Christopher Nolan spills details on Tenet, which is not a time-travel film

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

As is typical with any Christopher Nolan film, the details of TENET have largely been shrouded in secrecy, but as we inch closer to the release of the big-budget epic, we're beginning to learn more about the film. Entertainment Weekly managed to score a behind-the-scenes look at TENET, as well as a few tidbits from the mouth of Nolan himself.

Christopher Nolan said that he's been "working on this iteration of the script for about six of seven years," and judging by what we've seen from the trailers, you might assume that the plot has something to do with time-travel; however, Nolan says fairly confidently that TENET is "not a time-travel film." Instead, "It deals with time and the different ways in which time can function. Not to get into a physics lesson, but inversion is this idea of material that has had its entropy inverted, so it’s running backwards through time, relative to us." The concept of inversion is said to be inspired by real-life physics and entropy, "a measure of disorder and randomness in thermodynamic systems."

"We’re dealing in a world of espionage, we’re dealing in a world of hidden identities," Nolan said. "[John David] is playing an operative who is known by the term ‘Protagonist.’ Tenet is the name of the organization into which the Protagonist gets inducted." Although some have said that John David Washington's character is rather Bond-like, Nolan wouldn't go that far, only saying that, "He is very much a presence at the heart of the film, but, unlike a Bond, he has a very warm emotional accessibility." As far as Washington's co-star, Robert Pattinson, Nolan described him as a "slightly rascally character who operates within what they refer to as this twilight world of operatives in different secret services." The film also stars Kenneth Branagh, Elizabeth Debicki, and Michael Caine, but one member of the cast who hasn't been glimpsed much is Aaron Taylor-Johnson, but Nolan seems to hint that Taylor-Johnson's absence thus far may be by design.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson is indeed in the film. He’s an important part of the film. Yes, there are no photographs of him, this is true. He is briefly glimpsed in the [second] trailer. He’s also completely unrecognizable. There are all kinds of things that happen in terms of where the story goes as the film develops and where it winds up in the later stages that we don’t want to spoil for people.

TENET is currently set to hit theaters on July 31, 2020.