Christopher Nolan elected president of the Directors Guild of America
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Christopher Nolan has been a member of the guild since 2001 and has served on its national board and its Western Directors Council since 2015.
PHOTO: AFP
Derrick Bryson Taylor
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LOS ANGELES - Christopher Nolan, the British-American director behind blockbuster movies like Oppenheimer (2023) and Interstellar (2014), has been elected the president of the Directors Guild of America, the organisation announced on Sept 20.
The guild, a labour organisation that represents more than 19,500 film, television and other directors and members of directorial teams, works to protect that group’s creative and economic rights.
Nominees for the guild’s feature-film award, the organisation’s highest prize, often go on to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Director. In the 2025 awards season, Sean Baker, the American director of Anora (2024), won both the guild’s top award and the Oscar for Best Director.
“To be elected president of the Directors Guild of America is one of the greatest honours of my career,” Nolan said in a news release. “Our industry is experiencing tremendous change, and I thank the guild’s membership for entrusting me with this responsibility.”
The film industry has been struggling in recent years because of the lasting effects of labour strikes in 2023, declining production levels and sagging box office sales brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Nolan, 55, has been a member of the guild since 2001 and has served on its national board and its Western Directors Council since 2015. He also leads the guild’s Theatrical Creative Rights Committee and its Artificial Intelligence Committee.
Nolan, who made his directorial debut with a short film in the late 1980s, has become known for expansive cinematography and mind-bending plots in movies like Memento (2000), a psychological thriller about an insurance investigator hunting for his wife’s murderer. That film was nominated for two Academy Awards.
He went on to direct such notable films as Insomnia (2002), the Dark Knight trilogy (2005 to 2012) and Dunkirk (2017).
Oppenheimer, which tells the story of American theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the nuclear bomb, earned nearly US$1 billion (S$1.3 billion) at the box office. The film won seven Academy Awards in 2024, including Best Director, Best Picture and Best Actor for Cillian Murphy. NYTIMES
