Christopher Nolan on his career, including Oppenheimer and the Batman triology | BFI in conversation

so let let's just start with a little bit of the kind of your essential love of film and the films that you saw the F the films that really made an impression on you and first gave you that feeling that of what cinemar could do and also maybe gave you an inkling of what you might be able to do in cinema yeah I mean I think the first film I actually remember going to see I was very young was Snow White in the 7 dwarves um at I think it was muzzle Hill odion which is now on every man might have been the holway holay odion um and I remember very clearly being affected by particular the scene where um the evil queen turns into an old Crone you know the poison apple being very frightened of that hiding behind the seats um I think as far as influential movies and things that sort of to show me the the potential of films uh it was a very uh special time in terms of blockbusters so George Lucas's first Star Wars was it came out when I was 7 years old and um a spy who loved me was the Bond film of the time I remember going to see that in the cinema uh and those are the kind of films that I think a lot of filmmakers you know you come to film through the Hollywood Blockbuster those are the big films that you know as a kid you wind up going to see um I did have the very special experience of going to see 2001 uh on a film print because Star Wars was so successful they they re-released that film the year after that so I went to see that with my dad in uh in Leicester Square at the old leester Square theater on it would have been on on 70 mil um and that was a film I I remember that experience very clearly I remember just feeling the enormity of the image and the potential for that screen to kind of you know just take you anywhere um yeah and I guess seeing it at that age it's a or indeed any age with 2001 it's it is a question of you experiencing it rather than understanding every frame of it it's a kind of cumulative effect isn't it I think I mean I saw it when I was 7even years old and I I think I understood it certainly as well then as I do now maybe better I think maybe better because you just you take it for granted you experience it and the the Beauty and the magnitude of the images and and the feeling of you know traveling across the solar system or whatever I mean that that it's the point of the film it's a sort of wood for the trees thing I think as a kid you're actually pretty open to those visceral experiences uh and I think a lot of your appreciation of movies and the entertainment value of movies is very uh simple and it's just experiential in that way yeah did you also appreciate film as a kind of Time Machine as well in that it it it sort of it does capture and transcend time it can you know somebody can die over and over again in film can't they they can indeed yeah I mean I think some years ago was doing a U an event in India with my friend U the artist tastard deine who works on 60 mm film and has been very involved with me and with the BFI in in film preservation that is to say trying to preserve the medium of of film for future Generations uh for acquisition and and for projection uh and she pointed out that that the camera literally sees time and the more I thought about what she said and I applied it to my own Fascinations and my own interest in it for for work I mean you know it's only in a post-film world where you can conceive of slow motion or fast motion or things running backwards you know these are things that uh people before movies wouldn't have had any any idea of or any thought of and was that so that was something that you first appreciated through film rather because it was literature that you studied it at University but it was film but I did but I me mostly was making films and you know you know thinking about films you know getting by in literature but uh yeah I mean uh my interest in films has always been sort of overwhelming in terms of anything else going on in my life and when I got to UCL uh where I went to college it was a Film Society a student run Film Society in the basement of Bloomsbury theater it's still there today and you were able to shoot 16 mm films and uh and then in the Bloomsbury theater upstairs we would project 35mm films and use the proceeds from that to pay for film making so even though I was yes I was studying English literature I think I spent most of my time making films actually and clearly you were attracted to film Noir as a early on as a because which I suppose is a kind of expression of of the human you the human psyche isn't it as much as being any having any kind of Thriller content and film Noir and and psycho analysis kind of grew up together grappling didn't they as yeah I know I think I I think to a degree yeah I mean I think film Noir certainly I think the attraction of that genre particularly to a younger filmmaker starting out as it is it works at its best as an extrapolation of relatable fears and anxieties that's really the Bedrock of the attraction of that genre for audiences so when you're younger starting out and you don't know anything haven't experienced anything being able to extrapolate from your own uh fears and anxieties into into a more Universal Realm more universal language uh that's a really important tool for for a filmmaker so when you came to make momento which was um I mentioned following in the introduction which had obviously Noir kind of the step then to momento which was as it were the breakr film again very much uh a kind of Noir but about memory in some ways in a very a very complex sense so what made you want to make a film as it where where the chronology was backwards well I think you know in the noral tradition there there is a tradition of Amnesia films um that that momento was certainly inspired by and tapping into but it's based on a short story that my brother wrote and and told me about as he was writing in fact and um it yeah I mean it it's essentially dealing with somebody who can't make new memories um and ultimately what we decided uh what I decided in talking to my brother about it and tasked him within finishing his story is if you could tell the story subjectively that would surely be the most interesting way you know trying to live in in somebody's head like that um and so he in his story found ways to approach that um and me in the in the screenwriting you know uh ultimately decided that if you inverted the chronology um you know then you'd put yourself in the position of somebody who doesn't know what's just happened I mean the Revenge story is you know it's a staple of of movies and and literature generally and and Noir fiction in particular and so it always raises interesting ethical questions and I think momento more than any film I've made really tries to suggest that uh the ethical framework of the Dilemma is defined really by the point of view so it really is a question whether you're in his head or whether you're observing from outside in terms of how you judge the ethics of of how he's behaving so following on from momento you you made insomnia which was had originally been there was a Norwegian film and this is this was the Hollywood um version of this so you were working at that stage from somebody else's script which is you then you're done with that after that but um I suppose insomnia still felt a bit like you know you were dealing with something has originally been a kind of art housee film but then you go to The Dark Knight trilogy which that's introduced you obviously to Warner Brothers and then you go to The Dark Knight trilogy was that a big decision to go from something you've made such personal films until then I know you were still starting out was that something that you and Emma Thomas discussed as you know what you should do next how no not really I mean I think the the notion of personal or not personal doesn't really apply to my work they're all equally personal and and actually I me the interesting thing with insomia was it was a remake of yeah very brilliant Norwegian film um and Hillary sites Who is credited with the screenplay she had written a great adaptation of the original film and then she worked with me uh I was a great creative partner in rewriting I then did the last dra myself I didn't take a credit uh because she had done you know the vast majority of the work so that seemed appropriate um but I did write the last drum and I do on all of my films and so my relationship with the material is no different really than any other film um I've been involved with because some of them are adaptations some of them are original that one was a remake some have been sequels uh some are from novels you know I mean it's it's always always different um and yet the process has to be always the same in terms of finishing that last draft and then me approaching it as a director uh so no I think where you see more specific progression and that was probably a little more not necessarily uh self-conscious but the scale of the films you know grows in what for me was a very useful uh Cadence because went from a no budget film you know following was literally made you know with friends shooting on the weekend we were all working you know full-time jobs um and it was made for nothing uh and then momento was a you know a lowbudget move movie but uh you know it was about $4 million or so um and then insomnia was sort of 10 times that so then by the time we get to The Dark Knight trilogy Story bman begins we working on a much bigger scale but it was a a pretty good progression actually um so I felt I was challenged at every stage with taking on something bigger um but I didn't do what a lot of filmmakers since you know I did those films um there've been a lot of film like you've gone from their sort of whatever their momento is straight to their Batman Begins and that's a very difficult leap and I would not have wanted to have to try and make that kind of technical leap in terms of marshalling resources and everything I feel very lucky to have done a a more modestly budgeted Studio film and learned a lot about how to make that work and working within that system before I then you know took on the their larger scale properties and your vision for Gotham City and and Bruce Wayne's travails was um informed quite a lot by sort of European expressionism by Fritz Lang I mean yeah definitely I mean I think Lang's influence was more on the Dark Knight actually I think with Batman Begins uh on the design working with Nathan Crowley who worked with for years um we he very much wanted to take it in a modernist Direction and I like that and enjoyed that and we pushed a little bit in that direction but I felt that given the history of Batman how he'd been portrayed on film before even though we were trying to do something different I didn't want to completely abandon the sort of Gothic underpinnings of it quite so much and so Batman meins was more of a hybrid in that sense um and then by the time we got to the dark night we sort of built more confidence to take it in our own Direction and push in a in a very heavily sort of Mo modernist Direction and for the script more than the design really I pushed my brother who wrote the first draft of the Dark Knight um I pushed him very much in the direction of Fritz Lang looking at Dr mausa things like that um this idea of the sort of Master criminal in you know expression of Cinema the relationship between the city uh and and the master criminal and I think it it gave him a lot of inspiration actually um I think visually that that isn't necessar as strong a relationship I think it's a little bit more about almost sort of the the the morality of the thing really and and the relationship between police and you know criminal underworld um and then the idea of some kind of geographical or or architectural expression of that within the the visual nature of the film uh but obviously we're were doing it in a more more modern way I suppose and also the kind of fast themes as well in that Bruce Wayne take takes on this this mantle of Batman at some considerable personal cost doesn't he there's a price yeah definitely well it's it's yeah it is a sort of deal with a devil I mean it's it's really that idea of a sort of means to an end if you like and I think the Batman mythology one of the reasons that it's continually interesting and is continually reinvented by new generations of comic book writers and artists and and filmmakers uh is because that essential Paradox or that essential idea of of uh a good vigilante you know somebody who feels that they have to resort to criminal methods will be outside the system in order to fix the system uh it's endlessly complex and interesting in in its ethics and also the sort of twinning theme which will turn up in your films you know before before and after that that idea if there's a if there's a Batman there should be a joker well you surpr surprised by the appeal of the Joker to audiences how fascinated they were by him I mean no I wasn't because when I read Jonah's first draft which was it was a very unwieldy document and it you know uh it was it was long and and took us a long time to kind of get it into a practical shape but the character of The Joker was there like this sort of engine running through it um I had told him I needed jok to like the shark in Jaws he needed to sort of come through and thread through the film in this with this particular energy and he had just found that and absolutely cracked that even in that first draft and then when I brought Heath on and talked about it how it was going to work and saw his ideas and his references and as that started to come together um it was endlessly fascina you know very very interesting to see and as we shot with Heath you know right from the the first hair and makeup test you could see everybody on the floor just fascinated by them I mean it was just just sort of interesting creation um and it started with Jonah's script and then Heath's interpretation was so compelling um that now I think we all felt as we were filming it that that character would have very very special appeal and I think the challenge actually of of the film and the edit was to have all of the other elements in balance with that so you know Christian Bale and Gary Oldman everything that you know their story you know you can't give it all over to the Joker even though he's this incredibly magnetic and powerful force at the center of it um but no I think we all sort of felt that really developing as we were as we making the film yeah I guess that the challenge is that billionaire Bruce Wayne is is you know in some ways a less attractive figure yeah yeah in cinematic terms well but I mean a good villain I mean the devil has the best Tunes you know that's that's the thing and and um it's what really as I say it's the engine of the film it's what really makes it work um so we all knew how important it was going to be U but it was it was thrilling to see audiences really really respond to that and of course there've been all sorts of interpretations from right or left about appropriating the Joker one way or another I mean what do you make of those uh politically speaking well I mean we found that on on all three films people often attempting to put some kind of political interpretation on the films but it sort of ignores the Mythic landscape in which it take place certainly with Dark Knight Rises which you know has its share of people pulling at it politically right and left um either side of the political Spectrum in choosing to to interpret the film in their own terms they're willfully ignoring you know big chunks of the story to do that or big chokes at the point of view um so really it's important to remember the Mythic landscape uh the end of The Dark Knight is really drawn from Shane the Western you George Steven's wonderful Western and out of the past you know so it's it's Mythic American it's film Noir it's the Western I think where people get slightly confused by it or in that sense is is that it's a contemporary staging um because that's what what works for for Batman but even though it's a recognizable sort of Contemporary American cityscape uh emotionally you know thematically it's it's the Mythic Americana of you know crime fiction and and of the western I mean nonetheless it it the films did anticipate the rise of kind of disruptor leaders in politics all around the world didn't they so do you do you think they were sort of of their time in in I think they're very much yeah very much of their time um in that I mean certainly with David goyer my co-writer with my brother Jonah other co-writer the attempt was always to just be honest about presenting the things we were affected by things we were worried about afraid of um I mean certainly when I look back at Batman Begins there's a heavy emphasis on on terrorism on the sort of post 911 world but we it wasn't something we were consciously putting into the film we were just trying to be sincere and truthful about what moved us at the time um certainly The Joker for me and and The Dark Knight is all about a fear of Anarchy you know fear of the rules breaking down and and what that would do to society uh and The Dark Knight Rises is very much fearful of fascism fearful of demagogy um yeah and I I think you know I suppose in a sense we were sort of tuning into things around us in the world that we were worried about and and you know some of them come to pass you know so obviously you made other films during during that trilogy as well um did the Fantastic success I mean the huge box office takings of those films allow you to do something like Inception for example which you know was very daring cinematically yeah I mean it it definitely helped yeah um sure I mean coming off the Dark Knight I I think I've been working on inception for a very long time um I never really tried sort of pitching it to the studio or anything so I'd never really gauge the response in the absence of The Dark Knight I'd probably been afraid to uh but certainly following that film when I took it to the studio they you know they were very receptive they wanted to to do another film with us so um that smoothed away for what might otherwise have been received um with some raised eyebrows because it is a it's an unusual film and a complicated film uh and a very expensive film which is a tricky combination so I think both Emma myself Emma Thomas my producer and wife uh who's somewhere in the audience here I'm single around she's going to stand up ah there she [Applause] is I I think we both we both felt coming off the Dark Knight that we had a very very unusual opportunity to make something on a large scale with I mean not cart blanch but with a lot of freedom and so we we sort of dove in head first to do Inception because um you very aware when you get an opportunity like that I mean firstly how much you yourself have wanted to do uh something very ambitious like that but also how many other filmmakers are in the world who don't have that opportunity so um you really feel you know kind of an obligation almost to to just take a risk and and maximize it can I bring in something else that obviously was happening um around the time in terms of thinking about IMAX as a format um because clearly you know you're getting into an area where these films are just extraordinary that was it something that you had in mind when you go to make a film are you thinking about that particular format yeah depending on the film I I had first experienced IMAX as a kid uh in museums around the world actually Omnimax which is the variant of IMAX it's a Dome Theater um that isn't there's not much of it around anymore but uh in various museums uh in America they they had this format you'd watch Nature Documentaries and things and I always found it to be a very visceral sort of overwhelming experience I thought why not make a film that way and as I started to get into the film there was there was no way to do that but right around you know in in the sort of 10 years leading up to Batman Begins you know when I was in my early 20s um I'm actually started showing they they created a process called the DMR process whereby they could take a a regular 35 mil film and blow it up for their screens so they started building IMX CZ in commercial Cinemas uh for the first time and so by the time we got to Batman Begins I was able to say to the studio well can we transfer this we couldn't shoot an IMX no one had ever shot a thing in IMX for for those screens but then you had to transfer it and so I got to meet the IMX guys blowing up Batman beins and and you know it did well in that format so leading up to the Dark Knight I went to them and and said I'd like to take your cameras that have been used for you know Nature Documentaries and you know they' gone to outer space and up Mount Everest and all this the stuff but no one had ever shot a narrative feature with them uh so we started looking into it and it was a it was a very large undertaking because no one had done it there were a lot of a lot of unknowns a lot of fears about it um but I had read an interview with uh James Cameron years before where he had talked about whether you could make a film on IMAX and how that would work work in terms of what he'd figured out Cameron being the technical genius is is that you'd extract from the larger negative the smaller negative that you'd need for your regular release so rather than doing different versions or whatever you you'd have one definitive version that you could you could uh transfer to your other distribution formats and that's stuck in the back of my head so when we came to do it on the dark night we we figured out how to do that how to shoot an IMAX negative which is you know very tall frame but frame within that uh protect for a cinemascope version which is like the clip we just showed um and make it work in that way and figure out which sequences we could shoot that way uh the cameras are very loud so you don't really want to do dialogue scenes that way so we laid out which of the action set pieces we would shoot the IMX camera starting with the opening of the film where we introduced The Joker um and yeah we we went ahead and did that and uh it was you know it was a great success and kind of moved the format forwards and and I've been working in that format ever since CU I I just love it and that's really where the film begins with you with the IMAX version is it I mean is that what you thinking as it were I mean yes or no it it depends on which sequences you're you're in um it's pushed us over the years i' certainly working with ho van hoer as I had have for the last 10 years or so um by the time we get to Oppenheimer our conversations are a lot about uh not it it pushes you to a way of looking at cinematography where you're not looking at the prum you're not looking at the frame and making two-dimensional compositions you're really just putting the camera in proximity to the actors and you're composing in a three-dimensional sense you're sort of composing situationally and then that gets formatted to different shape screens and and holds up great and ho has a wonderful eye for that so in its IMAX version the extreme top and bottom it's really about the peripheral vision it's really kind of filling out the frame rather than boxing it in um so it's less a question of seeing things get boxed into particular compositions and more a question of pulling the frame away for that version uh and so it translates I think very well to the other formats as well for that reason so yeah no it's been it's been a a sort of ongoing experiment that we we quite enjoy and moving on as we inevitably have to do given the constraints of time to inter Stell there was a treatment by the physicist uh Kip Thorn I believe which is sort of the basis is where where you start which is to do with relativity and gravity and T well all all of those things is that where you began well no I mean Kip had an ambition to the Genesis of the project was Kip had an ambition to see a Hollywood film made based on scientific principles and so he was friends with the producer Linda opst and they had sort of taking this idea to Steven Spielberg and Stephen hired my brother to write it and so for years I was aware of Jour developing this project writing about it and so he would talk to me about it and I thought it was pretty pretty exciting and then ultimately Steven moved on did something else and so it became available and I I went to Jonah and said you know how would you feel if I took this and combined I had a couple other script ideas I wanted to combine it with um and he was willing to sort of you know let me do that and then we managed to negotiate with the studio so that we could uh take it on uh and that's kind of where the you know the project really came from um and in the finished film you know the whole setup the whole world of it the whole First Act is is pretty unchanged from what Jonah developed over the years uh and I worked very closely with Kip uh who' work with my brother and then when I took it over um I worked closely with him as well to try and really mine his incredible brain for what are the possibilities of science uh what do concepts of Relativity uh offer you for a narrative and Jonah had identified early on in talking to Kip and and researching it you looked a lot of Einstein's but Ein sort of thought experiments they tend to be very narrative so they tend to involve a set of twins you know when one goes off on a space ship or whatever one goes off on a train one is left at the station and they come back in the different ages and there's a sort of weird Melancholy to them almost uh and so a lot of that fed into his idea of what what the story should be and then I kind of borrowed in you know further and further with Kip on the relationship between quantum physics and classical physics and you know gravitational Theory and all this stuff and a lot of what you know he he came back with was truly Stranger Than Fiction uh really mind-blowing stuff um in visual terms it found its ultimate expression in the look of the black hole in inell which Kip insisted he wanted to talk to the visual effects guys about it and everything and I sort of was a bit worried about that because ultimately you want something kind of looks cool you don't necessarily really matter if it's scientifically accurate but what Kip had figured out Kip had all of the equations that would explain you know that would define how the gravitational effect of the black hole would affect the light behind it and and how it would therefore look he just really needed the computing power of our visual effects company to to render that so uh he worked very closely with Paul Franklin our visual effects supervisor uh and they created this incredibly uh realistic rendering of a black hole uh they actually published a couple of different scientific papers jointly about it uh and then some years later they actually managed a photograph of black hole in real life and it was on the front of the New York Times and I looked at it and I called Kip and I said well I guess you were right uh very glad to see that you were right and all black hole holds up and yeah it sort of become the the kind of standard way of of looking at it now but it was all based on absolutely the real the real science so it's all moving towards Oppenheimer I guess isn't it in in the sense of wanting to make that story of the father of the atom bomb and and the discovery of that Force um to make us feel as they were there for it is that right I think yeah I mean I think with woman films have had an increasing desire to really try and create an immersive experience and try and create a tactile sense of of a world and and you know put you there in it uh and I think that where that Finds Its maybe its ultimate utility in Oppenheimer is the the excitement or the tension of that story was always going to be based on you know can you actually be there for the Trinity test can you be in that room with these scientists deciding to go ahead and and do this thing uh and experience those those Stakes because obviously it's a story that's ultimately it's about you know people talking in rooms it's not the most obviously cinematic IC but the Trinity test itself in particular if if you can really feel that you're there for that uh it it would have been just the most extraordinary moment in history you know to be there and the tension of that you know felt like it would be inarguable and so yeah I think I I think I brought my experience to bear in terms of uh creating that tension creating that sense of being there there's a lot of detail work and things that that go into you uh you know feeling uh the tension around it feeling that you're there um as I pointed out to to Jen lame my editor it's a second film done with it but I said the thing I've learned about editing suspense is it's very tedious to edit actually because you have to repeat things a lot you have to sort of keep showing the same thing advancing at a particular pace and you have to tune that pacing to to the audience and so least Smith who cut that clip we just seen inter cell there's a lot of a lot of work on how slow to make the robot relative you know to the wave coming and all this and um you have to be very mechanical and pedantic about how you put those secenes together so that the audience can understand what they need to for the tension and those are those are things that you can gauge in what way I mean how do you know what is the point where the audience will become incredibly frustrated because a door is a lever is not moving or something well I think you have to feel it with your own internal clock um and then you sit with an audience and you watch it and and that sort of tells you as well but one of the the things I've learned over the years is to really judge it you have to watch the whole film because your sense of an internal rhythm is very very different depending on where you are in the film and the the pace of the sequence you've come out of you know um I often have the experience particularly with the Dark Knight film um if they're playing on TV or whatever and I happen to turn it on and it's in the last third or so the editing seems bizly fast to me and and you know it's it's somewhat choppy because it has to be to to get that pace um but it works if you watch it from the beginning so it modulates through the film you can't edit things with the same Rhythm different points in a 2 and a half hour film uh so to know where you are with something like the Trinity test to really have a gauge or we' have to throw the whole film up and and watch it with an audience and sort of feel that internal clocking and and how it was working yeah and of course it's it's different when you're dealing with history as well because people sort of know the outcome so do you have to modify it in a different way I mean not not not really I think the thing with Cinema and the way it works is I think uh you know when you go to see Titanic you you know the ship's going to sink you know it's it's you know the ice B's coming but it I I think you you enter a different world and that forn knowledge occupies a different space in your brain it's not literal I don't know what's going to happen um whereas if internally in the film let's say Cameron had decided to you know begin with the iceberg ship and then flash back or you know whatever that would weigh heavy in a different way you you you know it's it's really about what's within the text of the film in a way that you're judging and so um with Dunkirk for example you know the suspense we just treated it um the way we would have with a fictional story um and I think when the audience is there in the theater and the lights go down and they they engage with that film they tend to take it on its own terms and I think whatever the for knowledge is only really enhances the suspense actually um yeah in other words you're sort of giving people the feeling that yeah they know that it's going a particular place but it seems impossible that it's going to get there um that that feeling Works quite well I mean if you think about fictional Cinema um you know when you go see most action movies you got a pretty safe bet that the protagonist isn't going to die so and yet and you certainly know he's not going to die in the first 10 minutes so you still have suspense you still if it's done right you're still very wrapped up in those same dilemmas that intellectually you shouldn't be in the 21st century is the role of film or or do you see the role of your films to somehow make imaginable what has hither to been unimaginable um possibly even to show things that are you know even maybe to get as far as s like the inevitable the things that cannot be expressed in any other form except Cinema well I think that's the ideal if you if you're making a film uh is to take on something that can only really exist in this form um yeah I mean I do look for subjects that lend themselves to that and I think that with Oppenheimer the translation of a relatively academic Source material a piece of History to something more immersive or more visceral um is what made it special for me and and interesting to me uh because yeah I think you are looking for subjects that do in some way try to use Cinema for to do something that a radio play or a stage play or television program couldn't do um one of the most sort of pure cinematic experiences I've I've had actually is working with Andrew Jackson as the visual effects supervisor on this he was after Emma he was the first person I showed the script to because you know I wanted him to be able to produce all this imagery in an analog sense so there's no computer graphics and any of things cut into that scene they're all things that he found a way to photograph um because I felt that he wanted something that would have the texture of the rest of the film and have a kind of real world threat to it and Beauty to it um and I wanted to really get inside his head and imagine you know what those things could be and have a language of of immersive Cinema that would allow the audience to to see things through his eyes in a sense so Andrew spent months and months himself and Scott fiser the special effects coordinator working together just trying all of these different experiments but but everything in there including you know the entire world it's been caught on fire that's all stuff that that he photographed one way or another it's it's not CG at all it's we use computers for compositing and stuff with these elements that he would shoot um but he would do all kinds of just crazy sort of mad laboratory kind of stuff with things floating in liquids and setting fire to things and you know all sorts it was uh it was a lot of fun no I I do have a particular way um the first script I ever wrote which had a nonlinear structure was my script for following and I had the structure mapped out and I thought the way to do it would be to write the story in chronological terms and then edit it to that structure and what I found in that process is I had to do so much rewriting to make it coherent to make it flow for an audience so I I never did it that way again and every time that I've taken on a non-chronological structure I've done a lot of thinking about it working it out drawing a lot of diagrams things like that but then I write the script from page one through to page 124 or in the case of Oppenheimer page 180 but you know always writing for the way that the audience is going to see it you know sitting in the cinema seat and I find that that way you you get the appropriate narrative momentum you get the right connections between scenes because you're thinking of it in the right way you're not you're not sort of imposing the structure after the fact so for me that's been important to do I mean the the answer is yes to all of that I think different things at different stages uh I mean I I have ideas that halfway through the first sentence of explaining to Emma I realize it's just a terrible idea and it goes back in the drawer but I I think for me it's important to I tend to not try to write things too soon and I tend to not try and explore them with with other people too soon um if it is literally Half Baked it has a way of kind of dying on you and then it's very difficult to to resuscitate so I tend to just keep those ideas private and work on them kind of in my own time and and see if they amount to anything and that could take a long time I mean Inception we were talking about earlier that was a that was a script that I worked on for about 10 years off and on before I could really finish it um but every Project's different um but yeah I have plenty of you know half baked of stillborn ideas that don't don't see the light of day wow that's difficult to answer uh they all change in the edit a lot um but if everything's working right as a writer director everything's if the process is working right even though we change them a lot weirdly they wind up kind of the same as they were originally conceived um but every scene is a process of taking the input of actors bringing things to the table you didn't expect uh the photography being different than you expect you know um so I'm trying to think I mean certainly in Oppenheimer the scene I think Jen spent the longest cutting uh was was probably the scene with Boris Pash played by Casey Affleck you know where Oppenheimer sort of goes uh to the security services to try and at least give the appearance of cooperating about Espionage and it crosscuts with Matt Damon's character General growes on the train we spent a lot of time on that because what the actors brought to it was tremendous but if you tried to keep it all in it was just way too long and so that was one very specifically where to feel the rhythm of it you had to watch the whole film because you'd cut a version of it that you really felt was absolutely compelling but after you know coming after an hour and a half of screen time it would feel interminably long um so we were working on that throughout the the whole editing process visiting revisiting but it got to a place I was very very happy with and very often that is the the journey because on the day we knew we were getting brilliant performances from Killian and Casey all these incredible awkward pauses and things um but to get back to that so that it's revealed to the audience and the way we felt it on the day took you know six months of taking things out and seeing what's just a little bit that that can remain I mean yeah I I certainly uh Oppenheimer you know has has elements of horror in it definitely uh as I think is appropriate to the subject matter um I think horror films are very interesting because they depend on very very cinematic devices you know that really is about a visceral response resp to things and so at some point I'd love to make a horror film but I think a really good horror film you know requires a really exceptional idea and there's there's a few and far between so I I haven't found the story that lends itself to that exactly U but I think it's a a very interesting genre from a cinematic point of view it's it's also one of the few genres where I mean the studios make a lot of these films and they're films that have a lot of bleakness a lot of abstraction they have a lot of the qualities that that Hollywood is generally very resistant to putting in films but that's a genre where it's allowable not unlike really Oppenheimer bases the middle of the film very heavily on on the heist genre and and the third Act of the film is the courtroom drama and the reason I settled on on those two genres for those sections is their mainstream genres in which dialogue people talking is inherently tense and interesting to an audience um and so that's that's the fun thing with genre you know it can let you play with a lot of a lot of different areas where in in a different type of film you really wouldn't be allowed to in a sense I unfortunately I cannot possibly answer that question I uh you know it is I mean the cliche is it's like asking you know which of your children is your favorite child or something like that but it it genuinely is the case you you pour everything you have into the film you're making at any one time and so uh I really couldn't play favorites and it changes over time in truth your relationship with your own work shifts a lot over time you know it's been very interesting seeing these clips of you know films I made some time ago um yeah so sorry but that's up to for you to decide Lee rather than well thank you Le and everybody else for your questions thank you to the heroes in the projection booth are running between Christopher Christopher is rushing off now because he's going to go and to introduce screening of tenet at the IMAX so he will have to depart swiftly and without any further delay but thank you so much indeed for your time today thank you yeah

Channel: BFI

Views: 140,323

Keywords: British Film Institute (Publisher), British, film, institute, films, movie, movies, cinema, BFI, Christopher Nolan, Batman, Oppenheimer, Inception, Tenet, Interstellar, screenwriter, directing, writing, producing, Cillian Murphy, Baftas, Oscars, awards season, culture, science fiction, science, The Dark Knight, Batman Begins, Dunkirk, Memento

Id: PW3tLBp4L6Q

Length: 45min 2sec (2702 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 23 2024