A few of the many masterpiece blockbusters by legendary director and screenwriterChristopher Nolanwere based on books. Such as his latest filmOppenheimeris a biopic based onAmerican Prometheusby Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, a biography of the complex J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb. Also, one of Nolan’s films earlier in his career,The Prestige,was based on the novel of the same name by Christopher Priest. And Nolan’s breakthrough work into the film industry, which gained him international interestMementowas inspired by the short storyMemento Muriby Muriel Sparks, dealing with the same themes of amnesia, purpose, and revenge.
The untouchable filmmaker is clearly no novice in the world of book-to-movie adaptations, and in the very risky business of translating a story from page to screen, everyone Nolan has done has been a big hit. Coming fresh off thenear-billion-dollarsuccess of his bombastic adaptationOppenheimer, here are the perfect books for Christopher Nolan to adapt into movies.
The Forever War
Of all the books on this list, this one is right up Nolan’s alley. Joe Holdeman’sThe Forever Warhas all the marks of a Christopher Nolan movie, with time travel and space travel, awesome action, intense introspection, and a mixture ton of authentic and theoretical science that makes for epic science fiction.
The Forever Warmight become Nolan’s second film trilogy if he adapted the book after his acclaimed and belovedThe Dark KnightTrilogy, as a story about a war that takes forever might be hard to fit into a single movie. Conscripted to fight against an alien threat, William Mandella starts his first expedition far away from Earth in 1997, and when he returns after two years of fighting, he finds that it’s 2024.
Mandella returns to fight for just four years but finds that centuries have passed on Earth. This is due to time dilation, atheory of space traveldeveloped by Albert Einstein, in which time moves slowly for the traveler but continues normally for everyone else, and this was actually a big part of Nolan’sInterstellar.
Mandella stays in the war forever because everything is so changed he can’t incorporate back into society, and he spends millennia fighting until the end of the human race. The effects of future shock and countless millennia of war would be hard to fit in two hours, but with a series of movies, Nolan would be the perfect choice to properly adapt Holdeman’s war to the screen.
Dark Matter
Here is a book that fits well into Nolan’s style of filmmaking, a mix ofTenetandMementothat uses those multidimensional “what ifs?” inside the world of quantum mechanical physics. Blake Crouch’sDark Matterhas everything Nolan needs to make another mind-bending and universe-warping sci-fi he’s famous for.
A retired quantum researcher living in Chicago with his wife and kids, Jason Dessen is kidnapped and drugged, waking up in a laboratory after falling out of a giant cube. Learning he’s in an alternate Chicago where he had decided not to marry and instead pursued his career as a physicist, the Dressen of this world built the cube that enables the occupants to move between the countless worlds created from every possible outcome of every event.
Dressen has to figure out his own creation in order to get back to his wife and kids, where his other self is posing as himself to his family, and this other self is willing to kill him to maintain the lie. A mind-bender in every sense, this book is just begging to have a director like Nolan take up the task of adapting page to screen.
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The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
This book has the level of mind-diving that Nolan will have loads of fun with, a mix ofInceptionandMementothat delves into different minds suffering from amnesia but are trying to kill each other anyway, Netflix tried to make a series out of Stuart Turton’sThe 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, but it panned out, and that’s because there wasn’t someone like Nolan in charge.
Waking up in the middle of the woods, a manwith no memoryof even his own name finds his way to a manor, where there’s a party going on. He falls asleep and wakes up to find himself in the body of the butler.
He learns that he has eight days, and eight different incarnations, to solve the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle, the only daughter of the family in the manor, which will take place at 11 pm at the party that evening. He will only be allowed to leave once he finds the killer. If he fails, he loses his memory and starts all over again. There are also two other people in the same predicament, and only one gets to go. It’s the kind of thing Nolan would go for, and we want to see him do it.
Slaughterhouse Five
Something of an odd one even for Nolan, this book is a mix ofInterstellarandDunkirkwhere we jump through time, space, and WWII German POW camp inKurt Vonnegut’sSlaughterhouse-Five, proving itself to be everything Nolan needs to make another Nolan-esque movie, pretty standard for this director. However, the really impressive bit would be Nolan to communicate the same level of philosophy where traditionalism and modernism go head-to-head in the trenches of the battlefield and the mind.
In the non-linear style that Nolan loves, Billy Pilgrim is stuck inthe middle of WWII, fighting a horrible war he doesn’t want to fight until he becomes “unstuck in time.” Billy goes on an uncontrollable trip back and forth from his birth in New York to life on a distant planet full of aliens and back again to the horrors of the bombings of Dresden.
The themes of war, life and death, religion, time and space, and many more are important parts of the story as Billy sees everything in new alien ways. Nolan has filled his work with such heavy themes before, but this could change the way we see reality if Nolan pulls it off.
Related:Do All Of Christopher Nolan’s Movies Take Place in the Same Universe?
House of Leaves
This is probably one the most unconventional book ever written, and Nolan may be the one to make the most experimental films ever to adapt it. Mark Z. Danielewski’sHouse of Leavesstretches the literary medium to the breaking point.
Stylized as the shared journal of different owners of the same haunted house, words come in different colors, fonts, and sizes on the same page. Entire passages are struck through and bleed onto other pages; sometimes, the book must be flipped around because the text is at all sorts of wild angles, and it’s rumored that some pages are designed to fall out purposefully.
Nolan is never afraid to confuse his audience using unconventional or unthinkable tricks, and really, he might be one of the few directors in Hollywood capable of pulling off such an adaptation. The onlyway an adaptationcould work is if the movie is as unconventional and wild as the book is, which would take a lot of creativity and money, using such crazy tricks as making the audience pick up certain smells when watching the film adaptation. Nolan is wild for sure, but if he did this, we could see just how absurd he could be when he’s given a challenge.
