Jonathan Nolan Biography
Jonathan Nolan is a british-american screenwriter, Television producer, director and author. He is the creator of the CBS science fiction “Person Of Interest”. He is also the co-creator of the HBO science fiction western series “Westworld”. He has collaborated on several films with his brother “Christopher Nolan” who adapted Jonathan’s short story “Memento Mori” into the neo-noir thriller film “Memento”
Jonathan Nolan Age
Jonathan was born on 6 June, 1976 and is currently 42 years old as of 2018. His zodiac sign is Gemini.
Jonathan Nolan Height
Jonathan is 6 feet and 2 inches tall.
Jonathan Nolan Brother
He has two elder brothers, Christopher Nolan and Matthew Francis Nolan.
Jonathan Nolan Early Life
Nolan was born the youngest of three boys to Christina Nolan his mother and Brendan James Nolan his father. Him and his brothers Christopher Nolan and Matthew Francis Nolan were raised in both London and Chicago. He attended Loyola Academy and graduated from there in 1994. After this, he majored in English from the Georgetown University.
Jonathan Nolan Photo
Jonathan Nolan Career
In 2000, Jonathan Nolan’s short story titled “Memento Mori” was used by his brother, Christopher, as the basis for the movie ‘Memento.’ The film became a major critical and commercial success. Five years later, Nolan along with his brother wrote the screenplay for the mystery thriller film ‘The Prestige’ which was released in 2006. After this, the brothers again collaborated and wrote the screenplay for the 2008 movie ‘The Dark Knight’. The movie went on to become the most commercially successful one among the Batman films till then. Its sequel titled ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ was released in 2012.
In 2011, the British-American artist served as a writer and executive producer for the series ‘Person of Interest’. The program ran for five series and starred Michael Emerson and Jim Caviezel. Then in 2014, Nolan wrote the screenplay for the sci-fi flick ‘Interstellar’. That year, it was also reported that he was writing and producing a program based on the late writer cum professor Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation Trilogy’ for HBO.
Two years later, in 2016, he, along with his wife Lisa Joy wrote a pilot for the science fiction television series ‘Westworld’. The series is based on the 1973 film of the same name and takes place in a fictional Wild-West-themed amusement park. Nolan and Joy, along with J. J. Abrams, Jerry Weintraub, and Bryan Burk, serve as the executive producers of the show. So far, it has received mostly positive reviews from the critics.
Jonathan Nolan Net worth
Jonathan has an estimated net worth of 30 million dollars as of 2019.
Jonathan Nolan Wife
Jonathan married fellow “Westworld” creator Lisa Joy back in 2009 and have been happily married ever since. They have been blessed with a son and daughter.
Jonathan’s wife Lisa Joy
Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy
The two are the co-creators of the HBO science fiction series “Westworld”. It was recently announced that the two have signed with amazon for an overall deal to create original series for Amazon Prime Video. The deal builds on an existing project the pair is developing for the studio called “The Peripheral”.
The deal essentially means Amazon will get the first crack at anything Nolan and Joy create while under contract. Given the duo’s television track record, it seems Amazon is looking to snap up the next Westworld or Person of Interest before someone else gets it.
The two have also been married since 2009 till present and have 2 children, a son and a daughter.
Jonathan and Lisa
Jonathan Nolan Westworld
Jonatha is s the co-creator, executive producer and writer for the TV series, Westworld. He has written 6 episodes in the first season of the series, He has also written 3 episodes in season two of the series. He also directed two episodes on season one of the series.
Westworld
Jonathan Nolan Person of Interest
Nolan is the creator, executive producer and writer on Person of Interest. He has written 4 episodes on season 1, 3 episodes on season 2, 1 episode on season 3 and 1 episode on season 5 of the series. He also directed 1 episode on season 2 of the series.
Person of Interest
Jonathan Nolan Memento Mori
“Memento Mori” is a short story written by Jonathan Nolan and published in the March 2001 edition of Esquire magazine. It was the basis for the film Memento directed by his brother Christopher Nolan.
Nolan got the idea for the story from his general psychology class at Georgetown University. Nolan pitched the idea to his brother Christopher during a cross-country road trip from Chicago to Los Angeles. His brother responded to the idea, and encouraged him to write a first draft. After Jonathan returned to Washington, D.C., to finish college, he sent his brother a draft two months later, and Christopher set to work on a screenplay, while Jonathan began finishing the short story.
Christopher eventually made the feature film Memento, starring Guy Pearce, which was inspired from Jonathan’s story, although radically different. For example, in the short story, Earl is confined to a mental institution and the main character in the movie is not. Also, in the movie, the protagonist’s attempt to seek revenge on his wife’s killer is manipulated by other characters. In the short story, other characters, such as doctors, are only briefly mentioned. Jonathan’s short story was eventually published in Esquire magazine, although it can also be found in James Mottram’s making-of book about the film, The Making of Memento, and as a hidden special feature on the film’s special edition DVD.
Jonathan Nolan Books
- interstellar: The Complete Screenplay With Selected Storyboards
Jonathan Nolan Movies and TV Shows
Movies
- Memento
- Batman Begins
- The Prestige
- The Dark Knight
- Terminator Salvation
- The Dark Knight Rises
- Interstellar
TV Shows
- Person of Interest
- Westworld
Jonathan Nolan Interview
“Jonathan And Lisa Joy on Esquire Magazine”
What’s it like to work together as a married couple and as parents?
Jonathan Nolan: We’ve turned it into a family affair. With separate careers, you’ve had a bad day, you go home, and your partner’s had a great day: They kind of cancel each other out. When we’ve had a bad day, we’ve both had a bad day. The highs are that much higher and the lows are that much lower, but it’s an incredible journey to be on together.
Lisa Joy: It’s not great for having laid-back beers where you talk about the weather, because it’s this all-consuming thing. We’re chatting about either our family and our home or the world of the show. I love the idea of the literary salons in France where artists and writers would all come and talk and drink absinthe. This is a reproduction of that, without the absinthe and with the addition of screaming toddlers. Getting to that place where you’re just two very exhausted parents at the end of the day, but in the meantime you’ve been in a saloon heist—it’s like you get the chance to live a couple lifetimes simultaneously with the person whose company you enjoy the most.
It almost sounds like you like each other.
Lisa Joy: We have a lot of creative tussles, too.
JN: You caught us on a good day.
There’s evidence that when entrepreneurs start companies with friends or spouses, they often struggle more—in part because they have a harder time with conflict. They shy away from difficult conversations about work, which ends up hurting both their professional collaboration and their personal relationship. How do you avoid that trap?
LJ: Currently, the problem is not enough conflict, by what you just said.
JN: We’ve been reading each other’s shit for so long that I think we’ve gotten to the place where we’re pretty frank with one another when something’s not working. I’m never happier than when Lisa says, “It’s great.” Because I know it’s great. Hemingway said that to be a writer you need to have a built-in, shockproof bullshit detector.
LJ: That’s me. I actually feel more comfortable telling Jonah [Jonathan is Jonah to family and friends] very directly when I don’t think something’s working than I would with anybody else. Another writer might question whether you’re feeling competitive. But if I talk to Jonah, I know that he truly values my success more than his own. And I truly value his success more than my own. There’s a generosity there.
Lisa, what’s it like directing for the first time, particularly during #MeToo and Time’s Up?
LJ: I’ve tried to always be incredibly overprepared in everything that I’ve done. I think part of it comes from being a woman: It’s hard to get that first chance, and if you mess up, you just don’t get a second chance, right? So you always want to exceed expectations out of the gate.
I was thinking, I don’t want to do this unless I can really nail it. And so I started talking myself out of it. That’s when Jonah did the figurative version of pushing me out the door and locking it behind me. Because every time I expressed misgivings, he’d be like, “You’re directing this season. You’re a natural director.” And I’d say, “But the kids.” And he’d say, “I got the kids.” And I’d be like, “But the rest of production.” And he’s like, “I got that.”
Jonathan, from Memento to The Prestige to Westworld, it almost seems like your mission in life is to show us that our perceptions are flawed. Is there a larger purpose behind the kinds of stories you choose to tell?
JN: I’ve known that I was colorblind since I was a kid, but I thought of my condition as subtle until just a couple years ago—apparently, the whole world is piss yellow to me. That’s a small detail, but it reflected a larger interest of how we assemble our identities and how it maps onto reality. In Westworld, we were interested in the differences between an artificial mind and a human one. And it occurred to us that the memory would be very different. For the most part, the pictures in your phone don’t degrade over time. But our memories change. So we were interested in protagonists who had perfect recall but weren’t supposed to. How would they distinguish between a memory and a present reality?
So we conflated those things for Dolores [Evan Rachel Wood’s character], and we didn’t tell the audience. In the second season, they’re now aware of that, so we can explore that from the outside in instead of just the inside out.
Given all the time you spend thinking about what it means for an android to be increasingly human, what would you like to say to AI designers?
JN: Stop.
LJ: Being careful of hubris is as important as knowing the technology that you are developing. See in yourself and other people the capacity both for evil and for good. Know that the machines you build, your creations, will bear your fingerprints to some degree. And not necessarily the fingerprints you intentionally left but the ones that kind of grazed it unintentionally. It’s important to have people who will question you occasionally.
What’s the worst piece of career advice you’ve each been given?
JN: I’ve always thought “write what you know” was dumb. I want to be careful here, because clearly there’s been a massive deficit in storytelling of diversity in voices and people speaking from their experience. I think for people to write their truth is an admirable thing. But I think you can countenance a world in which that is valued and still allow writers to write—not just from their personal experiences but from their dreams. I was a boring suburban kid. If I’d followed that advice, we’d never be writing about nineteenth-century magicians or vigilantes who dress up like bats.
LJ: I think that’s true. As an Asian woman, all of those things factor into the way that I write and see the world, I’m sure. But part of who I am is just a writer who wants to write about robots, man. Every so often, you just want to write about robots. Or a giant space war. Or maybe I want to write a male hero. Holding women to the idea of “write what you know” subtly reinforces the status quo. Writing is a chance to celebrate who we are. But it’s also a chance to celebrate who we could be.
Whatever you’re gonna write, figure it out. Do your research. Talk to people. Understand and fully imagine a world. Otherwise it will not feel true.