Christopher Nolan feels studios are thinking about movies all wrong
We shouldn't be prioritizing plot and scale over a film's "audiovisual experience," according to the Oppenheimer director
Brace yourselves: another famous director has an opinion on Cinema-with-a-capital-C, something that always seems to send the internet into a full-bodied meltdown for some reason. It’s not like movies are their entire life and livelihood or anything!
Anyway, this time it’s Christopher Nolan, who has a little movie called Oppenheimer premiering this Friday. You may have heard of it. Nolan’s upcoming Barbie companion piece treatise on the devastation man has wrought on fellow man is not so little, of course. IMAX prints of the film stretch 11 miles (or, the distance between the Empire State Building and a KFC in the Bronx, per The A.V. Club’s Sam Barsanti), all of which is to say that there’s a lot of room in the film for “pure audiovisual experience,” something Nolan thinks modern cinema is in imminent danger of losing.
“Whether for budgetary reasons or reasons of control, studios now look at a screenplay as a series of events and say ‘this is the essence of what the film is,’” said Nolan, who famously hates series of events, in a recent interview with The Telegraph.
“That’s completely at odds with how cinema developed, right from the Lumière brothers’ train pulling into the station, as a pure audiovisual experience. But it’s a very popular fallacy—sometimes with critics as well, quite frankly—that all that matters is the scale of the story being told,” he continued.
Nolan (cleverly) neglected to wade into the Marvel of it all, as so many of his compatriots have done. Instead, he took the time to shout out the Star Wars franchise, a series of films he said were formative to his early movie-going experience.
“People will tell you that the success of Star Wars had nothing to do with its visual effects, and it was all down to its great story, but, I mean, clearly that’s not the case,” he said. “It is indeed a great story, but it’s also an incredible visual and aural experience. So this willful denial of what movies actually are has set in.” Well, if you’re one of those audience members who feels like they need a reminder of Cinema’s past, present, and future, the weekend’s double feature should provide a great, almost all-encompassing survey.