Christopher Nolan largely makes very serious movies, so it came as quite a shock a few years ago when it was revealed that one of his favorite films is the comedy masterpiece MacGruber. But what if I told you Nolan was a Tokyo Drift truther as well? Indeed, the filmmaker behind action epics like Tenet and Inception and Dunkirk recently revealed his fondness for a completely different (and wholly cartoony) action franchise: the Fast and Furious movies.

Appearing on Josh Horowitz’s HappySadConfused podcast, Nolan was asked about his affection for the Fast and Furious franchise. He revealed his favorite remains Rob Cohen’s original film The Fast and the Furious, but noted he joins a legion of F&F superfans in his appreciation for Tokyo Drift:

“I’m sort of original recipe, the Rob Cohen original. 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.”

Indeed I can’t really see Nolan sanctioning the buffoonery of something as CG-driven as The Fate of the Furious, but he does seem to be a fan of Lin’s direction in the franchise (Lin helmed Tokyo Drift through F6 and returned to the director’s chair for the upcoming F9).

Sung Kang as Han in the Fast & Furious franchise
Image via Universal Pictures

But all this talk of the increasing scale of the Fast and Furious franchise led to another curious point that Nolan made about sequels. A lot of filmmakers tend to decry sequels that are “bigger,” but the director behind The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises flat-out admits audiences want sequels to be bigger:

“The fun thing about those [Fast and 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. 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.”

Oh yes, this conversation then turns to Nolan on Fincher, as the Interstellar filmmaker took a moment to note that while he’s never talked to Fincher about Alien 3, he fondly remembers walking out of that smaller-scale sequel and immediately being aware of Fincher’s talent:

“I’ve never dared mention [Alien 3] to him. 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.”

The full conversation is well worth checking out, as Nolan talks at length about making Tenet, his process for writing scripts, and that Howard Hughes biopic he was working on in the early 2000s.

In the meantime, we will wait patiently for the next surprising “Nolan likes” revelation. Any guesses?

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Image via Warner Bros.