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Originally appeared on E! Online
Christopher Nolan is counting sheep on his movie sets—that is, fuzzy sheepskin boots.
The Interstellar director confessed one of his unorthodox tenets of filmmaking: He doesn't allow his actors to wear Ugg boots in between takes of his award-winning films, for a very specific reason.
"I want to stay in the moment. I want the actors to stay in the moment," Nolan told Gayle King during a July 20 appearance on CBS Mornings. "For me, the Ugg boots are a signifier of modernity, absurd though that is."
The 55-year-old likened the fluff-free protocol—which applied to stars like Anne Hathaway while working on his most recent period piece, The Odyssey—to snacking on junk food between cuts.
"It's like if someone's eating a bag of chips off camera," Nolan explained. "There's certain things that just remind you're in the real world, as opposed to the world we're trying to create for the actors."
Though he doesn't consider Uggs helpful to the creative process, he made it clear he doesn't have a personal problem with the Aussie favorites.
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"Sometimes actors will turn up—because the footwear hurts—they'll turn up in these big fluffy, comfy slippers," Nolan explained. “The funny thing is, you can be on set with a guy holding a microphone, you've got a giant camera, you've got crew everywhere. But something like that can actually weirdly take you out of reality."
And the Matt Damon epic isn't the first time Nolan's no-no for the suede slip-ons has turned heads. As he noted during the interview, the shoe situation became an inside joke with Hathaway when working on The Dark Knight Rises as well as with Oppenheimer actress Emily Blunt.
"I did show up one day with Uggs, and he looked down and went 'Nope,'" Hathaway laughed during a July 13 interview with USA Today. "I just went 'No problem!' And they never came back."
Joining Hathaway for the sit-down to promote the Greek tragedy's press tour, Damon added, "He hates Uggs more than anything."
Blunt, for her part, experienced a similar interaction when filming with Nolan in 2022. In fact, the actress compared the director's fashion-forward demand to her fictional boss Miranda Priestly.
"He has such an issue with Ugg boots. It's a serious problem," Blunt joked on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert 2024. "I walked in wearing them one day, and it was like The Devil Wears Prada. He literally just stared at them. I was like, 'Chris, come on.' He goes, 'Take those off.'"
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