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Putting "less emphasis on the characters" in any character-driven narrative is bad storytelling, plain and simple. Strong characterization is imperative, unless your characters are inherently retarded.
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See, I don’t think you’re wrong, but I don’t think Nolan writes character-driven stories.
Let’s take Inception as our example. (spoilers for people who haven’t seen it)
Inception is a movie all about dudes who break into people’s dreams to fuck with their heads. We are introduced to Silas Cobb: he’s our main character, and he is the best at breaking into dreams. He’s on the run from the law, and is also being chased around dreams by his dead wife. He is given an opportunity to clear his name, but needs to pull off some supposedly impossible feat and also manage to avoid his dead wife while doing so.
This is all explained to the audience over the course of the film. It tells us about Cobb’s history, and gives him motivation to do what he does in the movie, as well as put the movie’s plot into action.
But that’s pretty much all we need. The plot is set in motion by the characters, but it doesn’t revolve around them or their temperaments. It’s a heist plot, essentially, and the big draw is seeing how the plan gets pulled off, what goes wrong, and how the team recovers. It’s about the twists and turns the plot takes, not about the characters involved in it.
And I think that’s how Nolan rolls. He comes up with crazy concepts and cool plots, and puts some characters in to push them along. He writes enough into them to make them get things rolling, then the rest is about the ride. Memento is all about the murder mystery being told backwards, Prestige is about a deadly rivalry between two stage magicians, Dark Knight is about Gotham City being fought over by vigilantes.
