POTENTIAL SPOILERS AHEAD FOR “TENET”
As part of a recent
EW cover story, filmmaker Christopher Nolan and some of the cast got about as candid as they can get at this point prior to release about what’s coming. In the process we’re beginning to get a clearer picture of what’s coming.
Kenneth Branagh calls it an espionage piece dealing with a global threat worse than nuclear holocaust, all “wrapped up in this mind-boggling treatment of time”. That includes ‘inversion’ which Nolan explains:
“[Tenet] deals with time and the different ways in which time can function. Not to get into a physics lesson, but inversion is this idea of material that has had its entropy inverted, so it’s running backwards through time, relative to us.”
John David Washington’s main character is an operative who goes by the term ‘Protagonist’ with Tenet being the name of the organization into which the Protagonist is inducted. Unlike other spies (looking at you Bond & Bourne), he “has a very warm emotional accessibility” says Nolan.
Due to his being an espionage film dealing with a world of hidden and false identities, it’s not clear what the real names of any of the characters are. Of Robert Pattinson’s role he says “we think he might be called Neil… you never really quite know what’s going on with these identities.”
Nolan confirms that “Kick Ass” actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who has been missing from all the publicity material thus far, is in the film and in fact can be ever so briefly glimpsed in the second trailer:
“Aaron Taylor-Johnson is indeed in the film. He’s an important part of the film. Yes, there are no photographs of him, this is true. He is briefly glimpsed in the [second] trailer. He’s also completely unrecognizable. There are all kinds of things that happen in terms of where the story goes as the film develops and where it winds up in the later stages that we don’t want to spoil for people.”
One thing Nolan is adamant about though is that this is a film that needs to be seen on the big screen. Appearing as part of a CineEurope online conference today, Nolan confirmed they’re in last bits of post-production and wants it to be clear this is a movie to see on the big screen:
“We’re in the final throes of it. I don’t want to say too much about it other than we’re extraordinarily excited about what we’ve been able to do with this material. I think of all the films that I’ve made, this is perhaps the one that is most designed for the audience experience, the big screen experience. This is a film whose image and sound really needs to be enjoyed in your theaters on the big screen and we’re very very excited for you to see what it is we’ve done.
We’ve made big films in the past, but this is a film whose global reach and level of action is beyond anything we’ve ever attempted before. I think we only would have been able to pull off this film with the level of experience we’ve had doing action films in the past.”