Now one of Hollywood's most bankable directors, it's strange to think that Nolan initially struggled to find a distributor for Memento. "Devastating" is the word he uses to describe the knockbacks his misunderstood partly black-and-white noir received, until indie house Newmarket and its ballsy head Bob Berney took a chance on it. The $25m it racked in, aside from paying for a lot of that tattoo ink, upturned both filmmaker and distributor's fortunes. Since then, no Nolan film has grossed less than $100m, with The Dark Knight smashing the billion dollar mark and The Dark Knight Rises poised to beat even that. He's also brought colossal blockbusters in early - six days in the case of The Dark Knight - which is the kind of thing that has studio heads coughing into their lattes. Our guess? He's probably earned his own car-parking space.