OPPENHEIMER Director Christopher Nolan Cares a Lot Less about Plot Than You Probably Do
In an interview with The Telegraph, the filmmaker criticizes Hollywood's elevation of plot over the cinematic experience
While promoting his new film OPPENHEIMER, writer-director Christopher Nolan expressed frustration with how “Hollywood” develops stories today. Specifically, he aimed his frustration at executives whom he believes have reduced the cinematic experience to a plot train, one beat leading to another, overlooking what has made going to the movies such a distinct narrative art form for more than a century.
You can read the whole article from The Telegraph here, while the relevant passages about what he believes has gone wrong with Hollywood’s approach to cinema follow. I should add that Nolan’s argument is only one aspect where American filmmaking has largely gone astray in the 21st century, but it’s one I don’t think gets nearly enough attention given its existential nature versus a problem like unoriginality or an over-reliance on intellectual property, both of which are easy to grasp. (Nolan’s point here is also, I think, related to the damage that I’ve previously argued screenwriting manuals have done to films).
Cinema will never just be an exercise in plot…at least not great cinema.
The problem, he says, is that executives think of cinema as nothing more than a vehicle for plot: “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’. And 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.”
One of his own formative cinema-going experiences was seeing STAR WARS while visiting his grandmother in Ohio, months before its UK release in 1977. (When he went back to school, his classmates had no idea what he was raving about.)
“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,” he continues. “But, I mean, clearly that’s not the case. It is indeed a great story, but it’s also an incredible visual and aural experience. So this wilful denial of what movies actually are has set in. People will say, ‘Why would you have to see something like AFTERSUN’ – the acclaimed 2022 coming-of-age film from young British director Charlotte Wells – ‘on the big screen?’ But of course you have to. It also plays wonderfully on TV, but that’s not the point.”
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