This Is How 'Tenet' Relates To James Bond, According To Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan is winding up to release his new time-bending spy thriller Tenet, and some fans have been wondering if his new protagonist –named Protagonist, and played by John David Washington – might be a black James Bond figure, or a dry-run for the famously Bond-savvy director to get his eye before moving into the British spy franchise. 'Yes and no' is the answer, according to the director.

Tenet's protagonist, "is very much a presence at the heart of the film, but, unlike a Bond, he has a very warm emotional accessibility," Nolan told Entertainment Weekly.

Even more enigmatically, Nolan mentioned that Aaron Taylor-Johnson will play a pivotal role in the plot, despite not having turned up in any of the images released so far.

"Yes, there are no photographs of him, this is true. He is briefly glimpsed in the [second] trailer. He’s also completely unrecognisable. 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."

Recently, Nolan mentioned that he'd had to put his own personal Bond fandom on ice while working on Tenet.

"This is definitely the longest period of time I’ve ever gone in my life without watching a James Bond film," Nolan told Total Film. "My love of the spy genre comes from the Bond franchise, and the Bond character very specifically. I know as much about the Bond films as Alan Partridge does."

That meant that he didn't want to do any screenings of other spy films for the benefit of cast and crew.

"It’s totally in my bones. I don’t need to reference the movies and look at them again. It’s about trying to re-engage with your childhood connection with those movies, with the feeling of what it’s like to go someplace new, someplace fresh. It actually has to take them somewhere they haven’t been before, and that’s why no one’s ever been able, really, to do their own version of James Bond or something. It doesn’t work. And that’s not at all what this is. This is much more my attempt to create the sort of excitement in grand-scale entertainment I felt from those movies as a kid, in my own way."