Tenet Director Christopher Nolan Reveals That His Film's Plane Crash Is Very Real

Christopher Nolan is a director who is given a lot of leeway over the projects he's allowed to make within the Hollywood studio system, and the latest news about his upcoming movie, Tenet, serves as a great example of this.

In the latest cover story for Total Film magazine (as summarized on Gamesradar), for a scene involving a plane crashing into a hangar--which is alluded to in the film's second trailer--Nolan decided that the best way to get the stunt on film was to simply buy a Boeing 747 and then crash it.

Nolan says in the interview that he originally "planned to do it using miniatures and set-piece builds and a combination of visual effects and all the rest," but once he calculated costs, he decided that it would "be more efficient" to buy and crash a real plane on camera.

Nolan calls his decision "a kind of impulse buying," but says that it all worked out. "Scott Fisher, our special-effects supervisor, and Nathan Crowley, the production designer, figur(ed) out how to pull off this big sequence in camera. It was a very exciting thing to be a part of."

Tenet has an estimated budget of $205 million--an enormous figure for a non-franchise film. It stars John David Washington (BlacKkKlansmen), Elizabeth Debicki (Widows) and Robert Pattinson (who recently gave an amazing interview about Tenet, The Batman, and his ill-fated ideas for a new pasta restaurant).

Tenet is due to release--in cinemas, despite the current global pandemic--on July 17, 2020.