Six things we learned about Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan
Christopher Nolan is the most successful British director since Alfred Hitchcock. His latest film, Oppenheimer, has grossed over a billion dollars and been nominated for 13 Oscars. Film critic Tom Shone first met Nolan back in February 2000 when he was a young director new to Hollywood. Neither of them knew at the time, but Nolan’s first American feature, Memento, was about to become a major box office success.
Over twenty years later, Shone met with Nolan again for an exclusive interview with the Stories of our times podcast. Here are some of the things we learned from their conversation.
1. He wrote the script for Oppenheimer in the first person.
The third person voice is the standard for a typical film screenplay, but Nolan decided that his script would be written from the perspective of Oppenheimer himself. This helped to make the film as “intensely subjective as possible”.
2. He wrote the end of Oppenheimer in his sleep – almost.
As Nolan was starting to drift off one night, an idea for the final few scenes popped into his head. “I've learned over the years that if you have a great idea in the middle of the night, you really have to just get up and go and write it. So I did.” Fortunately, he could still read his handwriting the following morning.
3. His office is a mess.
As our interviewer Shone observes, Nolan’s writing space is a “shambles”. When he’s not writing here, he often travels to write his films, in order to free up his thinking. He partly wrote Oppenheimer in London, and partly in Los Alamos, where the film was shot.
Christopher Nolan talks about award season, and how he finds talking about Oppenheimer.
The director of Oppenheimer takes us inside the making of the film
4. Michael Caine mistook him for a courier.
Nolan prefers to hand deliver scripts to his actors. This routine started with the production of Batman Begins, for security reasons – although Caine didn’t recognise him at first. Still, Nolan continues to this day. “It's a very good way of getting an immediate, concentrated read from an actor that you're really interested in.”
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5. He works unusually closely with his musical composers.
Nolan often asks his composers, including Ludwig Göransson and Hans Zimmer, to score his films before they have even seen them. “I like music that is absolutely necessary to the film and a part of the film’s DNA. I don't view music as a sort of sauce to put on the ice cream sundae at the end.”
6. He sneaks into screenings of his films.
Nolan says this gives him a chance to see how a real, paying audience reacts to them. “For me, the audience finishes the film. They tell you what it is.”
