It was easy to understand Caine’s suspicion that something more surreal and mischievous had to be afoot. It felt peculiar, after a week steeped in Nolan’s filmic multiverse, to discover that our conference-room surroundings — the kind of functional, placid, slightly uncanny atrium that often appears in his work as a veneer of normalcy — maintained their steady state around us, rather than folding out of themselves into a labyrinthine Mandelbrot sandwich. The paneled glass enclosing us neither shattered with the gunfire of psychical mercenaries nor slid away to reveal a locked safe protecting a manila envelope whose contents itemized the dark heart of Nolan’s character. Nolan, however, does not find himself electrifying and does not take his own life as relevant to his work. He had taken me along on technical errands in New York and Burbank because he sees his most important work in the details of technique, in the decisions to shoot as much as he can on IMAX (“David Lean dragged 65-millimeter cameras into the desert” while shooting “Lawrence of Arabia,” he told me, “and I don’t know why we shouldn’t have similar aspirations”) and to record his score’s piano on a beautiful instrument in an airy room.

Nolan’s collected, tranquil mien has about it something of an achievement, because he spent his childhood shuttling around. He was born in London in 1970, to an English father — who spent time shooting commercials in Los Angeles and returned home with stories about the Beverly Hills Hotel — and an American mother, who had worked as a flight attendant. His childhood was apportioned between London and Chicago. Jonah, who is six years younger, told me that his very earliest memories were of his older brother making stop-motion space odysseys, painstaking processes of tweaking the gestures of action figures. They went to the movies constantly, and Jonah recalls that they brooked no distinction between the arty and the mainstream; they’d go to Scala Cinema Club in London to see “Akira” or a Werner Herzog film one month and then go to the Biograph in Chicago to see “The Commitments” the next. (When Jonah was 13 or 14, Nolan gave him two Frank Miller volumes, “Batman: Year One” and “The Dark Knight Returns,” which the two revered.) Nolan went to an English boarding school with a military inflection and then on to University College London, where he read English literature. He chose U.C.L. because of its film facilities, which included a Steenbeck editing suite. He and Emma Thomas, his wife, began dating in their first year. Together they ran a film society, screening 35-millimeter films to make money so members could shoot 16-millimeter shorts.

Nolan made his first film, “Following,” on $6,000 over the course of a year, shooting perhaps 15 minutes of footage each Saturday. It’s a very clever con-man/murder drama that owes more than a little to Hitchcock, with a sliced-up, rearranged chronology that prefigures “Memento.” Emma moved to Los Angeles, for her job with the production company Working Title, and Nolan, who was having trouble raising money in the clubby world of English filmmaking, soon followed. He and Jonah discussed the idea for “Memento” on their road trip from Chicago to Hollywood. They went on to film it over 25½ days on a budget of $4.5 million.

After that, when he came across the script of “Insomnia,” a remake of a Norwegian psychological thriller, Warner Bros. had the option. Nolan was interested but couldn’t get a meeting. His agent, Dan Aloni, called Steven Soderbergh, an early fan of “Memento.” Soderbergh told me that he “just walked across the lot and said to the head of production, ‘You’re insane if you don’t meet with this guy.’ My sense even then was that he didn’t need our help except to get in the door.” Everything happened very quickly. Nolan made the film on a budget of $46 million, and Soderbergh and George Clooney signed on as executive producers. Soderbergh visited the set in Alaska. “I got there and was having a conversation with Al Pacino: ‘How do you feel? How’s it going?’ Al said, ‘Well, I can tell you right now, at some point in the very near future I’m going to be very proud to say I was in a Christopher Nolan movie.’ ”

The film went on to gross $113 million worldwide and showed Warners he could handle the demands of a studio movie. “Chris is legendary for being prepared, being on time, on schedule,” Soderbergh told me. “We both have this attitude of approaching it with a sense that you have a responsibility to the people who pay for these things to do what you say you’re going to do and do it efficiently.” (Brad Grey, the president of Paramount, praised Nolan for his “fiscal responsibility,” like a parent proud of a child for not blowing all of his allowance on comic books.)

“The single-most important thing was the art of working in the studio system,” Nolan told me of his experience with “Insomnia.” “It takes time to learn how to take notes. In the corporate structure, the people giving you the notes are not responsible for the final product. You are. It’s not their job, it’s yours. When you’re taking notes, it’s possible that you’re having an interesting conversation with a very smart individual and everything they’re saying is correct. But they’re wrong. So you have to go back and approach it from a different angle.” He continues to treat executives as, essentially, representative filmgoers. At a development meeting — at, in other words, a conference-room table — before “The Dark Knight,” he had to explain the Joker’s motivations. “Execs are very good at saying things like, ‘What’s the bad guy’s plan?’ They know those engines have to be very powerful. I had to say: ‘The Joker represents chaos, anarchy. He has no logical objective in mind.’ I had to explain it to them, and that’s when I realized I had to explain it to the audience.”