George Nolfi writes big premises kindly: men in hats who nudge the world, a heist across Europe, a spy who wants to know who made him. His scripts work best when someone else is cutting them, and his directing debut best when it stops explaining.
Fi1m perspective
A coffee is spilt and a life changes course. In The Adjustment Bureau (2011) the world runs to a Plan, and a workforce of men in hats keeps humanity on it with small corrections, a missed bus here, a stumble there. Philip K. Dick wrote that idea to frighten us. George Nolfi, writing and directing it, uses it to keep Matt Damon and Emily Blunt apart for 106 minutes, and the film is at its best when it is about the two of them. That is Nolfi in one picture: a large idea handled gently, by a writer who would rather the people in it were happy than that the idea was followed all the way home.
He came to scripts from seminar rooms, Princeton and then Oxford and a doctorate in political science he never finished, and it shows in what he picks. Fate, free will, who decides. His first produced credit was Timeline (2003), from the Michael Crichton novel; then Ocean's Twelve (2004), grown from his own spec script; then an uncredited rewrite on The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and a shared screenplay on The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), before The Adjustment Bureau made him a director. He has since directed The Banker (2020) and Elevation (2024), which we have not reviewed. Matt Damon is in three of his films.
The best thing with his name on it is the one he had least control over. The Bourne Ultimatum is one long pursuit through Moscow, London, Madrid, Tangier and New York, the answers handed out in brief flashes between the running, and it is the best of the three Bourne films. Nolfi wrote it with Tony Gilroy and Scott Z. Burns for Paul Greengrass, who does not let anyone stand still long enough to make a speech. At Waterloo Station we stopped breathing for a stretch, and it was the camera and Damon doing it, with the script kept out of the way. That is the right size for Nolfi's writing. Give him room and he fills it. Ocean's Twelve is Steven Soderbergh's film about the company rather than the job, and Nolfi's script puts the job somewhere we cannot see it. The Adjustment Bureau is weakest whenever it stops to tell us how the machinery works, and every time it does, the romance goes cold.
He says he starts from character, always, and we believe him. The trouble is what happens next: he explains the character's world to us as though we had not been watching it. Damon and Blunt are easy company and we wanted them left alone; the hats kept coming in with diagrams. Nolfi makes strange premises hospitable, which is rarer than it sounds, and what he needs is a director as unsentimental as Greengrass or an editor with a hard heart. Until he finds one for his own films, watch them at home, where the speeches feel shorter.
Biography
George Nolfi is an American screenwriter, director and producer. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, he graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a degree in public policy and studied at Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship before entering the PhD programme in political science at UCLA.
While at UCLA he sold his first spec script in 1997 and left to pursue screenwriting. His first screen credit was for the 2003 film Timeline. He wrote Ocean's Twelve (2004), co-wrote The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and made his directorial debut with The Adjustment Bureau (2011), which he also wrote. Later directing credits include The Banker (2020) and Elevation (2024). He created the 2015 television series Allegiance.
