Elegant Nightmares

摘要

If Christopher Nolan Weren't A Movie director, he could be a Ralph Lauren ad. Tall, blond and civilized, he sits in a rocking chair in his living room politely answering questions in a soft British accent. But give Nolan a camera, and he goes straight for the most disturbed characters he can find. Last year he reinvented film noir with Memento, a low-budget story that he wrote and directed about an amnesia victim searching for his wife's killer. It started at the end and worked back toward the beginning, while the protagonist tattooed clues on his body. After Nolan weathered rejections from all the big studios, the $4.5 million thriller became a critically acclaimed hit, and Nolan got an Oscar nomination for his screenplay. His new film, Insomnia, is more conventional than Memento (it starts at the beginning, for one thing) but just as unsettling. It stars Al Pacino as a morally dubious Los Angeles cop who is exiled to Alaska to solve a murder and Robin Williams as the killer. "To me, the whole film is like a nightmare," says Nolan, 31, smiling as he gently rocks to and fro, "some awful waking dream."