As I’ve said a few times now, I really enjoyed Oppenheimer. My only real complaints were about Christopher Nolan still not understanding how to cast and write women, and that the script was too jumpy with the timelines, but it all made sense by the end of the film. Overall, it’s a good (perhaps even great) film with terrific performances all around, from Cillian Murphy to Robert Downey Jr to Matt Damon to Josh Hartnett. Oh, Gary Oldman was such blatant and unnecessary stunt-casting, and I fail to understand why two British actresses needed to play two American women, but you get the idea. It was mostly a great movie. I was surprised, as I watched it, that there weren’t huge set pieces – it’s mostly just people talking in rooms, and Nolan doesn’t even show the effects of the bomb. Imagine my surprise that the production cost $100 million? And Nolan wants a cookie for using his nine-figure budgets responsibly??

Christopher Nolan is a big fan of movies that are much more smaller-scale dramas like “Aftersun” (“a beautiful film”) and “Past Lives” (“subtle in a beautiful sort of way”) compared to his own output, he recently told Time magazine, but he’s probably never going to make them. Nolan got his start with indie productions like “Memento,” but he’s now famous for assembling blockbuster productions with huge sets and pricey budgets. He’s likely never going back to a more subtle production style.

“I’m drawn to working at a large scale because I know how fragile the opportunity to marshal those resources is,” Nolan told the publication about sticking with big productions. “I know that there are so many filmmakers out there in the world who would give their eye teeth to have the resources I put together, and I feel I have the responsibility to use them in the most productive and interesting way.”

Nolan’s most recent directorial effort was “Oppenheimer,” which carried a smaller-than-usual production budget of $100 million. That’s still a giant sum (especially for a dialogue-driven biographical drama), but it’s way down from the more than $200 million it took to get his espionage thriller “Tenet” off the ground. Nolan filmed “Oppenheimer” in around 60 days, and production designer Ruth De Jong revealed he slashed around 30 filming days in order to re-allocate the film’s budget to production design and set locations.

“It felt like a $100 million indie. This is not ‘Tenet,’” De Jong said last year. “Chris wanted to shoot all over the United States…just plane tickets alone and putting crew up all over the place [is expensive]. Not to mention I have to build Los Alamos, it doesn’t exist. That’s where I really felt like it was impossible. Chris said, ‘Forget the money. Let’s just design what we want.’ So that’s what we did, and when construction first budgeted my town it was $20 million. Chris was like, ‘Yeah, no. Stop.’”

[From Variety]

“We had to build Los Alamos from scratch” – a mini-town in the desert in which (again) most of the scenes took place in interiors, not exteriors? “We had to fly everyone all around the country” – for a film which AGAIN could have mostly taken place on soundstages?? Don’t get me wrong, I understand that Nolan felt it was important to film in California exteriors and desert exteriors, but holy sh-t, he’s really proud of himself for spending all of that production money, huh? What the hell is this kind of justification? “I know that there are so many filmmakers out there in the world who would give their eye teeth to have the resources I put together, and I feel I have the responsibility to use them in the most productive and interesting way.” Or you could not waste tens of millions of dollars on a pretty simple biographical drama in which people are mostly talking in rooms??? When Sofia Coppola was promoting Priscilla, she talked a lot about how few people would give her $20 million to make her movies, to the point where they even nickel-and-dimed her on Priscilla and she had to use B-roll footage from another project to complete the film. And here’s Nolan, basically justifying his exorbitant budgets as “I need those budgets because I know that I’m one of the few directors who gets those budgets!”

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.