Filmmaker Christopher Nolan is enchanted by India as he says the country is “unbelievably visual” with an “extraordinary history” that made it a suitable location for filming his new movie “Tenet”.

Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shot the movie in countries like Denmark, Estonia, Italy, Norway, the UK and the US.In India, the crew came down for a five-day shoot in Mumbai last September.

With a Globetrotting international espionage story and a time-bending element at the centre, the film features John David Washington in the lead alongside Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, Kenneth Branagh, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Michael Caine and Clemence Poesy.

The filmmaker, who previously shot a small sequence of his 2012 movie “The Dark Knight Rises” in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, said he chose Mumbai as it was one of the “most extraordinary looking cities in the world”.

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“Every time I go to India, I’m struck by how unbelievably visual the place is. I had shot a couple of days in Jodhpur on ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ and always wanted to go back and shoot a more substantial sequence, and I had the opportunity to do that on ‘Tenet’,” PTI quoted Nolan as saying.

“We shot in Mumbai, which is just one of the most extraordinary looking cities in the world in terms of its architecture, the amazing people and the abundance of life on the streets there. It’s a really remarkable place with this extraordinary history, so, to be able to take the audience there, it seemed a very exciting setting,” he added.

In Mumbai, the movie was shot in areas like Breach Candy Hospital, Cafe Mondegar, Colaba Causeway, Colaba Market, Gateway of India, Grant Road, Royal Bombay Yacht Club, and the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.

Nolan said that he had a wonderful time collaborating with local crews in pulling off some amazing shots.

“They have such a wonderful love of film and a highly developed film industry, it was really fun to collaborate with the local crews and learn about how they make films and cooperate with them in pulling off some remarkable things, including some of the first-ever aerial shots of Mumbai in a film.

“There are some really interesting things we were able to capture, shooting for a relatively short space of time in challenging conditions because it was monsoon season, so when it rained it really rained. But it was such a wonderfully atmospheric place to be,” the 50-year-old filmmaker added.

Nolan also opened up about roping in a star-studded international cast for the project as he wanted the movie to transcend national boundaries.

“It’s not about America per se, it’s about the survival of the entire human race. I wanted the stakes to be apparent and apparent in the breadth of nationalities. It really is the notion of using the diversity of the cast to express that the threat is a threat to the entire world.

“So from Rob Pattinson playing an Englishman, to Kenneth Branagh playing a Russian, to Elizabeth Debicki playing an Englishwoman to Dimple Kapadia playing an Indian woman. We were really trying to bring in a lot of different national identities to play,” the filmmaker said.

The Warner Bros film is slated to be released in Indian theatres on December 4 in English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.