Why Christopher Nolan ditched CGI and pulled a real 'impulse buy' on a retired jumbo jet

Known for creating huge stunts instead of using modern CGI, famed movie director Christopher Nolan once pulled a real ‘impulse buy’ on a retired jumbo jet and blew it to smithereens in his hit movie Tenet.

A movies go, Nolan’s portfolio is among the best of the best. Oppenheimer, Dunkirk, Interstellar, Batman’s Dark Knight trilogy, and Inception all come from the masterful eye of this action movie wizard.

But there’s one thing in all the films that sets Christopher Nolan apart from other directors: a reluctance to use CGI.

Instead, he opts for huge – and expensive – sets with real props to create perfectly realistic stunts, typified in this wild jumbo jet scene in Tenet.

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How Christopher Nolan bought a jumbo jet to blow up in Tenet

In the same way that Tom Cruise dangles from bi-planes instead of using a green screen, Christopher Nolan is devoted to making the best scenes possible by using physical sets.

It’s what makes him one of the best-paid directors in the world, alongside Steven Spielberg.

Hired to direct the discombobulating Tenet in 2020, Warner Bros. got its money out of the director, as he didn’t hold back in a plane crash scene.

Instead of using CGI, green screens, and other modern film technology, Nolan actually bought a retired Boeing 747 jumbo jet and took the crew out to an empty airport in California.

Here, he choreographed a full-speed collision with practical explosives, debris rigs, and real pyrotechnics, making it one of the best scenes filmed in the 21st century.

What makes this stunt even better is that the cost of buying the jumbo jet, explosives, and the hangar they crashed, is reported to cost less than what it would have to magic one up with CGI.

This technique has set a trend across the movie industry, with the likes of Apple cutting no corners in its destructive scenes within the F1 movie, featuring Brad Pitt and a flaming Damson Idris.

The best times he refused to use CGI

Funnily enough, this isn’t the only time that Christopher Nolan has gotten creative with airplanes.

In his blockbuster opening to The Dark Knight Rises, Bane (Tom Hardy) and his crew hijacked a plane by flying a bigger aircraft overhead and attaching grapples to flip it on its end, dragging it through the skies.

The director used a South African EMB-110 and a Lockheed C-130 Hercules in the stunt filmed in Scotland, although this time he needed to swap out the smaller plane for a prop for its destruction into the mountains.

Elsewhere, the director crafted a specially-rotating zero-gravity chamber for Leonardo DiCaprio’s room-spinning fight in Inception, used actual explosives to mimic the atomic bomb in Oppenheimer, and flew out to glaciers to make realistic sets for Interstellar.

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