Look. I’ve made one movie and sold one screenplay. Exactly no one is clamoring for my opinions on cinema. But Chris Nolan insisting on putting Tenet in theaters...is the antithesis of what I think of as good filmmaking.

At the heart, films are about getting people to care about something they didn’t know they cared about. Sometimes a whole lot! And another term for that is empathy. Empathy is the center of filmmaking as an art. Without it, movies are just geometry.

I’ve always struggled openly with auteur theory for this reason. Because to me, wanting to employ your singular vision for sole credit is the opposite of empathy. You want to show off, not let in. But you know, there are lots of good movies made by auteurs, including Nolan.

But Nolan is taking auteurism - the command of a single voice over a movie - and doing something entirely new and worse with it. He’s endangering people. This happens on set all the time, people asked to do something dangerous “for the art” by the auteur. It’s sometimes fatal.

Putting Tenet in theaters - specifically because it executes his vision - is a step beyond a dangerous stunt or an 18 hour day. It is risking the lives of viewers. And not just people buying tickets, but people who have to work around the film - critics and minimum wage workers.

Nolan has decided that’s ok. He’s decided that’s worth the risk to execute his vision. He’s decided that the spikes in death he may be responsible for - which, don’t forget, are disproportionately affecting Black and brown communities - are reasonable - for his vision.

So to me, that’s a bad filmmaker. An incredibly talented one, one whose films I’ve admired. But putting lives in danger for your vision seems to lose the thread entirely on what filmmaking is. It puts workers in a terrible position. It normalizes dismantling empathy for ego.

And I don’t think Hollywood is ever going to stop its long train of abuses - sexist, racist, exploitative - until we stop defining a bad filmmaker solely as one who can’t tell a compelling story.

Talent just isn’t a good enough excuse to kill people.