According to the director, the most underrated film of Christopher Nolan is “Insomnia”.

For years, Christopher Nolan has been one of the most talked about, praised, and hotly debated directors in Hollywood. He is the director with the most films in the IMDb top 250he navigated the industry with an impressive mix of original designs and intellectual property, one of his biggest films may have changed the Academy Awards foreverand each of his new films feels like a real event. (You’ve probably seen the hype around his recently announced adaptation of The Odyssey, which will be released next year.) His filmography has been combed and debated wherever cinephiles congregate, and members of his passionate, almost cult-like fan base are ready to go to bat for any of his roles.

Although I don’t know if Nolan himself has decided what his best film is, the director has spoken about what he thinks is the most underrated a film that provides a fascinating look at how he views his own work.

U The Nolan Variations: The Films, Mysteries, and Wonders of Christopher Nolan 2020 by Tom Shawn. Shawn was able to spend a significant amount of time with the director over the years to talk in detail about each of his films, and Nolan identified one of his first feature films as a project that may be the most unfairly rejected film of his career. body of work.

“Of all my movies, I think ‘Insomniac’ is probably the most underrated,” Nolan says in The Nolan Variations. He also gives a potential reason why audiences may not be interested in this film on the same level as his other films, and why that couldn’t be further from the truth for him:

“People will say things like, ‘Oh, it’s not as fun and personalized as Memento,’ but there’s a reason for that.” It’s from a script that someone else wrote. It is a remake of another movie. The reality is that one of my most personal films in terms of what it was like to make it (…) Of all the films I’ve made, it fits the most precisely or comfortably in the genre I tried to make it. It’s not genre-defying, and that’s what people have come to expect from other films I’ve made, but I think the film holds up very well, but every now and then I meet a director and that is to say actually a movie they’re interested in or talking about. Yes, I am very proud of the film.”

Three years earlier, Nolan called Insomniac the most underrated of his films, we at /Film came to the same conclusion and wrote our own reasons why we think this is the case. I encourage you to watch this piece, and if you haven’t seen Insomnia in a while, watch it again. The film may not turn the crime thriller genre on its head, but it features absolutely top-notch performances from Oscar winners Al Pacino and Robin Williams in a cat-and-mouse game set in one hell of an atmospheric setting. If nothing else, it will make you appreciate the power of a good night’s sleep.