In truth, television works in such a way that each episode can end with what in a movie would be a second-act twist. They never have to land the plane, essentially. So you get series that run for years and years and then they try to end it and everyone complains about the way they ended it.
The thing about cinema is it’s a very different medium. Yes, it has photographic cameras, actors speaking, it has music and it’s on a screen, but it’s the ending that defines the experience.
And:
We’ve always had TV movies, we’ve always had miniseries, we’ve always had straight-to-video movies. We’re making movie for the theater. And theatrical experience isn’t just about the size of the screen or the technology behind, although that’s a big part of it. It’s about an audience, the shared experience. What cinema gives you, unlike any other medium, is this fascinating and wonderful tension and combination of dialogue between this intensely subjective experience you’re having of the imagery the filmmaker has put up there, and this extraordinarily empathetic sharing of that with audience around you. It’s a remarkable medium for that and that’s what defines it. What’s a movie? The only definition of a movie, really, is it’s shown in a movie theater.
And:
Every film I make is an attempt to get back to something I enjoyed first as a child. I think Pauline Kael said it very wonderfully about sitting there and the lights go down and the audience’s hopes are concentrated up there on the screen. It’s just a magical moment as a film begins. These larger-than-life and extraordinary worlds I was shown as a kid, films like ’2001′ or ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ as a filmmaker, to me, that’s got to be your ambition: to try to give someone that feeling.
And:
Filmmakers all come to cinema through Hollywood, wherever they’ve come from in the world. They’ve seen those movies. As we enter into cinema as independent filmmakers, I think somewhere in the back of your mind as a filmmaker, certainly for me, there’s always this feeling that the highest aspiration when cinema is working at its absolute best is when it’s a grand-scale film that really works and does something you haven’t seen before. That for me is always the brass ring.
And:
AP: But you saw the kind of suspense you wanted in ‘Wages of Fear.’
Nolan: ‘Wages of Fear,’ I think, is a tremendous example of that. Hitchcock as well has numerous examples of that. But it was even Jan de Bont’s ‘Speed,’ films that had attempted to really shift the feeling of time. And George Miller’s ‘Mad Max: Fury Road,’ as well. I was in the middle of writing the script when I saw that film and I took confidence from it. I took comfort from it. It’s not dissimilar in terms of the modulation I’m talking about. What if you made an entire film that was a car chase? Or Alfonso Cuaron’s ‘Gravity,’ for example. There are examples that have pushed in the direction I was talking about.