After it recently surpassed “Bohemian Rhapsody” at the worldwide box-office, Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” has been branded the highest-grossing biopic in history (unadjusted for inflation).
It has some of the best reviews of any film of the year, and its $942 million in box-office is astonishing considering the subject matter as it explores the life of theoretical physicist and father of the atomic bomb J. Robert Oppenheimer.
But don’t call it a “biopic” in front of Nolan who says the film was never made with that intent. Speaking at a City University of New York event recently where he was interviewed by author Kai Bird, who wrote the book “American Prometheus” upon which “Oppenheimer” is based.
Hood asked why the film doesn’t explore the title character’s childhood, as is often the case of most ‘biopics’. Nolan said:
“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.
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. 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.
Biopic is something that applies to a film that is not quite registering in a dramatic fashion. You don’t talk about ‘Lawrence 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,” starring the likes of Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, Benny Safdie and Josh Hartnett, will be available on digital platforms starting November 21st. The full video of Nolan’s talk is up on YouTube
