Oppenheimer Maker Christopher Nolan Finally Breaks Silence On His Obsession With Making Complex ‘Non-Linear’ Films & Playing With Viewer’s Mind: “…Try To Be A Little Bit Ahead Of The Audience”
Christopher Nolan, in his latest interview, spoke about why he chooses to do films with complex subjects or storytelling. Read on!
Christopher Nolan Talks About His Fascination With Making Non-Linear Films (Picture Credit: IMDB)
Advertisement
Christopher Nolan is one of the most celebrated directors in Hollywood. People wait with bated breaths for his movies, and they, most of the time, deal with an unconventional way of storytelling, with time playing an important aspect in it. Be it Inception’s dream world or Tenet’s reverse entropy, or Interstellar’s time and space complexity, Nolan gave the audience some mind-boggling films. Even his latest Oppenheimer played with different perceptions of one event. He has finally opened up on this in his latest interview.
The director is currently enjoying the positive response of the audience to his much-hyped film based on the life of J Robert Oppenheimer, who is popularly known as the Father of the Atomic Bomb. His film has gotten one of the highest ratings on IMDb, and the audiences can’t stop raving about it.
The man behind a film like Oppenheimer, an event that changed the entire world, was not an easy task to pull off, but Christopher Nolan did it efficiently, and his love for bringing forth complicated stories on screen has been widely admired by people across the world. Speaking with the HugoDécrypte YouTube channel, Nolan opened up about this fascination of his and said, “Don’t try to understand it, just feel it. I don’t see movies in terms of a balance between simplicity and complexity. I think it’s really about mystery. And our expectations of films, really my whole life, but really since the 1950s, they’ve been informed by television and the expectations of television.”
He continued, “And sometimes that’s unfortunate. So I often use non-chronological structures, non-linear structures. That was something that was done a lot in the silent era, in early talkies, right up until television comes along. And then television sort of imposes a more linear, a more simple approach, because of the way in which we watched television from the 1950s onwards.”
The critically acclaimed film Oppenheimer’s, director Christopher Nolan, further added, “Then when home video DVD comes along and now streaming we can once again be more adventurous because you can watch something, you can stop it, you can rewind something, have a look at it. And so we can make more dense narratives, more complicated narratives.”
He then concluded by saying, “But ultimately, the thing about the experience in a movie theatre with an audience is it should be about mystery. You don’t want to understand the entire story right from the beginning. Otherwise, there’s nothing to unfold. And so, you know, really the film of the filmmaker, the job of the filmmaker is to try to be a little bit ahead of the audience, not too far ahead, not too far behind. When you’re behind the audience, the audience is understanding things before you’re explaining them, the audience gets very frustrated in a different way.”
Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Oppenheimer-led by Cillian Murphy in the titular role, was released in the theatres on July 21st.
Do you like Nolan’s style of work? Let us know in the comments, and for updates, stay tuned to Koimoi!
