New Photos From TENET Surface and Christopher Nolan Explains Why They Crashed a Real 747
We’ve got a few new photos to share with you today for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Quantum Cold War spy thriller Tenet. Those photos feature John David Washington as the film's main character who has the power of inversion, and Elizabeth Debicki as the mysterious woman who will help him on his mission to prevent World War III. This is the recent synopsis for the film that was shared:
Armed with only one word – Tenet – and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time. Not time travel. Inversion.
There’s still so much that we don’t know about this mind-bending story, but when talking about it Nolan explains that it will take the spy genre into some new territory:
“It’s a film of great ambition and great scale that takes a genre, namely the spy film, and tries to take it into some new territory, and tries to take the audience on a ride they might not have had before, and might not be expecting."
That sounds like fun to me! Nolan also offered some information to Total Film about one of Tenet's biggest set-pieces, which was teased in the most recent trailer. It required the production team to purchase a real 747 and then crash it into a hangar.
Yeah, that was not a miniature 747, that wasn’t CG, that was a real plane and when talking about why the director ended up using a real plane for this scene, he said:
“I planned to do it using miniatures and set-piece builds and a combination of visual effects and all the rest.” However, while scouting for locations in Victorville, California, the team discovered a massive array of old planes. “We started to run the numbers... It became apparent that it would actually be more efficient to buy a real plane of the real size, and perform this sequence for real in camera, rather than build miniatures or go the CG route.”
Nolan describes it as impulse buying:
“It’s a strange thing to talk about – a kind of impulse buying, I suppose. But we kind of did, and it worked very well, with Scott Fisher, our special-effects supervisor, and Nathan Crowley, the production designer, figuring out how to pull off this big sequence in camera. It was a very exciting thing to be a part of.”
I was actually in the Victorville area this past weekend and I saw all the old planes that they are talking about. Hey, if you’ve got the money to buy a 747 to destroy in a movie, why not!?
As far as we know the film is still scheduled to be released in theaters on July 17th as the studio hasn’t said otherwise. But, we’ll keep an eye out for any updates or changes.
