By Imagine being responsible for funding a new Christopher Nolan film. You'd be sat at your desk - probably a nice one with one of those 1930s green-shaded lamps on it - and in he'd burst, arms open, looking like he needed about £15 million off you.
"Hello! Chris Nolan here! Got another idea!"
"Please, Christopher," you whimper, head on your desk. You've just given him a wedge to build a spinning top that never falls over. "Please, please. Christopher. Please. Not another one."
"And I want to bend Paris in half. Not the proper one! Ha ha!" He really is laughing very loudly. "With CGI. And I'm going to need Leo DiCaprio. Cheers!"
And then he's gone. He's away to bend Paris in half with Leo DiCaprio, and you're picking up the tab.
Those poor bean-counters are apparently going to be very heavily employed for Nolan's upcoming film Tenet too. The Independent reports that Estonian Public Broadcasting (the ERR, or Eesti Rahvusringhääling if we're being entirely Estonian about it, which is the publicly funded Estonian equivalent of the BBC) says Nolan's new feature will cost somewhere in the region of $225 million (£177.5 million).
That sounds like a game of Estonian whispers, but Nolan's films do tend to be a bit spicy for accountants: The Dark Knight Rises cost $230 million, while The Dark Knight, Inception and Interstellar all topped $150 million.
"Estonia stands to win a lot," Estonian finance minister Martin Helme told ERR last week. "On one hand, part of the support paid out will make it back into the state’s coffers as taxes, and on the other there is work and revenue for different sectors, from the film industry right down to the caterers."
No idea how you translate from Estonian into English and land on the word 'coffers', but still, a sweet little bump for Estonia. We don't know much about the plot of Tenet yet but we do know that it's filming in seven different countries around the globe and will star John David Washington, Robert Pattinson and Elizabeth Debicki along with Nolan stalwarts Sir Kenneth Branagh and Sir Michael Caine.
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