Christopher Nolan’s affinity for doing effects on camera is the stuff of legends by now. Whether it’s building a rotating corridor set for Inception or blowing up an airplane in Tenet, Nolan has strived to reduce his reliance on CG by doing things for real as much as possible. In Empire’s latest exclusive on Oppenheimer, the director offered a great take on why he dislikes CG in particular while revealing some new tidbits about the “explosive effects” that they captured on camera for his latest biopic.
Nolan started off by suggesting that for some inexplicable reason, effects that employ CG remove the sense of uncertainty and danger that an audience feels when watching a movie. In a way, it feels too manufactured and cookie-cutter perfect. While that makes for a great textbook shot and a neat desktop wallpaper, it detaches the audience from the stakes in the movie. This was echoed in response to the Empire Magazine interviewer being treated at the footage and describing it as “unnerving”, to which Nolan responded by explaining that the stakes feel real because they shot these things for real.
I find CG rarely is able to grab you. It tends to feel safe. Even if it’s impressive and beautiful, it’s difficult to make you feel danger. And we were presenting the ultimate danger. We needed it to feel threatening, nasty and frightening to the audience.
The realness and rawness of filming it for real creates a visceral experience that, Nolan said, energizes the crew on set. And the moment itself tends to stick around with you for longer. Murphy had already weighed in on his inability to stop thinking about the real-life personalities and events depicted in Oppenheimer. Nolan lends that thoughs some more gravitas with his own words.
I’ve done a lot of explosions in a lot of films. But there is something very unique and particular about being out in a desert in the middle of the night with a big cast, and really just doing some enormous explosions and capturing that. You couldn’t help but come back to this moment when they were doing this on the ultimate scale, that in the back of their minds they knew there was this possibility that they would set fire to the atmosphere. It was pretty amazing to engage in that kind of tension.
So what approaches did they use to cook up the explosions in the movie? Visual Effects supervisor Andrew Jackson and Special Effects supervisor Scott J. Fisher previously hinted at some of the work they did in this area. He now adds some more tidbits to what these folks had laid out in a previous interview.
Very experimental approaches, some microscopic and tiny, some on a giant scale using explosives and magnesium flares and big, black powder explosions of petrol, whatever. And then some absolutely tiny, using interactions of different particles, different oils, different liquids. You know. These kinds of things.
Personally, I don’t mind VFX being used to enhance a film in the best of ways. When done right, it can absolutely convey a sense of terror and peril, as was the case in what was probably the first use of photorealistic CG: Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. But Spielberg didn’t solely rely on CGI, using a mix of physical, tangible animatronics, and computer generated effects to evoke a sense of fear. Many movies since took CG too far with an over-reliance on digital effects over real ones.
That said, I find Nolan’s commentary on CGI failing to invoke a sense of threat quite insightful. It definitely explains the banality of action set-pieces found in modern-day comicbook movies and is probably contributing in its own way to the superhero movie fatigue that audiences worldwide are experiencing. With that, I truly hope Oppenheimer delivers a taste of original, unnerving filmmaking on the biggest of IMAX screens possible.
Oppenheimer hits theaters on July 21, 2023. For more of my coverage on the movie, click on the title tag below.
