Baftas 2024: Christopher Nolan wins ‘Best Director’
English filmmaker Christopher Nolan has won the Bafta for ‘Best Director’ for his incredible blockbuster, Oppenheimer.
Nolan beat the competition in the form of filmmakers like Andrew Haigh (All of Us Strangers), Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest) and Bradley Cooper (Maestro).
Taking to the stage to accept his award, Nolan thanked the cast and crew who helped him to Bafta glory, stating, “This is an incredible honour being back home, getting this from Bafta in the festival hall where my mum and dad used to drag me to get some culture”.
Continuing, he thanked Universal Studios, stating: “Thank you for letting us take on something quite dark and seeing the potential in that…Our film ends on what I think is a dramatically necessary note of despair, but in the real world, there are all kinds of individuals and organisations who have fought long and hard to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world and, since its peak in 1967, they’ve done it by almost 90%, of late that’s gone the wrong way…they show the necessity and the potential of efforts for peace”.
The movie stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, depicting his rise and fall as he developed the atomic bomb, subsequently changing the course of history.
In a four-star review of the film, Far Out said, “Nolan consistently delivers in whatever project he takes on; he knows his vision and style and creates a positive, intimate environment for his actors to provide their best work.”
The review continues: “But with Oppenheimer, he hasn’t just delivered an entertaining, thought-provoking movie as he had done with his previous efforts, but a thoroughly important one that informs even the most sheltered of us about the global situation we find ourselves in today.”
Nolan has been nominated twice before for Inception and Dunkirk, but this is his first win, joining the likes of recent winners such as Chloé Zhao, Jane Campion and Edward Berger.
Did Christopher Nolan use a real atomic bomb?
No, Christopher Nolan did not let off a real atomic bomb while filming Oppenheimer. However, he didn’t use CGI either, telling National Geographic that doing so “would have felt too safe”.
Instead, the filmmaker and his crew worked with various techniques and employed camera trickery to achieve the shot. They settled with letting off an explosion that was much smaller than an atomic bomb, filming it close-up so it appeared much more dramatic. The blast was 200 feet high and did not destroy anything.
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