Classic Ni thought process: “Are you the kind of guy that wakes up in the middle of the night and goes, ‘I gotta write that down?’” “I am, but I’m also the kind of guy that never has a pen by the side of the bed and so I go, ‘You know what? I’ll remember it,’ and so I go back to sleep and then I don’t remember it.”
Rly?
I mean, I've done that too.
I don't consider that 'classic Ni."
Also, you can tell that he really admires the way that Leo needed to understand the 'emotional truth' of the character... screams Fi to me.
And there seems to be quite a bit of Se where he's describing what it's like to film a really interesting sequence and then watch it on the monitor after it's been filmed.
This is why I don't like celebrity typing threads. People assign very specific incidents that are cross-function to a particular function in order to make a case.I think broad pattern assessment and motivations are more important in making type reads -- as well as perhaps overall look and feel. Taking details out of context that can hold many meanings aren't really going to give clear pictures.
Maybe it would be better to compare him to a known NTJ director in similar genres (like James Cameron or Stanley Kubrick) and see how the two compare/contrast.
We can definitely confirm that, at least as a director, Nolan is (1) rational, his stories have to have a rational through-line and "make sense" in a way that many other directors don't care about, (2) intuitive in the sense he's more interested in what lies beneath something and the connections between things, rather than the things themselves.
He's also good at reinterpreting stories and characters in new ways, doesn't typically follow the conventional way of looking at them, isn't afraid to be "dark" or challenge status quo. He does a lot of adaptations of preexisting stories but does so in order to improve them. He sees the way they could be reassembled to be more effect, or perhaps he sees the underlying carriage that the surface details of the movie can be attached to and how that undercarriage can be tinkered with to accentuate what it already is all in order to provide a better vehicle.
He's a known expert in the "out of chrono" sequence style of movie editing -- even his first trial pic (Following) experiments with this... and he manages to convey the proper sense of story in ways that many directors could never pull off. (Inception was a twist on that, by instead dealing with making a coherent line of three stories set in different SPATIAL realities with different time speeds.)
He seems more of an architect to me as well, because message and purpose dictates form for him. He's not like Tarantino, for whom often style is movie; instead, the purpose dictates style and form. (this is a type of architect sensibility.)
if I had to compare Cameron to Nolan, I think it's worth noting that Cameron's stories -- while imaginative -- are typically straightforward. There is typically a through-line, and the details come into play in terms of execution (he's extremely anal in getting all the tangible details just right, in order to enact his vision for the story.) They are not like the complex intricate workings of the inside of a watch, like Nolan's pieces, where everything has to hook together in some way to support overall function... and everything seems to have to make rational sense in the way a building design has to make sense... all the functions interconnected, each piece contributing to the philosophical sense of story. Nolan seems less interested in surface detail, except how it reveals something about the inner workings of something and how it's connected to something else.