Let's watch Christopher Nolan geek out about Nathan Fielder and The Curse

It’s kind of hard to imagine Christopher Nolan watching television; as the most consistently prestigious of Hollywood’s big-budget genre directors, there’s an intellectualism to both Nolan’s work, and his public persona, that sort of defies the mental image of him sitting down on the couch, remote in hand. Which is part of what makes it especially interesting to hear the man completely geek out about good TV, as he did in an interview posted by Showtime earlier this week, where the Oppenheimer director interviewed, with geeky glee, Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie about their recent comedy/horror/home renovation show The Curse.

Which Nolan totally loved, it’s clear: In the half-hour interview, filmed at a For Your Consideration event for the show back in early January, he calls the series “incredible,” and compares it to shows like Twin Peaks in terms of its masterful use of tone. Interestingly, he also singles out Fielder’s earlier show, The Rehearsal, as a point of interest for him—which actually makes a kind of sense, in hindsight: Although Nolan’s films tend to shie away from comedy, he and Fielder share an artistic obsession with nested layers of reality and big, practically achieved spectacle.

Even beyond the novelty of seeing Mr. Tenet play TV nerd, though, it’s a pretty good interview for fans of the series: Filmed before the airing of the show’s last two episodes, it sees Nolan, Fielder, and Safdie (who first worked with the director last year, when he was cast in Oppenheimer) get into the minutiae of the show’s setting, production, and design. (Our favorite detail: The crew realizing that they had to start covering the show’s mirrored “passive home” exteriors in tarps when they weren’t filming, because the reflection of the New Mexico sun off of the giant shiny false fronts was burning brown lines in the grass of the homes they were renting; a pretty apt metaphor for Asher and Whitney Siegel’s obliviously destructive path through Española.)

Anyway, now we’re excited by two different ideas at the same time: On the one hand, the thought of Safdie, Nolan, and Fielder cooking up some kind of collaboration with each other is incredibly intriguing. (It’d be fascinating to see the Curse guys push Nolan out of his more stolid comfort zone, and to see him apply his precision to their big, weird ideas.) And, on the other, the thought of Christopher Nolan going back and watching that episode of Nathan For You where they try to stop people from buying cheap TVs with an alligator. Either option, really, would be fine by us.