00:00So let's just start with a little bit of your essential love of film and the films that you saw, the films that really made an impression on you and first gave you that feeling of what cinema could do and also maybe gave you an inkling of what you might be able to do in cinema

00:19Yeah, I mean I think the first film I actually remember going to see, I was very young, was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at, I think it was Muswell Hill Odeon, which is now an Everyman

00:30Might have been the Holloway Odeon

00:32And I remember very clearly being affected, particularly the scene where the evil queen turns into an old crone, you know, the poison apple, being very frightened of that, hiding behind the seats

00:47I think as far as influential movies and things that sort of showed me the potential of films, it was a very special time in terms of blockbusters

00:58So George Lucas's first Star Wars, it came out when I was 7 years old, and The Spy Who Loved Me was the Bond film of the time

01:09I remember going to see that in the cinema, and those are the kind of films that I think a lot of filmmakers, you know, you come to film through the Hollywood blockbuster

01:17Those are the big films that, you know, as a kid you wind up going to see

01:21I did have the very special experience of going to see 2001 on a film print because Star Wars was so successful, they re-released that film the year after that

01:35So I went to see that with my dad in Leicester Square at the old Leicester Square theater

01:41It would have been on 70mm, and that was a film I remember that experience very clearly

01:48I remember just feeling the enormity of the image and the potential for that screen to kind of, you know, just take you anywhere

01:54Yeah, and I guess seeing it at that age, it's a, or indeed any age with 2001, it is a question of you experiencing it rather than understanding every frame of it

02:04It's a kind of cumulative effect, isn't it? I think I mean I saw it when I was seven years old and I think I understood it certainly as well then as I do now, maybe better

02:17I think maybe better because you just you take it for granted, you experience it and the beauty and the magnitude of the images and the feeling of, you know, traveling across the solar system or whatever

02:28I mean that, that it's the point of the film

02:29It's a sort of wood for the trees thing

02:31I think as a kid you're actually pretty open to those visceral experiences, and I think a lot of your appreciation of movies and the entertainment value of movies is very simple and it's just experiential in that way

02:44Did you also appreciate film as a kind of time machine as well in that it sort of, it does capture and transcend time? It can, you know, somebody can die over and over again in film, can't they? They can indeed

02:57Yeah, I mean I think some years ago I was doing an event in India with my friend, the artist Tacita Dean, who works on 16mm film and has been very involved with me and with the BFI in film preservation

03:12That is to say, trying to preserve the medium of film for future generations, for acquisition and for projection

03:18And she pointed out that the camera literally sees time

03:21And the more I thought about what she said and I applied it to my own fascinations and my own interest in it for work, I mean, you know, it's only in a post-film world where you can conceive of slow motion or fast motion or things running backwards

03:41You know, these are things that people before movies wouldn't have had any idea of or any thought of

03:49And was that so, that was something that you first appreciated through film rather, because it was literature that you studied at university, but it was film? But I did, but I mostly was making films and, you know, thinking about films, you know, getting by in literature

04:02But yeah, I mean, my interest in films has always been sort of overwhelming in terms of anything else going on in my life

04:11And when I got to UCL, where I went to college, it was a film society, a student-run film society in the basement of Bloomsbury theater

04:20It's still there today and you were able to shoot 16mm films

04:29And then in the Bloomsbury theater upstairs, we would project 35mm films and use the proceeds from that to pay for filmmaking

04:32So even though I was, yes, I was studying English literature, I think I spent most of my time making films actually

04:37And clearly you were attracted to film noir early on, which I suppose is a kind of expression of the human psyche, isn't it, as much as being any, having any kind of thriller content

04:52And film noir and psychoanalysis kind of grew up together, didn't they? As yeah, I know, I think I, I think to a degree

04:59Yeah, I mean I think film noir certainly, I think the attraction of that genre particularly to a younger filmmaker starting out, as it is, it works at its best as an extrapolation of relatable fears and anxieties

05:10That's really the bedrock of the attraction of that genre for audiences

05:16So when you're younger starting out and you don't know anything, haven't experienced anything, being able to extrapolate from your own fears and anxieties into a more universal realm, more universal language, that's a really important tool for a filmmaker

05:33So when you came to make Memento, which was, I mentioned Following in the introduction, which had obviously noir kind of, the step then to Memento, which was as it were the breakout film, again very much a kind of noir but about memory in some ways, in a very complex sense

05:52So what made you want to make a film as it were where the chronology was backwards? Well, I think, you know, in the noir tradition, there is a tradition of amnesia films that Memento was certainly inspired by and tapping into

06:07But it's based on a short story that my brother wrote and told me about as he was writing, in fact

06:15And it, yeah, I mean it's essentially dealing with somebody who can't make new memories

06:23And ultimately what we decided, what I decided in talking to my brother about it and tasked him with in finishing his story, is if you could tell the story subjectively, that would surely be the most interesting way, you know, trying to live in somebody's head like that

06:39And so he in his story found ways to approach that, and me in the screenwriting, you know, ultimately decided that if you inverted the chronology, you know, then you'd put yourself in the position of somebody who doesn't know what's just happened

07:00I mean, the revenge story is, you know, it's a staple of movies and literature generally and noir fiction in particular

07:10And so it always raises interesting ethical questions and I think Memento more than any film I've made really tries to suggest that the ethical framework of the dilemma is defined really by the point of view

07:30So it really is a question whether you're in his head or whether you're observing from outside in terms of how you judge the ethics of how he's behaving

07:38So following on from Memento, you made Insomnia, which had originally been, there was a Norwegian film and this is, this was the Hollywood version of This, so you were working at that stage from somebody else's script, which is..

07:52you then, you're done with that after that

07:55But um, I suppose Insomnia still felt a bit like, you know, you were dealing with something that has originally been a kind of art house film

08:04But then you go to The Dark Knight trilogy, which that's introduced you obviously to Warner Brothers, and then you go to The Dark Knight trilogy

08:09Was that a big decision to go from something..

08:14you've made such personal films until then

08:17I know you were still starting out

08:18Was that something that you and Emma Thomas discussed as, you know, what you should do next?How..

08:22no, not really

08:22I mean, I think the notion of personal or not personal doesn't really apply to my work

08:28They're all equally personal

08:28And actually, I..

08:30the interesting thing with Insomnia was it was a remake of a very brilliant Norwegian film

08:35Um, and Hillary Seitz, who is credited with the screenplay, she had written a great adaptation of the original film, and then she worked with me

08:45Uh, I was a great creative partner in rewriting

08:47I then did the last draft myself

08:50I didn't take a credit uh, because she had done, you know, the vast majority of the work, so that seemed appropriate

08:55Um, but I did write the last draft, and I do on all of my films

09:00And so my relationship with the material is no different really than any other film um I've been involved with because some of them are adaptations, some of them are original, that one was a remake, some have been sequels, uh, some are from novels

09:13You know, I mean, it's always, always different

09:15Um, and yet the process has to be always the same in terms of finishing that last draft and then me approaching it as a director.Uh, so no, I think where you see more specific progression, and that was probably a little more not necessarily uh self-conscious, but the scale of the films, you know, grows in what for me was a very useful uh cadence because went from a no-budget film

09:45You know, Following was literally made, you know, with friends shooting on the weekend

09:50We were all working, you know, full-time jobs um and it was made for nothing

09:54Uh, and then Memento was a, you know, a low-budget movie, but uh, you know, it was about $4 million or so

10:01Um, and then Insomnia was sort of 10 times that

10:05So then by the time we get to The Dark Knight trilogy, story Batman Begins, we're working on a much bigger scale, but it was a pretty good progression actually

10:16Um, so I felt I was challenged at every stage with taking on something bigger

10:22Um, but I didn't do what a lot of filmmakers since, you know, I did those films..

10:29um, there've been a lot of filmmakers who've gone from their sort of whatever their Memento is straight to their Batman Begins, and that's a very difficult leap

10:37And I would not have wanted to have to try and make that kind of technical leap in terms of marshalling resources and everything

10:43I feel very lucky to have done a more modestly budgeted studio film and learned a lot about how to make that work and working within that system before I then, you know, took on the their larger scale properties.And your vision for Gotham City and and Bruce Wayne's travails was um informed quite a lot by sort of European expressionism, by Fritz Lang?I mean, yeah, definitely

11:08I mean, I think Lang's influence was more on The Dark Knight actually

11:14I think with Batman Begins, uh, on the design working with Nathan Crowley, who worked with for years, um, we..

11:22he very much wanted to take it in a modernist direction, and I like that and enjoyed that, and we pushed a little bit in that direction

11:31But I felt that given the history of Batman, how he'd been portrayed on film before, even though we were trying to do something different, I didn't want to completely abandon the sort of Gothic underpinnings of it quite so much

11:41And so Batman Begins was more of a hybrid in that sense

11:46Um, and then by the time we got to The Dark Knight, we sort of built more confidence to take it in our own direction and push in a very heavily sort of modernist direction.And for the script, more than the design really, I pushed my brother, who wrote the first draft of The Dark Knight..

12:03um, I pushed him very much in the direction of Fritz Lang, looking at Dr

12:09Mabuse, things like that

12:11Um, this idea of the sort of master criminal in, you know, expression of cinema, the relationship between the city uh and and the master criminal

12:17And I think it gave him a lot of inspiration actually

12:23Um, I think visually that that isn't necessarily as strong a relationship

12:29I think it's a little bit more about almost sort of the the morality of the thing really, and and the relationship between police and, you know, criminal underworld

12:40Um, and then the idea of some kind of geographical or or architectural expression of that within the the visual nature of the film

12:49Uh, but obviously we're were doing it in a more modern way, I suppose.And also the kind of Faust themes as well in that Bruce Wayne takes on this this mantle of Batman at some considerable personal cost, doesn't he? There's a price.Yeah, definitely

13:03Well, it's..

13:03yeah, it is a sort of deal with the devil

13:05I mean, it's really that idea of a sort of means to an end, if you like

13:12And I think the Batman mythology, one of the reasons that it's continually interesting and is continually reinvented by new generations of comic book writers and artists and and filmmakers, uh, is because that essential paradox or that essential idea of of uh a good vigilante, you know, somebody who feels that they have to resort to criminal methods, will be outside the system in order to fix the system

13:38Uh, it's endlessly complex and interesting in in its ethics.And also the sort of twinning theme which will turn up in your films, you know, before before and after that

13:51That idea if there's a if there's a Batman, there should be a Joker

13:55Well, you surprised by the appeal of the Joker to audiences, how fascinated they were by him?I mean, no, I wasn't because when I read Jonah's first draft, which was..

14:08it was a very unwieldy document, and it, you know, uh, it was long and and took us a long time to kind of get it into a practical shape

14:19But the character of The Joker was there like this sort of engine running through it

14:24Um, I had told him I needed Joker to like the shark in Jaws

14:27He needed to sort of come through and thread through the film in this with this particular energy, and he had just found that and absolutely cracked that even in that first draft

14:38And then when I brought Heath on and talked about it, how it was going to work, and saw his ideas and his references, and as that started to come together, um, it was endlessly fascinating, you know, very, very interesting to see

14:55And as we shot with Heath, you know, right from the the first hair and makeup test, you could see everybody on the floor just fascinated by them

15:02I mean, it was just sort of interesting creation

15:07Um, and it started with Jonah's script, and then Heath's interpretation was so compelling um that now I think we all felt as we were filming it that that character would have very, very special appeal

15:21And I think the challenge actually of of the film and the edit was to have all of the other elements in balance with that

15:27So, you know, Christian Bale and Gary Oldman, everything that, you know, their story, you know..

15:31Can't give it all over to the Joker even though he's this incredibly magnetic and powerful force at the center of it

15:37Um, but no, I think we all sort of felt that really developing as we were making the film

15:44Yeah, I guess that the challenge is that billionaire Bruce Wayne is, you know, in some ways a less attractive figure

15:50Yeah, in cinematic terms

15:53Well, but I mean a good villain, I mean the devil has the best tunes, you know, that's the thing

15:57And um, it's what really, as I say, it's the engine of the film, it's what really makes it work

16:03Um, so we all knew how important it was going to be

16:06But it was thrilling to see audiences really, really respond to that

16:11And of course, there've been all sorts of interpretations from right or left about appropriating the Joker one way or another

16:18I mean, what do you make of those, uh, politically speaking? Well, I mean, we found that on all three films, people often attempting to put some kind of political interpretation on the films, but it sort of ignores the mythic landscape in which it takes place

16:35Certainly with Dark Knight Rises, which, you know, has its share of people pulling at it politically right and left

16:42Um, either side of the political spectrum in choosing to interpret the film in their own terms, they're willfully ignoring, you know, big chunks of the story to do that, or big chunks of the point of view

16:53Um, so really it's important to remember the mythic landscape

16:57Uh, the end of The Dark Knight is really drawn from Shane, the Western, you know, George Stevens' wonderful Western, and Out of the Past, you know

17:06So it's mythic American, it's film noir, it's the Western

17:12I think where people get slightly confused by it, or in that sense, is that it's a contemporary staging

17:20Um, because that's what works for Batman, but even though it's a recognizable sort of contemporary American cityscape, uh, emotionally, you know, thematically, it's the mythic Americana of, you know, crime fiction and and of the Western

17:38I mean, nonetheless, it, the films did anticipate the rise of kind of disruptor leaders in politics all around the world, didn't they? So do you, do you think they were sort of of their time? In, I think they're very much, yeah, very much of their time

17:50Um, in that I mean, certainly with David Goyer, my co-writer, with my brother Jonah, other co-writer, the attempt was always to just be honest about presenting the things we were affected by, things we were worried about, afraid of

18:08Um, I mean, certainly when I look back at Batman Begins, there's a heavy emphasis on on terrorism, on the sort of post-9/11 world

18:15But we, it wasn't something we were consciously putting into the film, we were just trying to be sincere and truthful about what moved us at the time

18:24Um, certainly The Joker for me and and The Dark Knight is all about a fear of anarchy, you know, fear of the rules breaking down and and what that would do to society

18:34Uh, and The Dark Knight Rises is very much fearful of fascism, fearful of demagoguery

18:41Um, yeah, and I I think, you know, I suppose in a sense we were sort of tuning into things around us in the world that we were worried about and and, you know, some of them come to pass

18:51You know, so obviously you made other films during during that trilogy as well

18:55Um, did the fantastic success, I mean the huge box office takings of those films allow you to do something like Inception, for example, which, you know, was very daring cinematically? Yeah, I mean, it it definitely helped

19:12Um, sure, I mean, coming off the Dark Knight, I I think I'd been working on Inception for a very long time

19:19Um, I never really tried sort of pitching it to the studio or anything, so I'd never really gauged the response

19:25In the absence of The Dark Knight, I'd probably been afraid to

19:27Uh, but certainly following that film, when I took it to the studio, they, you know, they were very receptive

19:34They wanted to to do another film with us, so um, that smoothed the way for what might otherwise have been received um with some raised eyebrows because it is a, it's an unusual film and a complicated film, uh, and a very expensive film, which is a tricky combination

19:51So I think both Emma, myself, Emma Thomas my producer and wife, uh, who's somewhere in the audience here

19:58I'm signaling around, she's going to stand up

20:00Ah, there she is

20:07[Applause] I I think we both, we both felt coming off the Dark Knight that we had a very, very unusual opportunity to make something on a large scale with, I mean not carte blanche, but with a lot of freedom

20:21And so we we sort of dove in head first to do Inception because um, you're very aware when you get an opportunity like that

20:29I mean, firstly how much you yourself have wanted to do uh something very ambitious like that, but also how many other filmmakers are in the world who don't have that opportunity

20:40So um, you really feel, you know, kind of an obligation almost to to just take a risk and and maximize it

20:46Can I bring in something else that obviously was happening um around the time in terms of thinking about IMAX as a format? Um, because clearly, you know, you're getting into an area where these films are just extraordinary

21:00Was it something that you had in mind when you go to make a film? Are you thinking about that particular format? Yeah, depending on the film

21:08I I had first experienced IMAX as a kid, uh, in museums around the world, actually Omnimax, which is the variant of IMAX

21:19It's a dome theater um that isn't, there's not much of it around anymore, but uh, in various museums uh in America, they they had this format

21:28You'd watch nature documentaries and things, and I always found it to be a very visceral, sort of overwhelming experience

21:34I thought, why not make a film that way? And as I started to get into the film, there was there was no way to do that

21:42But right around, you know, in in the sort of 10 years leading up to Batman Begins, you know, when I was in my early 20s, um, IMAX actually started showing, they they created a process called the DMR process whereby they could take a a regular 35mm film and blow it up for their screens

21:59So they started building IMAX theaters in commercial cinemas uh for the first time

22:04And so by the time we got to Batman Begins, I was able to say to the studio, well, can we transfer this? We couldn't shoot in IMAX, no one had ever shot anything in IMAX for for those screens, but then you had to transfer it

22:16And so I got to meet the IMAX guys blowing up Batman Begins and and, you know, it did well in that format

22:22So leading up to the Dark Knight, I went to them and and said I'd like to take your cameras that have been used for, you know, nature documentaries and, you know, they'd gone to outer space and up Mount Everest and all this stuff, but no one had ever shot a narrative feature with them

22:37Uh, so we started looking into it and it was a, it was a very large undertaking because no one had done it

22:44There were a lot of, a lot of unknowns, a lot of fears about it

22:47Um, but I had read an interview with uh James Cameron years before where he had talked about whether you could make a film on IMAX and how that would work, work in terms of what he'd figured out

22:59Cameron, being the technical genius, is is that you'd extract from the larger negative the smaller negative that you'd need for your regular release

23:06So rather than doing different versions

23:08Or whatever, you'd have one definitive version that you could transfer to your other distribution formats, and that's stuck in the back of my head

23:18So when we came to do it on The Dark Knight, we figured out how to do that, how to shoot an IMAX negative, which is, you know, very tall frame, but frame within that, uh, protect for a cinemascope version, which is like the clip we just showed, um, and make it work in that way and figure out which sequences we could shoot that way

23:40Uh, the cameras are very loud so you don't really want to do dialogue scenes that way, so we laid out which of the action set pieces we would shoot with the IMAX camera, starting with the opening of the film where we introduced The Joker

23:52Um, and yeah, we went ahead and did that, and uh, it was, you know, it was a great success and kind of moved the format forwards, and I've been working in that format ever since.CU: I just love it, and that's really where the film begins with you with the IMAX version, is it? I mean, is that what you're thinking, as it were?CN: Yes or no, it depends on which sequences you're in

24:19Um, it's pushed us over the years

24:23I've certainly been working with Hoyte van Hoytema as I have for the last 10 years or so

24:28Um, by the time we get to Oppenheimer, our conversations are a lot about, uh, not..

24:35it pushes you to a way of looking at cinematography where you're not looking at the frame, you're not looking at the frame and making two-dimensional compositions

24:44You're really just putting the camera in proximity to the actors and you're composing in a three-dimensional sense

24:52You're sort of composing situationally, and then that gets formatted to different shape screens and holds up great

24:58And Hoyte has a wonderful eye for that

25:01So in its IMAX version, the extreme top and bottom, it's really about the peripheral vision

25:06It's really kind of filling out the frame rather than boxing it in

25:10Um, so it's less a question of seeing things get boxed into particular compositions and more a question of pulling the frame away for that version

25:19Uh, and so it translates, I think, very well to the other formats as well for that reason

25:24So yeah, no, it's been a sort of ongoing experiment that we quite enjoy.CU: And moving on, as we inevitably have to do given the constraints of time, to Interstellar, there was a treatment by the physicist, uh, Kip Thorne, I believe, which is sort of the basis

25:41Is that where you start, which is to do with relativity and gravity and, well, all of those things?CN: Well, no

25:50I mean, Kip had an ambition to..

25:53the genesis of the project was Kip had an ambition to see a Hollywood film made based on scientific principles

26:00And so he was friends with the producer Lynda Obst, and they had sort of taken this idea to Steven Spielberg

26:06And Steven hired my brother to write it, and so for years, I was aware of Jonah developing this project, writing about it

26:16And so he would talk to me about it, and I thought it was pretty exciting

26:19And then ultimately, Steven moved on, did something else, and so it became available

26:24And I went to Jonah and said, you know, how would you feel if I took this and combined..

26:31I had a couple of other script ideas I wanted to combine it with

26:33Um, and he was willing to sort of, you know, let me do that

26:38And then we managed to negotiate with the studio so that we could take it on

26:41Uh, and that's kind of where the, you know, the project really came from.Um, and in the finished film, you know, the whole setup, the whole world of it, the whole first act is pretty unchanged from what Jonah developed over the years

26:58Uh, and I worked very closely with Kip, who'd worked with my brother, and then when I took it over, um, I worked closely with him as well to try and really mine his incredible brain for what are the possibilities of science, uh, what do concepts of relativity offer you for a narrative

27:19And Jonah had identified early on in talking to Kip and researching it, you looked at a lot of Einstein's..

27:25Einstein's sort of thought experiments

27:28They tend to be very narrative, so they tend to involve a set of twins, you know, when one goes off on a spaceship or whatever, one goes off on a train, one is left at the station, and they come back at different ages

27:39And there's a sort of weird melancholy to them, almost

27:40Uh, and so a lot of that fed into his idea of what the story should be.And then I kind of borrowed in, you know, further and further with Kip on the relationship between quantum physics and classical physics and, you know, gravitational theory and all this stuff

27:57And a lot of what, you know, he came back with was truly stranger than fiction, uh, really mind-blowing stuff

28:05Um, in visual terms, it found its ultimate expression in the look of the black hole in Interstellar, which Kip insisted he wanted to talk to the visual effects guys about it and everything

28:16And I sort of was a bit worried about that because ultimately you want something that kind of looks cool

28:22You don't necessarily really matter if it's scientifically accurate

28:24But what Kip had figured out, Kip had all of the equations that would explain, you know, that would define how the gravitational effect of the black hole would affect the light behind it and how it would therefore look

28:39He just really needed the computing power of our visual effects company to render that.So, uh, he worked very closely with Paul Franklin, our visual effects supervisor, uh, and they created this incredibly uh realistic rendering of a black hole

28:56Uh, they actually published a couple of different scientific papers jointly about it

29:00Uh, and then some years later, they actually managed to photograph a black hole in real life, and it was on the front of the New York Times

29:10And I looked at it, and I called Kip, and I said, 'Well, I guess you were right

29:16Uh, very glad to see that you were right.' And all black hole holds up, and yeah, it's sort of become the kind of standard way of looking at it now

29:23But it was all based on absolutely the real science.CU: So it's all moving towards Oppenheimer, I guess, isn't it? In the sense of wanting to make that story of the father of the atom bomb and the discovery of that force, um, to make us feel as if we were there for it

29:44Is that right?CN: I think, yeah

29:44I mean, I think with my films, I've had an increasing desire to really try and create an immersive experience and try and create a tactile sense of of a world and, you know, put you there in it

29:56Uh, and I think that where that finds its maybe its ultimate utility in Oppenheimer is the excitement or the tension of that story was always going to be based on, you know, can you actually be there for the Trinity test? Can you be in that room with these scientists deciding to go ahead and do this thing? Uh, and experience those stakes because, obviously, it's a story that's ultimately, it's about, you know, people talking in rooms

30:24It's not the most obviously cinematic

30:26But the Trinity test itself, in particular, if you can really feel that you're there for that, uh, it would have been just the most extraordinary moment in history, you know, to be there

30:38And the tension of that, you know, felt like it would be inarguable

30:41And so, yeah, I think I brought my experience to bear in terms of uh creating that

30:49Tension, creating that sense of being there, there's a lot of detail work and things that go into you, you know, feeling the tension around it, feeling that you're there

31:02Um, as I pointed out to Jen Lame, my editor, it's the second film done with it, but I said the thing I've learned about editing suspense is it's very tedious to edit actually because you have to repeat things a lot

31:16You have to sort of keep showing the same thing advancing at a particular pace, and you have to tune that pacing to the audience

31:25And so Lee Smith, who cut that clip we just seen in Interstellar, there's a lot of work on how slow to make the robot relative, you know, to the wave coming and all this

31:36And um, you have to be very mechanical and pedantic about how you put those scenes together so that the audience can understand what they need to for the tension.Those are things that you can gauge

31:49In what way, I mean, how do you know what is the point where the audience will become incredibly frustrated because a door or a lever is not moving or something? Well, I think you have to feel it with your own internal clock, and then you sit with an audience and you watch it, and that sort of tells you as well

32:06But one of the things I've learned over the years is to really judge it, you have to watch the whole film because your sense of an internal rhythm is very, very different depending on where you are in the film and the pace of the sequence you've come out of, you know.Um, I often have the experience, particularly with the Dark Knight films, um, if they're playing on TV or whatever and I happen to turn it on and it's in the last third or so, the editing seems bizarrely fast to me and, you know, it's somewhat choppy because it has to be to get that pace

32:39Um, but it works if you watch it from the beginning, so it modulates through the film

32:45You can't edit things with the same rhythm at different points in a two-and-a-half-hour film

32:50Uh, so to know where you are with something like the Trinity test, to really have a gauge, we have to throw the whole film up and watch it with an audience and sort of feel that internal clocking and how it was working.Yeah, and of course, it's different when you're dealing with history as well because people sort of know the outcome

33:11So do you have to modify it in a different way? I mean, not really

33:15I think the thing with cinema and the way it works is, I think, uh, you know, when you go to see Titanic, you know the ship's going to sink, you know the iceberg's coming, but I think you enter a different world and that foreknowledge occupies a different space in your brain

33:36It's not literal

33:36I don't know what's going to happen

33:38Um, whereas if internally in the film, let's say Cameron had decided to, you know, begin with the iceberg hitting the ship and then flash back or, you know, whatever, that would weigh heavy in a different way

33:51You know, it's really about what's within the text of the film in a way that you're judging.And so, um, with Dunkirk, for example, you know, the suspense, we just treated it um the way we would have with a fictional story

34:08Um, and I think when the audience is there in the theater and the lights go down and they engage with that film, they tend to take it on its own terms

34:17And I think whatever the foreknowledge is only really enhances the suspense actually

34:21Um, yeah, in other words, you're sort of giving people the feeling that yeah, they know that it's going a particular place, but it seems impossible that it's going to get there

34:30Um, that feeling works quite well

34:33I mean, if you think about fictional cinema, um, you know, when you go see most action movies, you've got a pretty safe bet that the protagonist isn't going to die

34:44So, and yet, and you certainly know he's not going to die in the first 10 minutes, so you still have suspense

34:51You still, if it's done right, you're still very wrapped up in those same dilemmas that intellectually you shouldn't be.In the 21st century, is the role of film, or do you see the role of your films, to somehow make imaginable what has hitherto been unimaginable, um, possibly even to show things that are, you know, even maybe to get as far as, like, the inevitable, the things that cannot be expressed in any other form except cinema? Well, I think that's the ideal if you're making a film, uh, is to take on something that can only really exist in this form

35:31Um, yeah, I mean, I do look for subjects that lend themselves to that, and I think that with Oppenheimer, the translation of a relatively academic source material, a piece of history, to something more immersive or more visceral, um, is what made it special for me and interesting to me

35:51Uh, because yeah, I think you are looking for subjects that do in some way try to use cinema to do something that a radio play or a stage play or television program couldn't do.Um, one of the most sort of pure cinematic experiences I've had actually is working with Andrew Jackson as the visual effects supervisor on this

36:16He was, after Emma, he was the first person I showed the script to because, you know, I wanted him to be able to produce all this imagery in an analog sense

36:25So there's no computer graphics in any of things cut into that scene

36:29They're all things that he found a way to photograph, um, because I felt that we wanted something that would have the texture of the rest of the film and have a kind of real-world threat to it and beauty to it

36:40Um, and I wanted to really get inside his head and imagine, you know, what those things could be and have a language of immersive cinema that would allow the audience to see things through his eyes in a sense.So Andrew spent months and months, himself and Scott Fisher, the special effects coordinator, working together, just trying all of these different experiments

37:01But everything in there, including, you know, the entire world, it's been caught on fire, that's all stuff that he photographed one way or another

37:11It's not CG at all

37:11It's, we use computers for compositing and stuff with these elements that he would shoot, um, but he would do all kinds of just crazy sort of mad laboratory kind of stuff with things floating in liquids and setting fire to things and, you know, all sorts

37:24It was, uh, it was a lot of fun.No, I do have a particular way

37:37Um, the first script I ever wrote which had a nonlinear structure was my script for Following, and I had the structure mapped out, and I thought the way to do it would be to write the story in chronological terms and then edit it to that structure

37:53And what I found in that process is I had to do so much rewriting to make it coherent, to make it flow for an audience

38:02So I never did it that way again, and every time that I've taken on a non-chronological structure, I've done a lot of thinking about it, working it out, drawing a lot of diagrams, things like that

38:14But then I write the script from page one through to page 124, or in the case of Oppenheimer, page 180, but you know, always writing for the way that the audience is going to see it, you know, sitting in the cinema seat

38:28And I find that that way, you get the appropriate narrative momentum, you get the right connections between scenes because You're thinking of it in the right way

38:36You're not sort of imposing the structure after the fact, so for me that's been important to do

38:53I mean, the answer is yes to all of that

38:55I think different things at different stages

38:58I mean, I have ideas that halfway through the first sentence of explaining to Emma, I realize it's just a terrible idea and it goes back in the drawer

39:07But I think for me, it's important to..

39:11I tend to not try to write things too soon, and I tend to not try and explore them with other people too soon

39:17If it is literally half-baked, it has a way of kind of dying on you and then it's very difficult to resuscitate

39:23So I tend to just keep those ideas private and work on them kind of in my own time and see if they amount to anything

39:33And that could take a long time

39:33I mean, Inception, we were talking about earlier, that was a script that I worked on for about 10 years off and on before I could really finish it

39:42But every project's different

39:44But yeah, I have plenty of, you know, half-baked or stillborn ideas that don't see the light of day.Wow, that's difficult to answer

40:03They all change in the edit a lot, but if everything's working right as a writer-director, if the process is working right, even though we change them a lot, weirdly they wind up kind of the same as they were originally conceived

40:21But every scene is a process of taking the input of actors bringing things to the table you didn't expect, the photography being different than you expect, you know

40:30So I'm trying to think..

40:34I mean, certainly in Oppenheimer, the scene I think Jen spent the longest cutting was probably the scene with Boris Pash played by Casey Affleck, you know, where Oppenheimer sort of goes to the security services to try and at least give the appearance of cooperating about espionage, and it crosscuts with Matt Damon's character General Groves on the train

40:56We spent a lot of time on that because what the actors brought to it was tremendous, but if you tried to keep it all in, it was just way too long

41:04And so that was one very specifically where to feel the rhythm of it, you had to watch the whole film because you'd cut a version of it that you really felt was absolutely compelling, but after, you know, coming after an hour and a half of screen time, it would feel interminably long

41:21So we were working on that throughout the whole editing process, visiting, revisiting, but it got to a place I was very, very happy with

41:28And very often that is the journey because on the day we knew we were getting brilliant performances from Cillian and Casey, all these incredible awkward pauses and things

41:42But to get back to that so that it's revealed to the audience in the way we felt it on the day took, you know, six months of taking things out and seeing what's just a little bit that can remain.I mean, yeah, I certainly..

42:05Oppenheimer, you know, has elements of horror in it definitely, as I think is appropriate to the subject matter

42:13I think horror films are very interesting because they depend on very, very cinematic devices

42:22You know, that really is about a visceral response to things

42:26And so at some point, I'd love to make a horror film, but I think a really good horror film, you know, requires a really exceptional idea and there's few and far between

42:35So I haven't found the story that lends itself to that exactly

42:39But I think it's a very interesting genre from a cinematic point of view

42:44It's also one of the few genres where, I mean, the studios make a lot of these films and they're films that have a lot of bleakness, a lot of abstraction

42:52They have a lot of the qualities that Hollywood is generally very resistant to putting in films, but that's a genre where it's allowable

43:00Not unlike really Oppenheimer bases the middle of the film very heavily on the heist genre, and the third act of the film is the courtroom drama

43:11And the reason I settled on those two genres for those sections is they're mainstream genres in which dialogue, people talking, is inherently tense and interesting to an audience

43:26And so that's the fun thing with genre, you know, it can let you play with a lot of different areas where in a different type of film you really wouldn't be allowed to, in a sense.I unfortunately cannot possibly answer that question

43:49I, you know, it is..

43:52I mean, the cliche is it's like asking, you know, which of your children is your favorite child or something like that

43:56But it genuinely is the case, you pour everything you have into the film you're making at any one time, and so I really couldn't play favorites

44:04And it changes over time, in truth

44:06Your relationship with your own work shifts a lot over time, you know

44:10It's been very interesting seeing these clips of, you know, films I made some time ago

44:14Yeah, so sorry, but that's up to for you to decide rather than...Well, thank you Le and everybody else for your questions

44:25Thank you to the heroes in the projection booth

44:37Christopher is rushing off now because he's going to go and introduce a screening of Tenet at the IMAX, so he will have to depart swiftly and without any further delay

44:45But thank you so much indeed for your time today

44:47Thank you.