The one genre that “fails you completely”, according to Christopher Nolan
As much as the best directors are expected to weave seamlessly through multiple genres to prove that there are endless strings to their bow, there are some things that even Christopher Nolan knows he can’t, or won’t, be able to pull off.
For one thing, he isn’t the biggest fan of musicals, so don’t expect him to have his cast belting out showstoppers at any point in the future. It’s one of cinema’s most exuberant art forms anyway, which isn’t a word that’s been used to describe his filmography often, by which we obviously mean ever.
Despite being Hollywood’s biggest MacGruber superfan, he’s also waved off the idea of ever tackling a comedy. Can Christopher Nolan be funny? There are some light-hearted moments in his movies, sure, but he doesn’t seem like the kind of auteur who’d be able to oversee a rib-tickling good time at the theatre.
Bizarrely, he claimed that all of his pictures were comedies in one way or another, which they most definitely are not. Horror remains another unticked item on the genre list, and he’s at least open to it, but whether or not he actually gets around to it one day is a completely different matter.
He’s made mind-bending thrillers, comic book adaptations, time-warping blockbusters, sci-fi epics, jaw-dropping war stories, and has a big-budget historical epic in the can, so it’s not as if he’s churning out the same thing over and over again. However, there’s one subset of cinema that he thinks is completely useless, which instantly places his thoughts somewhere between ironic and oblivious.
“This is where the concept of a biopic fails you completely as a genre,” he said, explaining that Oppenheimer, a biographical drama by nature, wasn’t really a biographical drama. “It’s not a useful genre. I love working in useful genres.” Instead, he suggested that it was something else.
“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,” he suggested. “It’s very useful to look at the conventions of those genres and how they can pull the audience, and how they can give me communication with the audience.”
He’s not wrong, and there are elements of different genres at play during various points of his three-hour ‘Best Picture’ winner. And yet, since it’s a true-life story that focuses on the very real events that defined the life of a very real person, told with an emphasis on accuracy and authenticity, it’s a biopic by default.
“Biopic is something that applies to a film that is not quite registering in a dramatic fashion,” he maintained, pointing to Lawrence of Arabia and Citizen Kane as examples of not-biopics he wanted to emulate. “It’s not a useful genre, the same way drama is not a useful genre. It doesn’t give you anything to hold onto.” According to Nolan, Oppenheimer isn’t a biopic. According to everyone else, though, it is.
