For a minute he tries, though. “This thing, it’s so insane,” he says. He says they had a crew of around 500 people, and 250 of them would all fly together, just hopping planes to different countries. “And in each country there’s, like, an enormous set-piece scene, which is like the climax of a normal movie. In every single country.” He says otherwise jaded and hard-bitten crew members would come in on their days off to watch Nolan’s special effects because they were so crazy. He apologizes for not being able to say more. He just doesn’t really know what to say.
A few days later I call Christopher Nolan himself, to ask if Pattinson was ******* with me about not knowing the plot of the movie he had just finished.
“The interesting thing with Rob is, he’s slightly ******* with you,” Nolan says, laughing a reserved English laugh. “But he’s also being disarmingly honest. It’s sort of both things at once. When you see the film, you’ll understand. Rob’s read on the script was extremely acute. But he also understood the ambiguities of the film and the possibilities that spin off in the mind around the story. And so both things are true. Yes, he’s ******* with you, because he had a complete grasp of the script. But a complete grasp of the script, in the case of Tenet, is one that understands and acknowledges the need for this film to live on in the audience’s mind, and suggest possibilities in the audience’s mind. And he was very much a partner in crime with that.”
