Actors who’ve worked with Nolan say he leads by example.
“He won’t ask anyone to do anything that he’s not a thousand percent willing to do himself, twice as hard,” Robert Downey Jr. said in a 2024 Vanity Fair interview with fellow “Oppenheimer” stars Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt.
Murphy said one of the most memorable examples of Nolan’s leadership came during the filming of a scene for “Dunkirk,” when his character was found on the bow of a sunken vessel.
Because of the bad weather, the Marines and stunt team were hesitant to let Murphy climb aboard. Rather than asking Murphy to take the risk first, Nolan volunteered himself.
“Chris was like, ‘OK, I’ll get up there.’ So he got up there, did it all, and they checked it out with him doing it. Then he was like, ‘OK, put Cillian up there then,'” Murphy said.
“That’s just one example. There are so many of them,” the actor, who has been in six Nolan films, said.
Nolan continued to live up to that while filming “The Odyssey.” Rather than taking a helicopter, he made the same 1,000-foot hike to set as the rest of the cast and crew.
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