Nolan comes to China! What do I need to prepare to watch Oppenheimer?
Time Contributor | Fumi Minamino
Cult movie gluttony.
Just yesterday (August 22), director Christopher Nolan came to Beijing after six years to promote his new film "Oppenheimer".
The film has earned $720 million at the global box office, second only to the topical hit "Barbie".
During the premiere of "Oppenheimer" at Universal Studios, Nolan not only signed the poster for many Chinese fans, but also answered the question of what background knowledge needs to know before watching the film.
Quite surprisingly, Nolan thought that the most appropriate audience to enjoy "Oppenheimer" was ignorant of it.
He hopes that the film will be contagious with strong emotions to encourage the audience to learn more about Oppenheimer's life after watching it.
How did this scientist, who once attracted worldwide attention, arouse Nolan's interest in adapting in the first place?
Making "Oppenheimer"
Fans who are slightly familiar with Nolan's films may remember that he mentioned Oppenheimer and the "Manhattan Project" as early as his last work "Creed", which was a conversation between the arms dealer Puglia and the male protagonist.
Interestingly, after the completion of "Creed", Robert Pattinson gave Nolan another book, which was "Oppenheimer" co-authored by Kay Bird and Martin Sherwin.
Oppenheimer's vast intimate past and his complex attitude toward the atomic bomb evoke memories of Nolan's teenage years.
At that time, during the world nuclear disarmament movement, Nolan first learned of the great threat of nuclear war, and it was at that time.
He followed the delicate inner texture of "Oppenheimer" and found that this complex scientist was strikingly similar to the male protagonists in his films. This made Nolan determined to adapt this biography.
Unlike classic biopics such as "Gandhi" and "The Last Emperor", Nolan intends to "experience this story with Oppenheimer", rather than judging the character from a purely objective external perspective.
Therefore, in the image presentation of "Oppenheimer", it is divided into two parts: black and white and color.
The former's almost record-like brushstrokes represent Oppenheimer in the eyes of others; The latter is an emotional texture that recreates Oppenheimer's own vision of the world.
In order to better shape the character, Nolan invited his old partner Clerian Murphy, who has appeared in films such as the "Batman Prequel" trilogy, "Inception" and "Dunkirk", but all participated in supporting roles.
"Oppenheimer" is Murphy's first role as the male lead in a Nolan film.
Compared with the writing of the early script and the selection of actors, the shooting process of the whole film is more cumbersome and, of course, more difficult.
Nolan does not intend to make Oppenheimer's scientist attributes dispensable, but hopes to show the audience Oppenheimer's genius and charm in more solid and convincing details.
To achieve this, Nolan invited Professor David Salzberg of UCLA and Kip Thorne, who has been collaborating since Interstellar.
The latter had attended seminars held at Oppenheimer and listened to the lectures taught by Oppenheimer during his time at Preston University.
This gives Nolan more real reasons to refer to when dealing with some scene details.
The biggest difficulty, of course, is how to restore the nuclear explosion site.
For Nolan, who was shooting at every turn, he discussed with special effects supervisor Andrew Jackson for a long time, and finally came up with the idea of detonating a large amount of gasoline with explosives, magnesium flares and black powder, realistically simulating the horrific scene of an atomic bomb explosion.
"Real shooting maniac" Nolan wanted every scene to feel real, so in order to restore the era scene, the crew actually built a small town for real shooting, and the actors were also inspired after learning about it.
From pre-planning to on-site shooting, Nolan is like a meticulous top architect, constantly building a movie building that is enough to shake the soul of "Oppenheimer".
Become "Nolan"
Nolan has lived back and forth between the United Kingdom and the United States since he was a child, his father is an Englishman who works as advertising copywriter, and his mother is a mobile American flight attendant, which has also developed his diverse perspective since childhood.
He absorbed the tradition of classical English literature, but did not reject the universal popular culture of the United States.
Nolan is the second eldest in the family, with the eldest brother Matthew and the third brother Jonathan, both of whom majored in literature, especially Jonathan, and later formed a brother partner with the second brother and collaborated on a series of classic films, such as "Memory Fragments", "Deadly Magic" and "Batman: The Dark Knight".
Nolan has a long interest in film, shooting stop-motion animations with his father's ultra-eight-millimeter camera from the age of 7.
This is quite similar to Spielberg's upbringing.
After college, Nolan majored in English literature, but he joined a film club called "16mm" and made several creative short films, the most representative of which was "Antfly" in 1997.
A man chases the villain on the floor with his shoe in the room, but unbeknownst to him, another bigger self is behind him, about to wave his shoe and slap it.
The short film hints at Nolan's later cinematic style: thriller, suspenseful, and has a neat narrative structure.
It was in the process that Nolan met his wife, Emma Thomas, who was also in the film society.
A year later, with $6,000 in production funding, Nolan invited friends from the film community to shoot his first feature film "Follow". The film received a good response at the San Francisco Film Festival and attracted the attention of Hollywood filmmakers.
They contributed $5 million to allow Nolan to start filming "Fragments of Memory."
The film is known as the "most difficult Nolan movie", telling the story of the male protagonist who fell into a memory mystery and became a murderer in the case of losing his beloved wife and suffering from short-term memory loss.
"Fragments of Memory"
It can be said that "Memory Fragments" made Nolan appear in Hollywood, and it has also become a potential stock that many large studios are optimistic about.
Although "Insomnia" starring Al Pacino received a mediocre response, Warner's $150 million "Batman: Mystery of the Shadow" opened up new ideas for comic book movies and was very popular in the fan circle.
Since then, Nolan's film road has risen rapidly like a rocket.
Whether it is the social heated discussion caused by "Batman: The Dark Knight", or the blossoming of "Inception" in China and the United States, and the "Noblowing" trend set off in China after the release of "Interstellar", it all announces that Nolan has become one of the most popular Hollywood directors.
Why him?
It's no surprise that Nolan stood out on the fin de siècle film stage. At that time, world cinema was experiencing a "reform movement".
Quentin was almost the first director to start this movement, and his 1994 film Pulp Fiction uses a circular narrative, collaging several seemingly independent stories into a complete complex structure.
Guy Ritchie's "Two Big Smoking Guns" is a multi-line narrative, cross-cut, and finally put together.
David Lynch's Mulholland Drive is more like a mixed mix of dreams and reality, revealing chaos and uneasiness at times.
Nolan is one of these directors, and his "Follow" and "Memory Fragments" are also non-linear narratives, especially the latter, using black and white and color, positive sequence and flashback image codes, making the viewing process feel like a puzzle game.
In short, Quentin, Ritchie, Lynch and Nolan, these directors have transformed commercial films, especially Hollywood commercial films, into flat and straightforward linear narratives to complex and ambiguous non-linear narratives.
For Nolan, his non-linear narrative style is particularly efficient and powerful, and the most acceptable to the audience.
In "Deadly Magic", he implements the non-linear narrative into cross-editing, using two time and space "letter reading" plots to construct the causal relationship between the two stories, thereby creating suspense.
In "Inception", it uses Inception as a gimmick, presenting several nested dream spaces, forming interesting and thrilling interactive relationships.
This slightly brain-burning film style makes Nolan's films often seem unique, and more importantly, it will make the audience feel intellectual oppression, the pleasure of watching movies repeatedly, and the pleasure of finding details.
On this basis, although Nolan's films do not focus on strong emotional output, they always catch people's eyes with gray protagonists.
"Fragments of Memory" is actually about an unwitting murderer who, like Sisyphus, takes turns to return to a nightmare: he is both a victim and armed with a butcher knife that cannot be put down.
The two male protagonists in "Deadly Magic" seem to constantly pursue the supreme meaning of magic, but in fact, they go further and further in hatred and jealousy, and lose their hearts.
The charisma of the characters in Nolan's films, unlike traditional Hollywood blockbusters, mostly focuses on the front of the protagonists and explores the glorious factors in them, but experiments on gray characters, using a series of extreme events to drive them to the edge of madness.
To put it bluntly, Nolan's film is to shoot the villain as a decent person, thereby subverting our viewing expectations.
The same is true of Oppenheimer.
Nolan did not intend to portray a respected scientist, but to let the controversial "murderous weapon" descend on this Prometheus.
Let the audience see his fragility and helplessness, and touch his delicate compassion.
This is Nolan's unique talent and one of the reasons why he is recognized by this era.