Christopher Nolan’s Unmade Films: Movies the ‘Oppenheimer’ Director Almost Made (original) (raw)

There are some directors who have an army of orphaned projects; films that, for whatever reason, never ended up getting shot or released. Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and (especially) Luca Guadagnino have whole filmographies of projects they started developing before eventually abandoning.

Christopher Nolan is not one of those directors. Generally speaking, when the British director gets attached to a project, he almost always manages to carry the film out to completion. With the obvious exception of his acclaimed “Dark Knight” Batman trilogy, Nolan isn’t typically a director for hire. Pretty much every film Nolan directs is also written and produced by him, and the multi-hyphenate’s movies usually take awhile to make, with lengthy shoots and lengthier post-production phases required to bring his ambitions stories to life. “Oppenheimer,” his massively scaled biopic about the creator of the atomic bomb, took a relatively speedy 57 days to film; “Tenet,” his previous film, lasted for 96.

“Making films with [Nolan] is real filmmaking to me,” Nolan’s go-to cinematographer Hoyte von Hoytema said in an interview with Deadline. “It’s very hands-on and it’s a lot of engineering, always. It’s really switching your mind on to a very classic, visceral way of filmmaking. Nobody makes film like him.”

So with that in mind, it’s not surprising that Nolan usually manages to achieve what he sets out to do as a filmmaker. Still, someone with so many successful releases is bound to get attached to a few projects that don’t pan out at some point. Nolan is no exception, with three films that got lost in development after the director stopped actively pursuing them. In honor of “Oppenheimer’s” release, revisit the three films Nolan almost made, but never finished.

• An Untitled Howard Hughes Biopic

Image Credit: Bettmann Archive via Getty
Chalk this one up to poor timing. After releasing his first major studio picture, 2002’s “Insomnia” for Warner Bros., Nolan began writing a biopic about billionaire film producer and aviation enthusiast Howard Hughes, focusing on the man’s struggles with OCD over the course of his life. Jim Carrey was set to play the role, and Nolan deemed the script for the biopic the best thing he’d ever written in an interview with The Daily Beast in 2007.
But around the same time, Martin Scorsese was also prepping a biopic about Hughes, and his version — titled “The Aviator” and starring Leonardo DiCaprio — got further in the development process thanNolan’s, prompting the director to let go of the project. “The Aviator” hit theaters in 2004, while Nolan’s next project — “Batman Begins” — was released the following year.

• “The Keys to the Street”

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Written by late murder mystery author Ruth Rendell, “The Keys to the Street” was released in 1996, and focuses on a young woman who begins investigating a series of grisley murders targeting homeless people in Regent’s Park. After his Howard Hughes biopic was canned, Nolan was briefly attached to direct an adaptation of the movie for Fox Searchlight, but ultimately chose to return to Warner Bros. for “Batman Begins,” and the project sputtered in development without him.

• “The Prisoner”

Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection
One of the most famous and acclaimed sci-fi TV shows of all time, “The Prisoner” was Patrick McGoohan’s trippy story about a secret agent imprisoned against his will on a bizarre island village. In 2009, Nolan was reported to be attached to a film remake of the project. Nolan dropped out of the project later that year, however, leaving the status of Number Six’s venture onto the big screen a mystery.