Christopher Nolan

“But 'Memento' was so successful, such a huge cult hit, almost on the scale of a large film. If that had happened, with all the acclaim, before the next job, I'd have found it very difficult to figure out what to do next.”

“I don't particularly enjoy watching films in 3D because I think that a well-shot and well-projected film has a very three-dimensional quality to it, so I'm somewhat sceptical of the technology.”

“I made 'Batman' the way I made every other film, and I've done it to my own satisfaction - because the film, truly, is exactly the way I wanted it to be.”

“I'm taking a bit of a wait-and-see attitude towards 3D.”

“I never considered myself a lucky person. I'm the most extraordinary pessimist. I truly am.”

“But in the back of my mind I've always looked to the biggest-scale Hollywood movies. Because to me the most satisfying experience is of watching a movie, if it's done really well. And so that aspiration is always it for me, if I have the opportunity to do it.”

“Yeah, it's odd when you look back at your own work. Some filmmakers don't look back at their work at all. I look at my work a lot, actually. I feel like I learned something while looking at stuff I've done in terms of what I'm going to do in the future, mistakes I've made and things at work or what have you.”

“I have been interested in dreams, really since I was a kid. I have always been fascinated by the idea that your mind, when you are asleep, can create a world in a dream and you are perceiving it as though it really existed.”

“But I have been interested in dreams, really since I was a kid. I have always been fascinated by the idea that your mind, when you are asleep, can create a world in a dream and you are perceiving it as though it really existed.”

“Batman and Superman are very different characters but they're both iconic and elemental. Finding the right story for them both is the key.”

“I try not to have actors in mind when I write because the tendency then is to be influenced by either their last performance or your favourite of their performances.”

“I have always been a huge fan of Ridley Scott and certainly when I was a kid. 'Alien', 'Blade Runner' just blew me away because they created these extraordinary worlds that were just completely immersive. I was also an enormous Stanley Kubrick fan for similar reasons.”

“By the time I was 10 or 11, I knew I wanted to make films.”

“We all wake up in the morning wanting to live our lives the way we know we should. But we usually don't, in small ways. That's what makes a character like Batman so fascinating. He plays out our conflicts on a much larger scale.”

“I think there has been this increasing misperception that kids will not respond to something because it's also for adults. I think that often that tends to get underestimated.”

“The problem with big films is they snowball very rapidly and you can never pull back. It's a pipeline that needs to be fed.”

“For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously. He's not from another planet, or filled with radioactive gunk. I mean, Superman is essentially a god, but Batman is more like Hercules: he's a human being, very flawed, and bridges the divide.”

“I've been interested in dreams since I as a kid and I've wanted to do a film about them for a long time.”

“When you play a videogame, you could be a completely different person than you are in the real world, certain aspects of the way your brain works can be leveraged for something you could never do in the real world.”

“The thing with computer-generated imagery is that it's an incredibly powerful tool for making better visual effects. But I believe in an absolute difference between animation and photography.”