Tenet: Christopher Nolan built one of biggest outdoor sets in history for new film

Nolan says this film is more ‘designed for the big screen experience’ than ‘Inception’ and ‘Interstellar’

Christopher Nolan has gone to great lengths to ensure his new film is as cinematic as possible.

The Inception director is about to unveil Tenet, an espionage thriller starring John David Washington and Robert Pattinson.

While he has remained tightlipped on the film’s plot, Nolan has revealed that he made history behind-the-scenes by constructing “one of the largest-scale outdoor builds of all time”.

Nolan himself described the scene, which was filmed in October 2019 in the California desert, as “colossal”.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, it’s revealed that Nolan’s team built “an abandoned city of destroyed buildings and rubble” and filled it with “hundreds of extras in military camouflage uniforms”.

While the overarching plot of Tenet remains a mystery, Nolan wants people to know it has nothing to do with time travel.

“This film is not a time-travel film,” he said.

“It deals with time and the different ways in which time can function. Not to get into a physics lesson, but inversion is this idea of material that has had its entropy inverted, so it’s running backwards through time, relative to us.”

He said he has spent the last “six or seven years” working on the script.

Kenneth Branagh, who also stars in the film, said that Tenet “discusses an even worse possibility [than] a nuclear holocaust”.

“It is wrapped up in this mind-boggling treatment of time that continues Chris Nolan’s preoccupations in films way back to Memento, through Interstellar and Inception.”

Earlier this week, it was reported that Nolan told members of CineEurope that Tenet was more ”designed for the big screen experience” than any of his other films.

Tenet will be released on 31 July.