Christopher Nolan admits ‘soft spot’ for ‘Tokyo Drift’ and ‘Alien 3’: ‘I love that film’

The ‘Tenet’ writer/director opened up about his enjoyment of ‘The Fast and the Furious’ franchise in a new interview

Acclaimed writer/director Christopher Nolan tends to make very dense, cinematically rich, nonlinear films (see: 2000's Memento, the Batman trilogy, 2010's Inception, 2014's Interstellar, 2017's Dunkirk, and this year's Tenet, to name just a few).

In spite of his fondness for complex and grandiose storylines, it turns out that Nolan actually has a soft spot for less, shall we say, highbrow franchises, like The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.

Appearing on Josh Horowitz's HappySadConfused podcast, Nolan went in-depth around his enjoyment of The Fast and the Furious films, noting that he loves the 2001 original but has a "soft spot" for Tokyo Drift.

“I’m sort of original recipe, the Rob Cohen original," he said. “But I’ve got a very soft spot for Tokyo Drift actually. And Justin Lin’s iterations, as they got crazier and bigger and crazier and bigger they became something else, but something else kinda fun.”

Nolan went on to point out that The Fast and the Furious franchise satisfies the audience's need for "bigger" sequels.

“The fun thing about those [Fast and the Furious] movies is even as they’ve gotten bigger and bigger, as sequels have to do – everyone always complains that sequels get bigger, but we are the people making sequels get bigger. We do want them bigger. You don’t want them smaller."

The director then segued into what he called "the Alien 3 lesson," referencing the smaller-scale and critically reviled 1992 David Fincher sequel to Aliens.

"It’s the Alien 3 lesson, the Fincher one, you can do it but it’s not gonna make anybody happy even though personally I love that film – I love it more than he does, I think."

(Fincher famously is not a fan of Alien 3.)

"I’ve never dared mention [Alien 3] to him," Nolan continued. "I think he’s very aware of the flaws and he’s very aware of the appalling experience he had making it, and how put-upon he was, and I truly can only imagine. But his talent shines through in that movie. I came out of that film and had a conversation with a guy I was with and I said, ‘I’ve just seen the new Ridley Scott. I know who the new Ridley Scott is, it’s David Fincher,’ and I wasn’t wrong. It’s there in the movie, whether he knows it or not."

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