Christopher Nolan's Favorite Bond Movie Might Surprise You
Christopher Nolan directing a Bond movie feels inevitable. Every time the franchise starts looking for a new director, his name pops up immediately—and for good reason. He's basically been training for it his whole career.
Nolan's love for 007 runs deep, and he's never hidden it. At a Q&A, he called The Spy Who Loved Me "one of the first films I remember seeing," adding:
"At a certain point the Bond films fixed in my head as a great example of scope and scale in large scale images. That idea of getting you to other places, of getting you along for a ride if you can believe in it — in The Spy Who Loved Me the Lotus Esprit turns into a submarine, and it's totally convincing, and it works, and you go, ‘Wow. That's incredible.'"
Released in 1977, The Spy Who Loved Me was Roger Moore's third go as Bond and helped save the franchise after the lukewarm reception to The Man with the Golden Gun. It locked in the Bond formula: wild gadgets, ridiculous henchmen, exotic locales—and it became the highest-grossing Bond movie up to that point.
But Nolan's real favorite? That would be George Lazenby's one-off outing in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Speaking to Empire, Nolan said:
"I think On Her Majesty's Secret Service would be my favourite Bond. It's a hell of a movie, it holds up very well. What I liked about it that we've tried to emulate in this film is there's a tremendous balance of action, scale, and romanticism and tragedy and emotion. Of all the Bond films, it's by far the most emotional."
That emotional tone shows up in Nolan's own work—especially in Inception, whose snowy fortress finale was basically a love letter to Bond. Nolan admitted as much:
"I've been plundering ruthlessly from the Bond movies in everything I've done, forever... [Inception's] snow sequence was absolutely my Bond film."