Hugely cineliterate, Nolan's movie touchstones are legion, with Ridley Scott and Nicolas Roeg self-professed influences. Comparisons with Stanley Kubrick are also particularly hard to avoid. The two make meticulous, cerebral movies and, much less fairly, both share a reputation for films with emotional cores that exist under layers of permafrost - if they exist at all. The zero-gravity flair of Inception has roots in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the cool-headed crime of The Killing parlays into Nolan's neo-noir Memento, but while we're sure Nolan would take "the new Kubrick" over, say, "the new Uwe Boll", it's an invidious parallel for a man who's always striven to do create new. Still, it would be nice to see Nolan growing an enormously bushy beard one day.