Acclaimed director Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is a thrilling sci-fi movie with a star-studded cast, complete with a cameo by frequent collaborator Sir Michael Caine. Tenet’s screenplay took Nolan over five years to write, and six months to shoot in locations all around the world, before it eventually premiered in 2020. Its release was met with mixed reviews, though its impressive reversed (or “inverted”) scenes and larger-than-life stunts received high praise.
Christopher Nolan is famed for bringing huge action-sequences to the big screen, often employing the use of practical effects to do so. Nolan has stated he prefers practical effects over CGI and miniature replicas, believing “the audience is always aware on some level of the difference between things that are animated and things that have been photographed,” (via practical effects instead of CGI or models for one of the most captivating and dangerous scenes in Tenet.
In Tenet, Neil (Robert Pattinson) suggests to the Protagonist (John David Washington) that they crash a plane as a diversion to break into an airport. Amazingly, the literally explosive scene was filmed by crashing a real 747 airplane into a building. Although Nolan “knew [he] wanted to try and do it in some ways in camera” while he was writing the scene, his initial plans involved a combination of visual effects, miniature models and set pieces. However, when the cast and crew arrived on set in Victorville, California, he quickly changed his mind due to the provisions the location afforded him.
Why Christopher Nolan Didn’t Use CGI or Models
In Victorville, there were a lot of old planes that were prime resources for shooting the plane crash scene via practical effects. While the movie’s budget was by no means miniscule, it was determined that using an older, but real 747 plane for the crash would actually be more cost-effective than to trying to artificially create the scene using props or CGI, which together with Nolan's own leaning towards practical effects resulted in the team going for a real plane crash instead of the alternatives. The scene was shot at a working airport, where the crew “had a tow-rope from the place through the set, attached to a couple of big tow trucks,” the film’s visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson recalled (via The Hollywood Reporter). He added they had to “put 747 brakes back on the wheels so that [the crew] could stop it at the point where it needed to stop. It did go a little farther than it was meant to, but that just made it more exciting.”
Christopher Nolan described his decision to crash a real plane in Tenet as a spur-of-the-moment purchase or “kind of impulse buy,” (via the Tenet cast and crew agree it was the right way to create the scene, with Pattinson stating “[it] feels very very real, essentially cause it is real,” (via Warner Brothers Pictures). Using practical effects throughout filming Tenet not only made it easier for the actors to perform to their fullest - as they were experiencing some of the film’s events playing out in real life - it also made Nolan’s ambitious scenes appear all the more real to viewers of the movie itself.
