The movie Christopher Nolan called “an extraordinary piece of work”
It’s long been known that when Christopher Nolan is preparing to shoot a movie, he likes to screen films for his cast and crew, which influenced his vision for the upcoming project. For example, while envisioning the look of Batman Begins, he showed Blade Runner to cinematographer Wally Pfister, as he wanted his Gotham City to feel like the rain-soaked, grungy future Los Angeles in that Ridley Scott classic.
However, when it came time to reimagine Gotham in The Dark Knight, Nolan wanted a very different feel. He loved how Michael Mann shot Los Angeles in his classic crime epic Heat, as the director expertly made the city’s streets and looming architecture feel grand and imposing, which made it the perfect playground for the action. That’s exactly the vibe he wanted for his Batman sequel, so he did the sensible thing and screened Heat for his department heads.
Many years later, Nolan used the same trick when he was preparing to shoot his Oscar-dominating biopic, Oppenheimer. As a large chunk of the film was going to be shot in a brand new black-and-white IMAX film, Nolan wanted to get the crew in that kind of headspace—and he wound up showing them a film he dubbed “an extraordinary piece of work”.
In February 2024, Nolan spoke with the BFI’s Sight and Sound magazine, where he was asked, “You often screen films as reference points for the crew going into production. On this, were there films that you referred to?” The director replied, “We watched black and white films because we were shooting large-format black and white for the first time. We screened Sidney Lumet’s The Hill, an extraordinary piece of work.”
This uncompromising 1965 drama, set in a British military prison in North Africa, starred Sean Connery and was nominated for a bevvy of Bafta awards. It wasn’t simply the fact that it was shot in black and white that interested Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, but it was also Lumet’s stunning camera work.
Nolan explained: “It was the way he moves the camera. It’s pre-Technocrane, pre-Steadicam. It has what Hoyte van Hoytema wonderfully referred to as ‘people with a heavy camera and a dolly and a lot of ambition’ in how it finds a way to get the camera in places. We decided to shoot that way – we have no Steadicam. Everything was on the track or hand-held, which actually proved to be freeing in its limitations.”
Fascinatingly, Nolan also chose to screen Orson Welles’ 1962 picture The Trial, as it was key to how he envisioned the courtroom drama elements of Oppenheimer. He revealed: “The way Welles uses the trial scenario—the balconies of people jeering—informed a lot about the use of architecture to portray bureaucracy and the machine under whose wheels you get crushed.”
Welles’ film – which Roger Ebert dubbed a “masterpiece” – helped Nolan visualise the striking differences between J. Robert Oppenheimer’s 1954 security hearing and the 1959 senate hearing, both of which are intercut throughout the film. He explained: “One has to be absolutely tiny and claustrophobic – we shot it with an IMAX camera in a room seven feet wide – and the other was a big balcony, lots of extras, flash bulbs, out in the grandeur of the theatrical political machine.”
