Jonathan Nolan

“We have been crafted by disaster to push out to the utmost horizon to find out what's on the other side of it. That's in our nature. What's also in our nature is a profound love and connection to our children and our communities. Those two things are very much at conflict with one another at certain moments.”

“One of the things I love about working with my brother is that there's a commitment there - an unwavering commitment. From our basement in Illinois when I was three years old to Iceland on a frozen glacier with Matthew McConaughey and Matt Damon in spacesuits - there's a commitment to the pure spectacle, the pure cinema of it.”

“I believe we should be good custodians of the Earth.”

“I've always loved shows that combine both approaches - that have a mythology and a set of characters, whose stories develop and change, and where the relationships evolve and fracture.”

“People are fascinated, for whatever reason, by human drama, and the idea that cameras are capturing ambient stories.”

“I'd grown up in the U.K., where the surveillance apparatus went into place in the 1970s in response to the Troubles with the IRA. When I was a kid, we moved to Chicago, and I was surprised to see you could live in a large city in which you didn't have cameras on every street corner.”

“Here's the truth: People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It's a daily pantomime, one man yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week, every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the introvert, the conversationalist. Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots.”

“I consider my job as a screenwriter to pack a script with possibilities and ideas - to create a feast for the filmmaker to pick from.”

“You're different. You're more perfect. Time is three things for most people, but for you, for us, just one. A singularity. One moment. This moment. Like you're the center of the clock, the axis on which the hands turn. Time moves about you but never moves you. It has lost its ability to affect you. What is it they say? That time is theft? But not for you. Close your eyes and you can start all over again. Conjure up that necessary emotion, fresh as roses.”

“Believing the lie that time will heal all wounds is just a nice way of saying that time deadens us.”

“I'm not a big fan of visual effects.”

“I was a big Batman fan when I was a kid.”

“When you have a smartphone, the things that it can do are kind of ridiculous and terrifying.”

“I'm a big gamer. I know the lead time and how long it takes to develop a game and how hard it is to get it right.”