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
Aux News Christopher Nolan
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.
65 Comments
Chris always struck me as someone incapable who, if he did feel something, he’d immediately ignore it and hope no one noticed. He’s a cinematic engineer.
I still say the screenwriter is most important. You can be the most brilliant director ever, but if your script is crap, you will get a crap movie.
He’s at best a cinematic engineer, which is why he doesn’t give a shit about all that emotional, creative stuff.
That’s precisely what’s wrong with Nolan’s movies. He makes gorgeous looking films by using some of the most creative methods ever, but he always has labryinthian schemes that make no goddamn sense and never sticks the landing. His screenwriting partner is his brother, he has to dump him and get an actual moviewriter.
The only film of his that I truly like is The Prestige because all of the ‘tricks’ are those the characters play on each other. Well, ok, he does love to play with time in that one too, which is a trick. At least the plot and themes are clear and they highlight Obsession and Winning (and losing) so he’s telling on himself as all artists do.
There’s a famous story about screenwriter Robert Riskin and Frank Capra where Riskin, who had written many Capra films, was pissed off because Capra never gave him any credit. And critics always liked to talk about the “Capra touch.” So, one day Riskin dropped a ream of blank paper on Capra’s desk and said, “put your fucking Capra touch on that!”
I think Ridley Scott is a great example of this. Obviously very talented, but can’t identify a good script so he’s been attached to some really good looking crap over the years.
Spectacle has always been a part of it, from Grand Opera to Movies. Of course, Barbie has always been quite a spectacle herself.
“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”
Who are these made-up people you’re pretending about?
Sorry, Chris, plot is way more important than ‘bwamm!’ If your plot sucks, your movie sucks.
I do not think that is what he said.
Dude is all over the place. Nobody says the success of Star Wars is all because of the great story. He’s pulling out straw men, so I’m gonna say plot is more important than ‘bwamm!’.Though he’s not wrong about the ‘this happens, then this happens’ plotting…Trey and Matt are right, you need ‘but’ and ‘therefore’.
I agree with you even though there are films that rely on ‘mood’ – much like a poem; introspective pieces without much of a plot. But, yes, all of the explosions and “bwamm!” and time-trickery can’t subsitute for Story. Without story there is nothing but empty spectacle. Might be cool if he were self-aware the point of making that a theme. Maybe if he lives long enough and starts making his retrospective ‘apology’ films.
I don’t think this is true, although I suppose it depends on what you think makes a good plot. Almost all of Richard Linklater’s movies have only the thinnest of plots (Dazed and Confused, Before Sunset), and at least one has no plot at all (Slacker). The Big Lebowski’s plot is just an excuse to show off the characters. Non-narrative films like Baraka or Gummo are pretty good too.
Don’t confuse depth of plot with plot not sucking. Big Lebowski’s plot doesn’t suck.
‘also, the audience being able to hear dialogue is overrated. in the early days of cinema dialogue wasn’t even available, so i am following in that tradition.’
I’m not sure if you’re quoting Nolan, but if this is his statement, I’d ask “but are current fimakers following the tradition of making a plot accessible without spoken/written dialogue?” The only movies of Gibson’s I can enjoy is Apocalypto because it is one of the best examples of visual storytelling I’ve ever seen.
Congrats, Chris: you’ve attained what multimarket, cross-lingual children’s television has been doing for decades.
The guy who directed Tenet finds the “audiovisual experience” more important than plot? Yeah, that tracks. You’ll also notice “coherent, audible dialogue” isn’t even on the list.
Did you watch the movie? It really didn’t need audio, all the hints and then the reveal of the twist were all done by visual queues and not much dialogue.
And Interstellar (haven’t seen Tenet). I watched the ending on cable a couple of weeks ago and it made slightly more sense, but I don’t think that clarity helped how I feel about the plot resolution. But that movie is otherwise a damn compelling watch.
I really want you to see Tenet. Rent it so that you can watch it a few times. You might find it interesting to dip into a few forums where the Movie Tech. Bros argue about Causation and such (sigh). Don’t even worry yourself about the conclusion. It’s pure Nolan, a koan without an answer (which probably lies in a sci fi future we haven’t discovered yet anyway). Imo, it’s alot like Finnegans Wake: it looks extremely complicated but the plot isn’t so problematic. Would love to hear your opinion, as always 🙂
I haven’t avoided it, just didn’t catch it in theaters and then never got around to it. I generally dig Nolan and I’m sure will get to it sooner rather than later. Funny side story – I was in LA a few years ago and did a bike tour of Hollywood and the surrounding hills. We stopped briefly for the guide to point out Nolan’s house, which is on a corner and you can see into his back yard. The guide made us move along quickly because apparently Nolan is not amused by gawkers and once yelled at his tour group.
!!! Wow, why am I not surprised? He does seem prickly. Maybe just me but I’ve noticed some Brit creatives get temperamental when they settle here, either becuase they find our culture baffling (as did Bowie) or they come from some serious priviledge – like Nolan.
And, goodness, I was accusing you of being negligent. I’m just intersted in your point of view 🙂
All good. I’ll let you know if I get to it.
Interstellar was where Nolan starting losing his touch for me. It’s visually stunning, can’t take that away, but it really just doesn’t work as a story for me.
The last 1/3 just really doesn’t make much sense, including the accusation that Caine’s character knew the program wouldn’t work and still sent the astronauts off to die as some sort of PR ruse. Up until then it’s pretty gripping as you follow McConaughey and Hathaway across the various prospective planet homes, and see the awfulness continuing to expand on Earth. I understand the ending, but just think it’s kind of dumb. “Future people figure out how to send messages through time, including through black holes” is not a very satisfying explanation.
It’s been a while, and I didn’t expend much effort to remember the film, but didn’t it also end up being some kind of “love makes things possible” bit at the end too?
Yeah, something along the lines of being able to quantify love and use it as a wavelength for the aforementioned message-sending.
I ended up putting the captions on for Tenet because I couldn’t understand a damn thing that was being said and I’ve never had to do that with a movie before or since.
Same. Would have been entirely lost otherwise. I have to do it with most movies these days. No one wants to hear criticism of Everything Everywhere All At Once, but the audo at the cinema was so awful I had to watch it at home before I had a clue what was going on.
Comments on a movie’s aural experience are rich coming from the guy who gave us Bane’s disembodied voice.
Hardy and Bale doing funny voices at each other is the best part of that whole movie, it’s absolutely hilarious. I’m not sure that’s what he was going for, but that’s what happened.
Also it lead to Bane being far and away the best part of the Harley Quinn series.
“The streets will run RED…with RAZZIE ZAZZIE”
“I will BLOW YOU UP, chicken satay.”
The best thing about Hardy’s Bane is that it gave us Bane in the Harley Quinn animated series.
It’s really unbelievable how poorly it’s mixed. I swear, Nolan just slapped the booth recordings onto the final film on his laptop when he was flying back to the States, using the laptop’s inbuilt speakers as the monitors.There’s zero room note, it’s a few dB louder than all the other dialogue, it’s hard centre channel – it floats above all the other sound. It’s essentially voiceover.
Who are the people saying visual effects had no impact on the success of Star Wars? Oh, probably in Christopher Nolan’s head
Right? It’s like the MAIN thing people talk about with the OT.
He’s talking about how studio executives approach film and their thought-process. It doesn’t feel like he’s talking about audiences here.
I don’t know about “no impact”, but people do talk a lot about the plotting and Joseph Campbell influence on those films, particularly the first one.
Seriously, it was the effects, especially the sheer scope of what was onscreen, that completely blew people’s minds. Didn’t hurt that it was a well-executed hero’s journey with quick pacing.
He wasn’t just influenced by Star Wars. He was obsessed. Did a stop motion film about it as a kid. I think at this point he’s developed his own personal mythology about all of it and expects us to live in his head with it.
It would be fun to get him in a room with Werner Herzog so they can both make baffling statements about what film “is.”
Werner Herzog is super fun and interesting to listen to, tho. This guy just drones on
Oh, I want to see Von Trier in that group along with old nasty – Woody Allen. Hell, throw Tarantino in there too.
The fucking gall on this guy. Yeah no shit you don’t make movies for the plot, none of your movies have a competent ending, but SOME of us moviegoers actually regard plot as the most important part to a movie.“HEY wasn’t it cool in Dark Knight how I flipped an entire truck over?? Yeah…so Iunno, make Joker break out of jail by putting a guy with a bomb in his belly in there with him then the bomb explodes killing everyone except the joker because that was All Part of His Plan except the joker really is supposed be this agent of chaos without super detailed plans and…”
I really want to see Oppenheimer in the theater, but I feel like the very least I can do is not support and industry where the writers and stars are on strike. I hope Hollywood ends this shit before I have to watch it on my phone.
i think all the union people who worked hard want to see their work appreciated. i don’t think any SAG or Writers Guild people are calling for a consumer boycott. think of it as supporting the theatrical release industry and sticking it to the streamers, if you gotta.
Agree.
So to help SAG you’re going to boycott their work? Seems nonsensical. No one has said that boycotting already produced content under their previous deal would be helpful. Quit the opposite, actually.
“No one has said that boycotting already produced content under their previous deal would be helpful.”And yet, where are the actors doing promotional interviews or even going to the premieres for those same films? How many cast members walked out of the Oppenheimer premiere?
Show me where one actor or union official has encouraged the boycott of already produced content. I’ll wait.
Dick sauce, show me where I said that. I’ll wait.
Christopher Nolan apparently considers Michael Bay a great filmmaker. I guess this tracks…
This is an odd take considering we are living in the time of greenscreen CGI-fest dystopia. Movies increasingly rely on spectacle over story. Nolan worries too much about convincing people he is the smartest guy in the room.
“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.I’m surprised that the comment section is so hostile to Nolan. The jokes about his inaudible dialogue are inevitable, but his seems clear enough. So why are we needling him for shit he didn’t actually say?Nolan is not saying that scripts don’t matter, or that effects are more important than plot. Does anyone on earth think that the guy with screenplay credit for Memento doesn’t care about plot? He’s pointing to a change during his career in the way that producers focus on story at the expense of style. And he’s not naming names here, but it’s not hard to link these remarks to familiar industry trends. The increasing focus on franchises has subordinated directors to powerful producers like Kevin Feige who oversee stories that stretch from film to film. And the streaming market has created a tendency to see film as “content” rather than its own distinctive medium, meaning that directors do not have a strong incentive to shoot their work with the big screen in mind. Nolan isn’t bashing screenwriters; he’s talking about the way Disney and streamers are changing his medium.
That’s what i thought too, maybe no one read the article and just went red seeing him as all the push to take down barbie from the right has gotten people trying to pick sides in a war made by corporations and pushed by people for some reason. Like of all the movies this year, barbie isn’t the one i expect to get a billion from…and nolan’s film isn’t exactly people pleasing its for people who wanna see that. To be fair i never watched the trailers and i’ll likely just wait for reviews but its like most historical movies…i know the plot so im not jumping out of my seat vs fantasy fiction. To be fair, nonfiction lovers say the same about fiction in that they think fiction is dumb and unrealsist fantasy trite and love reading history book like retellings of true events. Both can be fun but im looking for some creative spin from fantasy fiction. Anyway to get back on track, yeah he seems to be just saying a middle ground, its like when people scream practical effects all the time, but some things cant be done in practical and getting the vision of the creator is important to me and some so why not allow a character to fly etc…screaming ugh so fake, no #$($ man. Its just to get the point across like in a book where stage directions say the character flew…doesnt take you out of the story unless you make it. Spectacle aint bad, and yeah its easier to sell to hollywood when you have a bunch of set pieces that sell for trailers and he said its not fun if its not organic but he gets why its done…that’s what i read between the lines in what he’s saying. I dont get where the take that he hates good story telling and thinks plots arent needed and he knows his movies have bad sound and bad endings or whatever these haters are spewing. PS. To be fair we caused the need to have plots that are just plot beats, as we say trailers look boring or i dont know what this movie is about and the fact most go to movies when trailer gives away entire plot. People also seem to love spectacle while watching then hate it later on review or say a movie is boring when there isnt spectacle then get tired if theres too much action, then bored if too much talking etc.
“That’s [the importance of screenplay] 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 is not saying that scripts don’t matter.” He is arguing just that.
Nolan has been heavily involved in the development of virtually every screenplay he has filmed. He has a screenplay credit on roughly half of his movies, and he worked closely with his writers on the rest. Have a look at Tom Shone’s book, The Nolan Variations, for the details. The idea that he neglects the importance of scripts is simply not credible based on his track record. But he is pointing out that cinema began with the dramatic impact of images, even before there was much of a narrative to support them, and that is historically true. Have a look at the Lumiere shorts he is talking about. And Nolan’s filmography bears that out too. After all, the dramatic effect of The Dark Knight is about characters and events, but it’s also about seeing the minimalist Chicago skyline and hearing those anxious soundscapes on the Zimmer score. Interstellar cuts between busy, noisy handheld shots inside the ships and pristine tripod shots outside. This is someone who thinks about how his stories can lead toward cinematic effects.He is saying that stories, whatever their scale, are not necessarily cinematic unless the writers, producers, and directors imagine them that way, and who here doubts that? He’s making a pretty humble, obvious point, and the fact that it’s remotely controversial says something about the state of both the industry and online fandom.
He has screenplay credits. Ok, but that doesn’t necessarily prove that they’re very good. “But he is pointing out that cinema began with the dramatic impact of images, even before there was much of a narrative to support them, and that is historically true.” So what? That’s how it began but that isn’t how it is sustained, even if it did actually begin that way. Everyone who writes for the cinema is writing for the cinema; you’re arguing from repetition. Is it controversy? I don’t think many of the commenters here think that necessarily. They just believe that spectacle, although a necessry part of cinema, isn’t the predominant element. He is saying that.
Its not that people hate film makers or actors that express their opinions on a industry they are involved in or love. In fact we like it more than the days of actors saying they never watch or see movies even ones they’re in and act like they have no interest (wondering if those were better in hindsight since now everyone somehow was a big fan of naruto or something the kids like and you cant tell who’s lying not that it matters) We just hate getting this official stamp that something we enjoy or dislike is best or worst just cause they said it. Their opinion is as good as any other critic. If we vibe with it or see the merits fine. But constantly telling me how true cinema is this or practical effects always beat cgi when im busy worrying about if you got the story across that you intended and dont care if your overworked employees didnt have to do overtime to make sure a 1 sec scene was perfect for pixle counters who will say the film is trash later or an actor didnt break their bones to make something practical that could look cooler with cgi if i suspend disbelief, then yeah i only care about the story. Its becoming that trend where animation fans claim any cgi is bad yet we want seasons done fast and perfect with good work time for artist and detailed fluid movement without any mistakes. Ok…then can i cgi this crowd or car that will take up hours of my time and you wont care about…NO cause ill notice…but you also said that part i didnt cgi was cgi and that part i animated you said was rotoscope…seems you pick and choose what NOOOO do as i say.
I have no comment on anything other than the fact that he is shooting Panavision and the caption says he’s on the set of Oppenheimer.
“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.Wow. The arrival of a Train at La Ciotat was certainly important in the development of cinema, but that’s what is was: the Lumiere’s experimenting with the presentation of the visual movement of objects on the screen. To suggest that cinema begins and ends there is just downright specious. And that very short film does have a ‘story’. The train arrives. People get off and people get on. They were often called “Actuality” films (like documentaries); they caught a a few moment in time, but even that requires recognition and this require the abilit to show that ‘something is happening now and then something else is happening’. Otherwise it would be a snapshot, but even then a good snapshot tells a story. Jeeze, Nolan never went to film school, but he got a great education. Did he never read Barthes or any other semiotician?
Hollywood has been prioritizing scripts over spectacle?