Christopher Nolan rejects the idea that Oppenheimer is a “biopic”
Nolan says he views his movie as a heist film, crossed with a courtroom drama—but never a biopic
Aux News Christopher Nolan
Despite having made what is, at least at first blush, a pretty definitive biographical picture about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan says he rejects the “biopic” label for his recent blockbuster historical film, Oppenheimer. That’s per Variety, reporting on a talk Nolan recently gave at a CUNY event, in which he derided the “biopic” label for not being a “useful genre” to work in.
Nolan (who was on stage with his wife and co-producer, Emma Thomas, and American Prometheus author Kai Bird) was fielding a question about why Oppenheimer doesn’t concern itself with its main character’s childhood, with the director arguing that doing so would have given in to “a tendency in biography post-Freud to attribute characteristics of the person you’re dealing with to their genetics from their parents,” dubbing this “A very reductive view of a human being.”
Noting that he dislikes the idea of the “drama” genre for similar reasons, Nolan says he didn’t think about “biopic” as a genre while making his movie because it didn’t give him any useful tools for telling its story. Instead, he said, Oppenheimer pulls from those structures that do serve his goals (and which he’s generally more familiar with): “I love working in useful genres. In this film…it’s the heist film as it applies to the Manhattan Project and the courtroom drama as it applies to the security hearings. It’s very useful to look at the conventions of those genres and how they can pull the audience and how they can give me communication with the audience.”
When Oppenheimer was first announced, it felt like a bit of a departure for Nolan, whose filmography has tended toward more cerebral takes on very straight genre premises: Superheroes, space travel, noir, war movies, and more. In that light, it’s interesting to hear how he views the film, not as a departure, but a continuation of that earlier work, and why he finds the superficial label “useless”:
Biopic is something that applies to a film that is not quite registering in a dramatic fashion. You don’t talk about Laurence of Arabia as a biopic. You don’t talk about Citizen Kane as a biopic. It’s an adventure film. It’s a film about somebody’s life. It’s not a useful genre the same way drama is not a useful genre. It doesn’t give you anything to hold onto.
Of course, it worked out pretty well, in so far as Oppenheimer is now the most successful biopic of all time, having surpassed previous record holder Bohemian Rhapsody. Just, uh, don’t tell Christopher Nolan that, huh?
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For some reason, Chris Nolan thinks it’s a “sci-fi musical sports dramedy”.
“It’s slapstick. Very dry, I’ll admit, but that’s just my style of comedy.”
zom rom com about the bomb
“with the director arguing that doing so would have given in to “a tendency in biography post-Freud to attribute characteristics of the person you’re dealing with to their genetics from their parents,” dubbing this “A very reductive view of a human being.”He ain’t wrong.
Sure, but “childhood is irrelevant” seems like an overcorrection in the other direction. Your formative experiences invariably help shape who you become, even if it’s not the be all and end all of your personality.
(I’m not arguing we needed Oppenheimer’s childhood in this movie, though, as that’s just not what it’s about.)
It shows Oppenheimer’s university years, which are still pretty formative.
It’s not just biography. A lot of dramas needlessly shove in some kind of childhood trauma as if it’s the only way to suggest character motivation.
“Wrong kid became Death!!”
Huh, I thought of it more as a coming of age tale, with some heavy noir influences and a few splashes of Modernism.
I totally get the “pretentious artist says something pretentious” thing is going on, but there’s a good point here. I didn’t recognize the rhythms of a heist movie while I was in the theater, but in retrospect, there they are.
Kinda, but I think the “it’s not a biopic because biopics suck” argument is ultimately a bit silly. Because sure, some, even most, biopics are a slog, but that doesn’t mean it’s an essential feature of the genre. It just means that the category comes with a different set of challenges than other genres.
I don’t think your phrasing is exactly right. Biopics don’t suck because they suck. They suck because they hit the same four beats over and over. When Walk Hard came out, it skewered that tendency so effectively that studios more or less hit pause on releasing them (at least the musical kind) for half a decade.Oppenheimer isn’t “not a biopic because it doesn’t suck.” It didn’t suck because it didn’t hit those beats. They’d been replaced by a set of story points that are just as recognizable (neither “heist movie” nor “courtroom drama” are super original), but hiding them inside of an ostensible biopic was enough that I didn’t recognize the playbook and anticipate every twist and turn. Just my experience.EDIT: It hit some of those beats, but it had the grace to move right along. We get it, the marriage isn’t perfect, etc.
Oppenheimer’s Eleven.
In retrospect, David Krumholtz should have been casually munching on snack food in the background of every shot
This is true of all movies.
I’d say it’s more like he used the heist/court drama formats applied to a biopic. He did a very clever take on a biopic, which is why it feels so different from other biopics (something I noticed when I was watching, but I couldn’t exactly explain why), but it’s still ultimately a biopic.
I haven’t seen it yet because I won’t sit in a theatre for three hours and it isn’t available for streaming yet. Waiting for that.
Is it really like a “heist” film? I didn’t get that impression from the trailer, etc. Is something being heisted, besides our faith in other humans?
I agree with Nolan. I dislike the label and the presumption. I’d never recommend the biopics I’ve seen as a reliable portal into a subject’s life. They are dramatizations and this already assumes significant tinkering with facts. No one’s life is particularly “dramatic” but audiences require it. A documentary attempts to represent a subjects life, but even most docs need sufficient tension to maintain audience interest. I’m always interested in good/inventive filmaking but the label “biopic” is inherently misleading, imo, becuase too many viewers go away thinking they have seen all they need to in order understand a subject’s life and contributions. I loved Rocket Man, but it is entertainment inspired by an artist’s work and life, and its emphasis on the fantastic is its genius.
It’s not a heist movie in any sort of traditional sense. There is a bit of an “assembling the team” element, and the sense that keeping the project funded and staffed with effective people was a highwire act that sometimes involved keeping the higher ups from hearing certain details or perspectives. You could argue that amounts to theft of funding by deception, but it’s a stretch. My guess is he’s really just talking about some rhythms he borrowed.
Thank you, Commk. Asking for info here is so much more helpful (and interesting) than Googling.
It’s not so much a heist film as it borrows some of the same tropes. There’s the getting-the-team-together bit, long planning sessions that often lay out the problems that need to be overcome, the narrow time window (they have to build the bomb before the Nazis do), the sense that it all hinges on a number of things going just right. I get the sense that this is how Nolan views genre – not in terms of the outcomes of the story, but in the themes and concepts.
Thank you for the details. It’s much clearer now and I’ll have a sense of what to expect.
This right here. Nolan is smarter than to assume all heist films need to be some version of Ocean’s 11.
I love pointing this out to people, go brush up on the tropes of “detective” films and then go watch The Dark Knight. Nolan is genius. Seriously at no point in that film does the audience know more or less than “the detective” (Batman) does. He laced in detective themes.
It’s better than the average biopic because it’s presented creatively, with the timeframe of the narrative moving in a nonlinear fashionIt’s better than the average Nolan film because the creative nonlinear storytelling is an artistic choice and not a “magic trick” where Christopher Nolan feels the need to put someone on screen to dump exposition for 10 minutes on how it works because the audience “isn’t smart enough to understand it”
Myopic?
“You were only supposed to blow the bloody Axis Powers up!”
“There are a quarter of a million Italians Japanese in England. They’ll be made to suffer.”
That last line of the article woof. You had me sold on Christopher Nolan’s reasoning and then for some reason you were like “Nolan’s dumb haha!”. Nolan makes extremely valid points about “biopics” and “drama”. Like what even is “drama”? That’s just an umbrella for everything that isn’t humorous… the tells me next to nothing about the film. Strongly agree with Nolan here. Not sure why someone wouldn’t find his reasons agreeable. Why should he have shoehorned in a scene of “young Oppenheimer”? How would that have served the film. Suggesting that due to it being biographical it needed young Oppenheimer scene is a new level of stupidity.
clearly it is more a monopic, as it focuses on one Oppie, not two (although his brother Frank, later founder of San Francisco’s Exploratorium, is briefly shown, and as was the custom of the time, his wife Kitty changed her last name to Oppenheimer, so you could argue that it was a triopic, I suppose).
Three is about the limit. Any more and you just stop counting and call it a “polypic.”
That’s funny, because I rejected the idea it was “good.”
A heist film? Jesus Christ, Chris.
Label discussions like this are almost always totally pointless. Labels are useful shorthand for describing something if you don’t have the time or inclination to get into a longer discussion of the thing’s nature and characteristics, but by nature of their brevity, labels are inherently limited in how much useful information they can convey about something.If one accepts “biopic” to mean “a movie that depicts significant parts of a real historical figure’s life (especially a famous figure)” then Oppenheimer is unarguably a biopic. But in its execution, it’s also quite different in a lot of ways from other movies that are labeled “biopic”. That’s as far as that discussion needs to go. Time is better spent discussing the movie’s actual characteristics (themes, filmmaking technique, performances, narrative) than arguing about whether it deserves one label or another.
This. I’d argue that a lot of mediocre filmmaking has come from treating genres as formulas to implement, rather than merely tools for describing a work.