Christopher Nolan’s Movies Are Obsessed With False Identities And Untold Crimes, But Here’s The Real Life Story Behind His Big Brother.

Christopher Nolan has an older brother who spent years living under the name Matthew McCall Oppenheimer, is accused of contract killing in Costa Rica, and has never been publicly acknowledged by Christopher or the filmmaker’s brother Jonathan.

Christopher Nolan has two brothers. The youngest, Jonathan, is a filmmaker in his own right: he created the HBO series Westworld and co-wrote Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight Rises, and Interstellar with Christopher. My older brother, Matthew Francis Nolan, never worked in the film industry. He is known publicly for a single, unsolved chapter that began in Costa Rica in 2005 and ended, at least on the public record, in a Chicago state prison five years later.

In March 2005, an American accountant named Robert Cohen was kidnapped, tortured, and beaten to death in San José. Costa Rican authorities later charged Matthew Nolan with the murder. Prosecutors allege that a jeweler named Robert Breska brought Nolan in to recover several million dollars that Cohen allegedly stole.

Nolan, they say, worked under Matthew McCall Oppenheimer, who claims to be connected to the wealthy South African Oppenheimer diamond family. A hotel worker has been convicted of murder. Costa Rica demanded that Nolan be extradited to his country on charges of aggravated murder, aggravated kidnapping, and using a false document.

In February 2009, the FBI arrested Nolan in Chicago during a bankruptcy hearing. A U.S. magistrate judge reviewed the Costa Rican evidence and, in August of that year, found probable cause only on the perjury charge. The judge ruled that the evidence did not establish a motive for murder or kidnapping. Costa Rica eventually abandoned its attempt to extradite him on more serious charges. Nolan was not convicted of murder or of acting as a hitman.

While incarcerated at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago, authorities found escape items in his cell: a 31-foot rope made of sheets, a harness, a razor, and a metal clip that could open handcuffs. Nolan pleaded guilty to possession of illegal property and obstruction of justice. In July 2010 he was sentenced to 14 months, which was given reasonable time given the length of his pre-trial detention. After his release, he disappeared from public history. Neither Christopher nor Jonathan Nolan has ever spoken publicly about him.

The written facts end there. What remains is the question of interpretation of this passage which definitely raises for anyone who knows the work of the brothers. Nolan’s films often return to double-entendres, describing fake people, crimes that resist clean resolution, and men who live by secret codes. Prestige unlocks competitive ownership and manipulation costs. Memento and Inception explore broken realities and constructed realities.

The Dark Knight trilogy is preoccupied with masks, moral compromises, and the gap between public fiction and private action. Even Oppenheimer, with a middle man burdened by a name and history he can’t escape, gains an extra layer of resonance once the brother’s name is known.

None of this proves that Matthew Nolan’s case shaped any film. Christopher Nolan’s thematic interests were established years before the 2009 arrest, and the overlap may be coincidental or the natural product of a filmmaker drawn to issues of secrecy and double life.

However, the presence of an older brother who lived under a false name, who is accused of a contract killing abroad, who tried to escape from prison with a sheet of rope, and who has never been publicly acknowledged by his film-making siblings is difficult to put aside. It provides a real-world, messy, unsettled, and forever unspoken counterpart to the patterns at work.

Evidence that the brother’s story inspired the films is slim. The evidence that it is changing the way movies are viewed is hard to dismiss.

Thanks for reading Thought Catalog. You can follow us on Facebook here. Or check out our website.