Al Pacino’s acting on set is so subtle it’s practically undetectable to the human eye, says Christopher Nolan

Al Pacino is somewhat stereotypically known for yelling in movies, but he did not become regarded as one of our finest living actors on increased decibels alone. No, his range is so great that he is also capable of doing work so quiet, so subtle, that his director may not even notice it’s happening. So says Christopher Nolan, who directed Pacino in Insomnia, in a new interview with the Los Angeles Times.

“I had gone up to Pacino after a series of takes and given him a note on what I wanted,” Nolan tells the outlet. “He told me, ‘I’ve already done that. You can’t see it to the eye, but I’ve done it on the dailies.’ I looked for it and I was like, ‘Oh, my God,’ because there it was.”

There’s a reason Nolan is telling this story while promoting Oppenheimer: Cillian Murphy shares Pacino’s prowess. His performance of the father of the atom bomb “became all-enveloping, when I realized Cillian had so much more going on than I saw on set,” Nolan reports. “Great film actors can do that, and that’s what I had with Cillian.”

The director may not have noticed every nuance of Murphy’s performance on set, but he made sure the audience would be able to see it all by shooting for IMAX. “We associate IMAX with giant landscapes, but here Hoyte [van Hoytema, cinematographer] is shooting faces, eyes, something deceptively simple. Whatever Cillian is feeling, thinking, it opens it to the audience,” Nolan gushes.

Murphy seemingly won’t be able to promote the movie himself anymore (due to the SAG-AFTRA strike), but Nolan will happily promote Murphy himself. The filmmaker calls his star “one of the best actors of his generation,” adding, “I’ve never seen an actor with such a commitment to the truth. But I’d never had him as the lead, so it was a thrill to be able to call him and say, ‘This is the one.’”