nolen russell

   When Josephine Vadeboncoeur and Alistair Ewen decided to get married, despite their twenty-one year age gap, it was a given that any children they had were going to live incredibly charmed lives. Only ten months into their union, the couple – a combination of a failing model and an eventual Formula One-based multibillionare – welcomed their first child. On October 30th, 1968 Nolen Russell Ewen was brought into the world, an energetic child from the moment he started to cry. However, Josephine and Alistair were not entirely equipped to be parents. Alistair had a business to run and to grow. Josephine had hair appointments, yoga, pilates – this left Nolen in the company of a series of expensive nannies and au pairs. He managed to overcome his parental neglect and grow into an exceedingly bright, although demanding child, his mood swings and unsympathetic nature apparent at a very early age.

   That lack of empathy was compacted with an Asperger Syndrome diagnosis shortly after Nolen turned eight. It was a busy year for the family; three months after Nolen’s diagnosis, his younger sister, Cordelia, was born. That marked the completion of the family, and the beginning of a new role for Nolen, and one that he never took seriously as a young child. However, Nolen’s diagnosis meant medication, and medication meant that the troublesome behaviours he had been displaying came under control. By the time that he was ten, Nolen was functioning as what his parents referred to as “a completely normal boy”, a phrase that he abhors to this day. He took on added responsibilities at school, he joined sports teams, he spent as much time with his baby sister as he could. Nolen blossomed into a promising young man. Although he was socially inept, he was exceptionally bright, displaying a strong passion for art and an uncanny ability at mathematics. For every lack of friend, every empty birthday party, Nolen received a good great in school or a stellar academic review from his instructors; those reviews, however, were always marked by reports of general unkindness and an inability to “get along”.

   Shortly after Nolen’s thirteenth birthday, his parents made the decision to divorce – Alistair, always busy, relinquished custody to his children very easily, on the condition that he could have frequent visits. Josephine moved the family to New York, New York and they settled into Manhattan, where Josephine’s WASP-y parents had hailed from. She remained an absentee parent and Nolen spent a great deal of time in the company of his grandparents, who loved and doted on him and showed him more affection than he had ever received from either of his biological parents. His excellent school performance continued into the American education system, and Nolen even managed to make the odd friend or two. He joined clubs, he played sports; Nolen came into himself, so to speak, all the while remaining heavily medicated.

   School passed with little to no important events, Nolen’s academic accomplishments fading into the background. They were common place, nothing out of the ordinary, and he generally began to feel as if people did not care how he did. As a means of childish rebellion, and to foster an interest in art that he had developed in numerous extracurriculars, seventeen-year-old Nolen turned down an admission to Yale University and opted instead for the University of Southern California. Of course, his family disapproved. There hadn’t been a generation of his mother’s family that had not attended. However, Nolen viewed California as the promise land; a land of sun, fun, and an academic experience that he was sure that he would enjoy much more than a stuffy Ivy League. It also meant a new therapist. At eighteen, in the middle of his first semester of university, Nolen started with a new doctor, a new psychiatrist. A whole new team of people who weren’t quite sure that Nolen still met the diagnostic criteria of a person with Asperger’s syndrome.

   That meant no more medication. While no means mild-mannered, Nolen’s medication certainly did tone him down, and when he was old enough to make the decision to stop taking it and to live what he refers to as an “un-sedated life”, he made it. His fully mercurial and volatile nature came to the surface, and many people, those that he met in school and had similar interests with, felt it suited him better. “He’s meant to be explosive,” one woman said much later in life, commenting on her relationship with him to a publicist, “you can’t be that talented and not have a violent personality flaw.” Though Nolen hated school, it proved to be a breeding ground for creative collaboration. On the first day of classes, Nolen became introduced to a man who was enrolled in the same program and had many similar interests. They hit it off and immediately began to plot all of the films that they would make together, the places that they’d go. Only one of those plans ever came to fruition – the low budget My Best Friend’s Birthday was produced and released in 1987, when Nolen was only 19, funded entirely by the money his father had been sending him. From that moment on, Nolen was hooked; determined to make films and to make them the way that he wanted to, despite being young and never taken very seriously. The other most influential person Nolen met, though, was his future wife. Wren was bright and intelligent, feisty and impossible to control; immediately, the kind of person that Nolen clashed violently with. But that clashing turned into a tumultuous form of affection and in 1995, after the two had graduated (Nolen with an arts degree in cinematic studies and Wren with a biology degree), they were married.

   The time between convocation and marriage was a busy one for the couple. Nolen, with little interest in finding a job and still having an enormous amount of money coming in from his parents, started to write. He wrote, and he wrote, and he wrote, churning out idea after idea, deeply dissatisfied with everything he created. After a consultation with a former professor, and a collaborative revision of a script that Nolen had been unwilling to burn, as he did the others he didn’t like, Reservoir Dogs was born. It took time to find funding, time to find a producer who would buy into allowing a twenty-three year old to direct a film – but after several weeks of rejections, Nolen was successful and he became a first time writer-director. And the success that he found on his first film was astounding, shocking, something that even he could not fully understand or ever come to appreciate.

   The next several years seemed to flash by. Nolen was nominated for and received his first Academy Award in 1994, for Pulp Fiction. He and Wren had their first child shortly after Nolen turned 25. Nolen became more successful, establishing himself as an interesting and influential filmmaker. The couple became more and more unhappy with each other, despite bringing two more children into the world. Shortly after the release of Kill Bill Vol. 2, Nolen came under public scrutiny for a drug arrest. He took six months away from work to “sort his affairs” – meaning he spent the time in a drug rehabilitation facility. The stress of the event had proved too much for Wren to handle and she filed for divorce in 2005, taking their two youngest children with her.

   In the years since, Nolen’s career has seen an explosion. While he was successful before, Nolen found himself finding the freedom to direct and write, essentially, whatever he pleased. He has been nominated for a handful of Oscar nomination for Inglorious Basterds in 2009, and won once again in 2012 for Django Unchained. Though not concerned with awards, Nolen feels as if he is enjoying a certain type of success that many are not privy to – and he is going to enjoy it while it lasts.