Christopher Nolan says he still gets pre-release jitters after decades of filmmaking

Christopher Nolan may be at the top of his game, but he still gets nervous every time one of his movies is about to be released.

On Tuesday’s appearance on “The Daily Show,” hosted by Jon Stewart, the “Oppenheimer” director said that releasing a film is always daunting because he devotes so much of himself to each project.

“One of the responsibilities, but one of the great thrills of my job, is that you get to live in a world for a couple of years, and I devote myself to that fully. For me, that’s never finished, really, until the film goes out to the audience,” Nolan told Stewart. “The audience finishes the movie. They tell us what it is that we did.”

Ahead of the July 17 release of his next film, “The Odyssey,” Nolan said, “Right now, we’re a few days away. And it’s a terrifying time.”

The film, starring Matt DamonAnne Hathaway, and Tom Hollandis based on Homer’s ancient Greek epic, which tells the tale of Odysseus’ 10-year struggle to return home to Ithaca after the Trojan War.

Nolan said he screened the movie for test audiences throughout production.

“You have an idea of how the movie’s playing for an audience,” he said.

Still, the uncertainty surrounding a worldwide release never goes away, he added.

“It never gets any easier, and it’s absolutely terrifying,” Nolan said.

Expectations for “The Odyssey” are especially high. The film is the first feature to be shot entirely with Imax cameras, fueling demand for premium Imax and 70mm screenings. Some fans are traveling abroad to catch it, while others are paying as much as $600 for tickets to one of its first screenings.

It’s not the first time Nolan has spoken about the nerves he feels before a film’s release.

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times ahead of the release of “Dunkirk” in 2017, Nolan described the wait before audiences saw the film as “this awful, tense moment.”

“It’s this kind of horrible holding pattern of stress,” he said.

Nolan isn’t alone in feeling that way. Other acclaimed directors have also spoken about the pressure of making movies.

In 2012, Steven Spielberg told CBS News he still experiences “stage fright every single morning” when he gets to set.

“If I didn’t have that, I wouldn’t be a director. You can’t make a great movie from a position of great confidence. The more nervous I am, I think the better the films turn out,” Spielberg said.

In 2022, ahead of the release of “Avatar: The Way of Water,” James Cameron told AP News that no filmmaker is immune to pre-release jitters. Anyone who “says they don’t get nervous before a movie drops” is a liar, Cameron said at the time.