Nolan's move from Highgate to Hollywood

Christopher Nolan first had a hit movie on his hands two years ago, at the Venice film festival. "It was our first public screening of Memento," he recalls. "I'd been warned that in Venice if they don't like something they boo. The film ends very abruptly and for a few seconds everyone was completely silent. I thought, 'Oh no, they hate it.' Then, suddenly, there was rapturous applause."

Memento, the London-born writer/ director's second full-length film, went on to win him an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. His latest feature, Insomnia, which opens here tomorrow, has been fawned over by American critics, and boasts the first screen pairing of Al Pacino and Robin Williams, not to mention support from Oscar-winner Hilary Swank. It's a lot for a 32-year-old lad from Highgate to handle, but Nolan seems to be taking it all in his stride.

"From the outside it probably looks as if it all happened very quickly," he says. "But it creeps up on you one piece at a time. I felt very lucky to be working with Guy Pearce and Carrie-Anne Moss [of The Matrix fame] on Memento, so it didn't seem that strange to go on to direct three Oscar winners on Insomnia."

A taut, atmospheric remake of a 1997 Norwegian thriller, Insomnia was shot in the frozen badlands of British Columbia and features Pacino playing a morally compromised LAPD detective sent to a remote town in Alaska on a murder case. There, the 24-hour daylight plays havoc with his body clock, leading to white nights and paranoia.

Nolan's wife gave birth to their baby daughter while he was editing the film, so he experienced sleep deprivation first-hand. "With a newborn, you don't sleep for a couple of months," he says. "I definitely think that worked its way into how we finished the film. There's a lot of intricate editing and sound work designed to convey the distortion of perception which accompanies extreme exhaustion."

Insomnia confirms Nolan as one of Hollywood's brightest young auteurs and could see him snapping at Sam Mendes's heels for the crown of most successful British export to Hollywood since Nolan's cinematic hero Ridley Scott. But barely four years ago he was living in a flat off Tottenham Court Road, McJobbing as a freelance cameraman on training films and corporate videos.

Like Guy Ritchie, who also has three films under his belt, Nolan's father worked in advertising (his mother was a flight attendant). The 32-year-old first caught the film-making bug at the age of seven with his dad's Super 8 camera. During his twenties, after an English degree at University College, London, he borrowed the university film club's equipment to produce a succession of short films and later a full-length feature entitled Following.

Released in 1998 to critical acclaim, the thriller had a budget that made that of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels seem like Cleopatra. The crew would travel to locations - equipment and all - in a black cab. The cast was made up of friends, relatives and assorted flotsam they picked up on the way.

The moment Following was completed, Nolan upped sticks for Hollywood. And who can blame him? It seems depressingly predictable that Britain has once again produced a film-maker whose work is so assured and international that most people assume he's American. It's more than 20 years since Colin Welland warned Hollywood that the British were coming. But rather than invading, our homegrown talent continues to be assimilated by America.

While Memento won a clutch of independent film awards and nominations at the Golden Globes and the Oscars, it failed to get noticed at the Baftas. You can't help wondering whether Nolan's meteoric rise would have occurred here. "I don't want to sound too negative," he says, "but I don't see how it would have happened here. Certainly, I never had any luck trying to get funding for films in London. Which is why Following was made for next to nothing. I paid for it myself from what I was earning as a cameraman. It took a year to make, because we could only afford to buy one roll of film at a time and shoot about 15 minutes over the weekend. I like to think that if I'd stayed here I would have found a way to make things work, but, in retrospect, it worked very well going to the States."