelligence in science fiction.
Oh, interesting. We’re going to talk about this.
It was almost nothing, nothing really. It’s James Cameron on one side, nobody on the other side of the list and Ian Banks, who wrote those books over 20 years, starting in the late 1980s, I think, until his death in early 2010. Very young. But it’s the most brilliant and realized depiction of a hybrid civilization where you have people and you have artificial intelligence and they’ve kind of figured it out.