Director Zack Snyder is famous not just for his films, but also for his passionate fanbase. And while most of Snyder’s fans vocalize that on social media, one of the biggest did so via traditonal media. His name is Christopher Nolan.
That Nolan is a fan of Snyder’s isn’t really a surprise. It was Nolan who, as he was finishing his Dark Knight Trilogy, played a role in hiring Snyder to make Man of Steel. Nolan is even a producer on the film. Snyder directing that film changed the entire trajectory of his career, setting the stage for a decade of DC films that will always be fun to talk about.
In a new interview though, Nolan put an even finer point on his Snyder fandom, focusing on his influence and first superhero film. “There’s no superhero science-fiction film coming out these days where I don’t see some influence of Zack,” Nolan told the Atlantic. “When you watch a Zack Snyder film, you see and feel his love for the potential of cinema. The potential of it to be fantastical, to be heightened in its reality, but to move you and to excite you.”
High praise from a man who’s also influenced superhero films, maybe even more deeply, with his realistic take on Batman in Batman Begins. Soon after Nolan made that, Snyder also dipped his toes into the superhero genre with the even more ambitious and risky Watchmen. Nolan is a fan.
“I’ve always believed Watchmen was ahead of its time,” he said. “The idea of a superhero team, which it so brilliantly subverts, wasn’t yet a thing in movies. It would have been fascinating to see it released post-Avengers.”
Of course, a version of Watchmen did get released post-Avengers—the Damon Lindelof series on HBO—and it was, as Nolan predicted, received much more favorably than the Snyder version. (The timing wasn’t the only reason for that, but the point still stands.)
There’s no word on what Nolan thinks of Snyder’s latest film, Rebel Moon, but one can imagine that whether he cared for it or not, he’d praise its ambition both on screen and off. You can watch it yourself right here.