In an era when Hollywood has gone almost all-in on comic book movies and franchises, it was a big deal this summer when two of the biggest hits were neither. One was Barbie, which, to be fair, is based on a popular toy line (and which kicked off its own Mattel cinematic universe). The other was Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s supersized look at the father of the atomic bomb. Just don’t call it a biopic, at least not around Nolan.
Per Variety, the filmmaker spoke at an event at the City University of New York, where he unloaded on the idea of getting too into Psych 101 analyses when depicting real-life figures.
“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 explain. “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.”
He continued:
“This is where the concept of a biopic fails you completely as a genre … 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 how they can give me communication with the audience.”
Nolan continued to slag the biopic tag: “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.”
Oppenheimer is due on digital platforms on Nov. 21 — a rarity in this era when even big movies (like Barbie) are available for home viewing a couple months, if not a couple weeks, after hitting theaters. When it is, streamers better not place it in the biopic category.
You can watch Nolan’s full CUNY appearance in the video below.
(Via Variety)