Following Nolan
A close encounter with the Academy Award Best Director nominee at the dawn of our careers
As I begin this writing on a bone-chilling winter day in the Blue Ridge Mountain foothills of suburban Asheville, North Carolina, I confess to its motivation being a cheap trick. Strongly suspecting that the illustrious filmmaker Christopher Nolan will very soon be awarded the Academy Award for Best Director, the obscure fact that we briefly shared a stage together 25 years ago is weighing somewhat heavily. Illuminating that rapidly fading memory is my blatant inspiration.
Hoping the tale of sharing a stage with such an accomplished human — even for a moment, even so long ago — holds some interest, let’s briefly retrace my own journey to Park City, Utah, in 1999, and the Slamdance Film Festival.
Before
First launched in 1978 as the Utah/United States Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival rose in the 1990s to represent the epitome of successful independent filmmaking. During that decade, as an aspiring, Central Florida-based screenwriter with a few unproduced screenplays under my belt, I had applied to the Sundance Institute for its annual Feature Film grant program, but had no luck. Looking back, the list of awards programs I had compiled for future submissions also included another…
