Christopher Nolan has, by any account, had a banner year with “Oppenheimer.” But “Tenet” was still on his mind.
The palindromic spy thriller starring John David Washington and Robert Pattinson was released at a tricky time during the pandemic, when many theaters were open internationally but not yet in New York and Los Angeles. And all those IMAX 70mm and 70mm film prints, which proved so immensely popular with audiences for “Oppenheimer,” were just sitting around.
“It’s a film that was designed, almost more than any I’ve made, to be enjoyed in this form,” Nolan told The Associated Press. “When I heard they were going to be making film prints on ‘Dune: Part Two,’ I jumped at that and thought what if we opened up the week before? We can dust off the projectors.”
Nolan showed one to Warner Bros. film chiefs Pam Abdy and Michael De Luca, and “they got it.”
Beginning Feb. 23, “Tenet” will be back in theaters, in Nolan’s favorite format, at locations like AMC Lincoln Square, in New York, and Universal CityWalk and the TCL Chinese in the Los Angeles area, as well as venues in London, Melbourne and Nashville, Tennessee, and Tempe, Arizona.
Longtime friends, Nolan and Denis Villeneuve spoke to the AP last week, outside of a sold out showing of the re-release, about “Tenet,” “Dune: Part Two,” and the sense that, a decade after Kodak almost stopped making film altogether, movie audiences are embracing and rallying around film too.
Below are excerpts from the conversation, which has been edited for clarity and brevity.