Christopher Nolan explains why a biopic is “not a useful genre”
Oppenheimer, the most recent film by Christopher Nolan, has surpassed all expectations at the box office, pulling in nearly a billion dollars. This was quite a surprise for the filmmakers, considering that it’s almost three hours long, uses both colour and black-and-white film, and explores the life of a nuclear physicist in the 1940s.
Based on the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Oppenheimer tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project and “father of the atomic bomb.” Despite its undeniable and awe-inspiring cinematic flair, earning four stars from Far Out, the movie is ostensibly a biopic. However, Nolan doesn’t agree with the term.
Speaking alongside his wife and producer Emma Thomas and Bird at an event for the City University of New York, the director explained why his movie didn’t delve into the childhood of its central real-life character – a convention that most biopics would usually adhere to.
There is a tendency in biography post-Freud to attribute characteristics of the person you’re dealing with to their genetics from their parents. It’s a very reductive view of a human being,” Nolan said. “If you’re writing a book that’s 500 pages or 1,000 pages, there’s a way to balance that with their individuality and experiences.”
“When you compress and strip down to the necessary simplicity of a screenplay, it’s incredibly reductive. This is where the concept of a biopic fails you completely as a genre,” the director continued. “It’s not a useful genre.”
“I love working in useful genres. In this film… it’s the heist film as it applies to the Manhattan Project and the courtroom drama as it applies to the security hearings. It’s very useful to look at the conventions of those genres and how they can pull the audience and give me communication with the audience.”
Clarifying further, Nolan said, “Biopic is something that applies to a film that is not quite registering in a dramatic fashion. You don’t talk about ‘Laurence of Arabia’ as a biopic. You don’t talk about ‘Citizen Kane’ as a biopic. It’s an adventure film. It’s a film about somebody’s life. It’s not a useful genre, the same way drama is not a useful genre. It doesn’t give you anything to hold onto.”
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