Nolan was raised by an American mother and a British father, and his family spent time in both Chicago and London. As a child, he attended Haileybury, a boarding school just outside London. From a young age, Nolan was interested in moviemaking and would use his father’s Super-8 camera to make shorts. He was influenced by George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy and by the immersive dystopian films of Ridley Scott. After attending University College London, where he studied English literature, Nolan began directing corporate and industrial training videos. At the same time, he was working on his first full-length release, Following (1998). The film centred on a writer going to dangerous lengths to find inspiration; it took Nolan 14 months to complete. On the strength of its success on the festival circuit, he and his producer wife moved to Hollywood.
Nolan’s breakthrough came with the 2000 film Memento, a sleeper hit that he adapted from a short story written by his brother Jonathan. It used a destabilizing reverse-order storyline to mirror the fractured mental state of its protagonist, a man with short-term amnesia who is trying to track down the person who murdered his wife. The film was a critical and popular success and garnered the Nolan brothers an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay. Nolan followed up with Insomnia (2002), a thriller set in the Alaskan wilds, which starred Al Pacino as a compromised police detective.
In 2003 Warner Brothers enlisted Nolan to direct an instalment of the Batman franchise, the first since 1997’s poorly received Batman & Robin. Nolan’s highly anticipated Batman Begins (2005), starring Christian Bale, focused on the superhero’s origins and featured settings and tone that were grimmer and more realistic than those of previous Batman films.