Christopher Nolan has mastered the cinematic craft with the ability to mesmerize the audience, he has a well-established track record of it. After nearly two decades, the director has finally secured an Oscar win after receiving eight nods from the Academy for his movies.
Hoyte van Hoytema and Christopher Nolan. Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures/YT
On his road to an astonishing cinematic journey, Nolan has worked with several directors of photography, Dutch-Swedish cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema has been one of his favorites. Hoytema filmed a total of four movies for Nolan, we have ranked the movies combining every aspect of cinematography and direction while shaping up these brilliant works.
4 . Tenet
Hoyte van Hoytema and Christopher Nolan in the set of Tenet. Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures/YT
Christopher Nolan’s 2020 mind-bending action sci-fi Tenet starring John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, and Kenneth Branagh has engrossing visuals designed to keep the audience at the edge of their seats. Tenet’s cinematic visuals are close to achieving the aesthetic diary of beautifully lighted shots moving across time. With the compliments from Ludwig Göransson’s music Hoyte van Hoytema achieved a masterful rendering of aesthetics justifying the complex tale from Nolan’s mind. Not so unusual, Nolan is completely a different director with his own sets of demands as he creates the nest of comfort working with experts of his liking.
Every time Hoytema shines with his prowess to bring what Nolan nestles in his mind in the form of narrative ready to create a masterpiece out of it. While Tenet was far from being Nolan’s best work, it has certainly made moviegoers think about what a movie can achieve to disturb the simplicity of interpretation, Hoytema always backs his vision by tweaking lenses and changing the camera to establish the essence of what the narrative demands. Tenet, without a doubt, has to be one of the greatest collaborations of the duo.
3 . Dunkirk
Hoyte van Hoytema and Christopher Nolan while filming the cockpit scene in Dunkirk. Image Credit: IMAX/YT
Nolan’s 2017 war action movie Dunkirk crafted in the backdrop of World War II has the essence of riveting tension among the characters perfectly built up to trigger the cinematic charisma. The narrative doesn’t have anything to be happy about, it’s sad but beyond the narrative, the craft of grandeur cinematography flourished.
It would be fair to say that no one in the right mind would hate the visual narrative that the duo has meticulously crafted. Also, the achievement of the astonishing visual was not simple in any way, no Nolan movie would allow that. To pull it off, Hoytema revealed the idea of leaning towards the larger formats. “We straight away started talking about a big format we have big law for the big four months,” he said (via IMAX). “I mean especially IMAX you know it’s a very visceral window to the world you know in many ways it’s the best format out there,” he added.
Nolan, the director of the film with his usual masterfully created narrative wanted the historic Dunkirk evacuation to be close to a cinematic marvel, in many ways, it has achieved that status.
“The immersive quality of the image is second to none we really try and create the sensation and that I would describe as virtual reality without the goggles a huge challenge is the size and weight of the cameras so our feeling was if we could find a way to do it physically the pay off would be well worth it,” Nolan said.
The most creative and challenging to film was a scene where they had to set the camera in a plane both on the exterior and in the cockpit while filming Tom Hardy. It was a vital scene and both Nolan and Hoytema took the challenge and re-engineered the huge IMAX cameras. “We started to invent stuff to make it possible for us to put the camera on planes,” Hoytema explained. “And in the cockpits engineering special lenses that would put the lenses in certain places where it was impossible for a camera to be.” Dunkirk will be remembered for the cinematic marvel the duo has achieved.
2 . Interstellar
A visual from Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar filmed by Hoyte van Hoytema. Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
Interstellar has to be one of the finest visions Nolan was able to put on the big screen as he wanted his space adventure to be put on screen. Interstellar was another visual masterpiece but it was far from being Oscar darling, it is tremendously painful for many Hoytema and Nolan fans (including me) to see the movie being discarded from the Best Cinematography category. Of course, Emmanuel Lubezki made a solid case in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2014 masterclass Birdman (also one of my favorite movies of all time) but Hoytema at least deserved a nod.
Of course, the Visual Effects had to be in favor of the movie but the cinematography alongside astounding VFX have really been synonymous with Nolan’s grand narrative exploring worlds beyond our Solar System. It is so pleasing to watch again and again pioneering modern space exploration movies following the footsteps of legendary director Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Still, many believe, Interstellar is one of Nolan’s underappreciated works in terms of the accolades the movie has received.
1 . Oppenheimer
Hoyte van Hoytema and Christopher Nolan with the crew in BTS from Oppenheimer. Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
Oppenheimer is the greatest work Nolan has produced in his lifetime, at least my stance is affirmed in this belief. The 2023 blockbuster was filmed with Nolan’s long-time obsession, IMAX, and with 70-millimeter film. It was one of the most ambitious biopics in the history of Hollywood cinema. Also, the movie was a critical darling inviting wide accolades to complement the essence of the story that narrates one of the most important American history revolving around none other than the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer.
For Hoytema, the CGI-less aspect of the movie was most fascinating but he embraced it with his open heart using the set as his playground to explore the depth of his passionate zeal for experimenting with cinematography. “It’s, for me, always a super exciting period in the prep that is everybody sort of throwing those crazy ideas into the hats,” the cinematographer told Collider in an interview.
“And a lot of them, they don’t have necessarily technical solutions to it, and then, step by step, people come up with all these kind of weird solutions and weird ideas that we then very often test them, and we start testing them as well as we start building them. Like it was very clear to us that, very early in the start, we wanted to—and I’m talking then about Andrew Jackson and Scott Fisher, our glorious visual and special effects team that were working very close together, also, because visual effects and special effects on a shoot like this is very closely related. Because Andrew Jackson, as much as how he’s connected to a visual effects department, wanted to rely as little as possible on CGI. So he really took control over trying to get as much as possible in camera, as well in his world, and with the help of Scott Fisher. So they work very close together.”
Hoytema’s collaboration closely working with the VFX team eased up the progression of “doing all these science experiments” for the project. Further, filming the black-and-white part was another challenge he pulled off with elegance. The movie was again, a huge playground for the cinematographer with the utmost nod from Nolan as he accompanied Hoytema bringing out the cinematic vision in his mind without computer-generated images. Hoytema proved his prowess winning an Oscar for his hard work, if not the hardest.
