“And so for me, everything about Oppenheimer's story was about engagement. “That's engagement and that is the stuff of entertainment”, states Nolan. And possibly appalled, possibly horrified.” We're talking about being riveted by a very tense and dramatic story. And when we speak of entertainment in movies, we're not necessarily talking about fun, laughter, and happy things. But horror is a valid genre in cinema, the same way as drama, romance, comedy, or anything else. “And of course, it's a little uncomfortable talking about the word entertainment in regard to something so serious. “Well, it's useful that you use the word horrific in the same breath as entertainment, which seems contradictory”, Nolan explains. It’s meant to be a horrifying moment that leaves theatres solemnly quiet as opposed to whooping with glee. One more akin to a moment of tragedy from something like There Will Be Blood than the heroic action of Top Gun: Maverick. Oppenheimer called for a different type of effect. So many of his previous stunts and set pieces were designed in order to thrill and entertain the audience, turning their world upside down like a semi-truck flipping over in downtown Gotham. It’s a breadth of emotion that needed to be carefully balanced by Nolan and reflected in the blast itself. Each member of the cast is on top of their game displaying a range of excitement, fear, and dread. The scene set prior to the detonation in the vast New Mexico desert is one filled with tension. So let's see if we can produce all of these effects using analog methods, from the very first imaginings that Oppenheimer has of the quantum world, of atoms, and how they would be interacting with strong force between them. “So I first showed the script to Andrew Jackson, my visual effects supervisor, and said, I don't think that tool's going to work for us. It's very difficult to have computer graphics convey threat, which is why they have to be used very carefully in horror movies, for example. But the results tend to feel a little anodyne, a little safe. That's not going to work because computer graphics, they're extremely versatile, and the detail that can be achieved and the variety of imagery that can be achieved is obviously unparalleled. “But when I came to Oppenheimer and I thought, okay, how do we portray the Trinity test? That first atomic device being detonated. It was actually put further away and made to feel safe.” But, strange to say, in that sequence, it was the release of tension. “So we used computer graphics to do the explosion in Dark Knight Rises. “At the end of Dark Knight Rises, there's a nuclear explosion, the point of which is very, very different from the explosion we knew we had to portray in the real-life Trinity test”, says Nolan. But, for a director with a long-held passion for practical effects, it was actually one of the rare occasions from his previous films where he embraced CGI methods that made it clear to him that Oppenheimer’s cinematic centrepiece would have to be created without the use of computer graphics.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |