SBIFF - Christopher Nolan - Modern Master Award

What makes a Modern Master? Neophyte filmmakers, cineastes and fans alike, packed the Arlington Theatre on night four of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival to find out, as Inception star, Leonardo DiCaprio bestowed the fest’s most prestigious and definitive accolade on one of it’s most deserving recipients - Writer/Producer/Director, Christopher Nolan.

The red carpet was populated mostly by future Modern Masters as a contingent of festival filmmakers made their way into the theater, hoping to glean insight and inspiration from Nolan. Among them, Santa Ynez local Alyssa Price, whose film The Monstrosity is making its debut here, as well as Will Eubank and Love, his collaborative effort with the band Angels & Airwaves.

Once inside, host/moderator Pete Hammond took the reins and gave a brief overview of Nolan’s filmography, respective box-office tallies, and veritable laundry list of awards, spanning DGA, BAFTA, ASC (and yes, even this year’s egregious omission of Best Director nom by the Academy) before introducing the director and settling into chairs at the left of the stage for clips and Q&A.

Giving the evening an added dose of cinema magic, Nolan established a local, full-circle connection early on, reminiscing about countless summers spent in Santa Barbara with his aunt and uncle and attending numerous screenings from the very seats this nights audience currently occupied, most notably Aliens (circa 1986) directed by last year’s honoree James Cameron.

The evening unfolded in un-Nolan-esque fashion, as Hammond screened a linear chronology of the director’s films, beginning with the gritty, voyeuristic, verite thriller Following. Exhibiting masterful filmmaking on a miniscule budget (to which many of the filmmakers in the audience could relate) Nolan discussed his incremental production of the black and white film; shooting on weekends on fifteen minutes of stock at a time with a skeleton crew of friends, constantly innovating to make more with less. As a non-actor, the extensive rehearsal time also led Nolan to develop his rapport and ability to articulate his vision to his performers.

In his next film Memento, Nolan’s directorial mastery shines through in his ability to transcend a linear story-line to (de)construct and configure the narrative such that the audience finds itself in the same boat as protagonist Guy Pearce. Playing an amnesiac struggling to piece together a cohesive memory using fragments of the recent past, including cryptic tattoos, notes jotted on napkins and Polaroid pictures, Pearce and (by virtue of Nolan’s narrative structure) the viewers are thrust into a harrowing odyssey to find the truth.

Insomnia showcased another of Nolan’s gifts as a director - the ability to mesh, mold and synergize the mercurial and disparate styles of two strong performers into a cohesive chemistry. Wrangling the method of Al Pacino and the manic of Robin Williams (who Nolan noted, was always cracking-up the crew) into a taught thriller is a daunting task for any helmer and yet Nolan pulls it off to chilling effect.

So where did Batman begin? That was the impetus for Nolan’s resuscitating and re-imagining of the iconic superhero franchise.  Inspired by Richard Donner’s 1978 version of Superman, Nolan became fascinated with the origins and creation myth surrounding the evolution of Bruce Wayne into Batman. Unlike the previous fantastical incarnations of Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher, Nolan chose to make the caped crusader into an extraordinary character residing in an ordinary Gotham City.

In The Prestige, filmed between the two Batman pictures, Nolan related how he created some magic of his own, filming the Victorian–era drama entirely in Los Angeles, using many of the city’s downtown vintage theaters to replicate those in London.

Revisiting the franchise in 2008 with The Dark Knight, Nolan again took Batman to new levels of malevolence and intensity, casting Heath Ledger as the Joker in an Oscar-winning tour-de-force performance that the director said was motivated by the theme of a dark engine set in motion, inflicting nothing pure chaos and anarchy (and channeling a bit of Malcolm McDowell’s Clockwork Orange droogery).

So how do you know when you’ve truly earned your “Master” card? When a major studio (like Warner Bros.) gives you carte blanche to make any film you desire, and you pitch them an action adventure/crime caper set solely in the minds and dreams of its characters (Ocean’s Eleven in the Occipital Lobe?) and they greenlight it! Such was the case with this year’s Best Picture nominee Inception. As with most of Nolan’s projects, it was a family affair - conceived by the director, written in conjunction with his brother Jonah and produced by wife Emma. Again, Nolan takes innovative liberties with narrative structure, stretching time and place orientation and adding a multi-layered emotional subtext to every scene as the audience deciphers the mystery, meaning and consequence of each set-piece and its larger context. It’s this ability to engage the audience on an emotional level in the midst of mind-blowing mayhem (often eschewing CGI for in-camera effects) that marks Nolan’s mastery of cinema; mixing art-house and action, bombs and brains and imbuing high-octane, heart-stopping action with, well, heart.

The Arlington audience was also privy to some inside scoop on the next Bat installment, The Dark Knight Rises, beginning principal photography in twelve weeks and casting Anne Hathaway as the feline nemesis, the film has a July 2012 release date. Nolan is also lending his golden touch and vision as Producer of the next Superman incarnation.

When Hammond asked if he’d like to shift gears from high-concept blockbusters and make nice, small romantic comedies with Jennifer Anniston, Nolan sat in a prolonged, palpable silence… and then uttered a definitive “No” to hearty laughs and applaus.

At that point, the evening came to a close as DiCaprio took the stage to a fusillade of flashbulbs (reminiscent of one of the director’s own gunfight sequences) and presented the filmmaker with the Modern Master award, lauding the qualities befitting the title: Being a true Master of all film-craft, from writing and producing to directing; articulating his vision and dreams from concept to screen; being an innovative visionary, constantly expanding horizons and re-defining the architecture of narrative; taking his actors to new levels of performance and audiences to realms once unimaginable; challenging viewers and raising the bar by making even car chases cerebral and infusing the darkest tales with an emotional core; making the films he wants to make (and see) - In short, the penultimate definition of Modern Master. Put succinctly by Ellen Page’s character, Ariadne in Inception, “It’s just pure…creation.”