Christopher Nolan Slams Studios For Not Understanding The Theatrical Movie Experience

Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan continually delivers great movies that audiences enjoy. He creates awesome movie-going experiences and it sounds like Oppenheimer will be one of the best that he’s made. He’s built quite the reputation and the studios have given him the money and time to tell his stories properly, but not every filmmaker gets that luxury. Most filmmakers make the kinds of movies that the studios want them to make, which is why films a lot of movies are simply mediocre.

During a recent interview with The Telegraph, Nolan talked about the issues he has with the studio system and slams them for not having a proper understanding of what the theatrical experience should be. He explained:

"Whether for budgetary reasons or reasons of control, studios now look at a screenplay as a series of events and say, 'This is the essence of what the film is'. And that's completely at odds with how cinema developed, right from the Lumière brothers' train pulling into the station, as a pure audiovisual experience, but it's a very popular fallacy -- sometimes with critics as well, quite frankly -- that all that matters is the scale of the story being told."

Hollywood doesn’t really care about the quality of the movies they make anymore. Hollywood is run by accountants and movies are made to make investors and the stock market happy. The focus is to keep the movies rolling out regardless of if they are good or bad.

Nolan went on to praise George Lucas and his accomplishments with Star Wars, noting that it wasn't only the story that elevated it above the films being made at the time, but also its ambitious visual effects:

"People will tell you that the success of Star Wars had nothing to do with its visual effects, and it was all down to its great story, but, I mean, clearly that's not the case. It is indeed a great story, but it's also an incredible visual and aural experience. So this willful denial of what movies actually are has set in. People will say, 'Why would you have to see something like Aftersun' -- the acclaimed 2022 coming-of-age film from young British director Charlotte Wells -- 'on the big screen?' But of course you have to. It also plays wonderfully on TV, but that's not the point."

As you know, Nolan is a huge supporter of the theatrical experience and he bailed on Warner Bros. because they changed their model to something that wasn’t theater friendly. Nolan has a strong understanding of the movie-going experience and it’s people like him that will help change the ways of the studios. It may take some time because Hollywood is set in its ways, but maybe one day a studio will rise challenging the way that things work.