Despite having made what is, at least at first blush, a pretty definitive biographical picture about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan says he rejects the “biopic” label for his recent blockbuster historical film, Oppenheimer. That’s per Variety, reporting on a talk Nolan recently gave at a CUNY event, in which he derided the “biopic” label for not being a “useful genre” to work in.
Nolan (who was on stage with his wife and co-producer, Emma Thomas, and American Prometheus author Kai Bird) was fielding a question about why Oppenheimer doesn’t concern itself with its main character’s childhood, with the director arguing that doing so would have given in to “a tendency in biography post-Freud to attribute characteristics of the person you’re dealing with to their genetics from their parents,” dubbing this “A very reductive view of a human being.”
Noting that he dislikes the idea of the “drama” genre for similar reasons, Nolan says he didn’t think about “biopic” as a genre while making his movie because it didn’t give him any useful tools for telling its story. Instead, he said, Oppenheimer pulls from those structures that do serve his goals (and which he’s generally more familiar with): “I love working in useful genres. In this film…it’s the heist film as it applies to the Manhattan Project and the courtroom drama as it applies to the security hearings. It’s very useful to look at the conventions of those genres and how they can pull the audience and how they can give me communication with the audience.”
When Oppenheimer was first announced, it felt like a bit of a departure for Nolan, whose filmography has tended toward more cerebral takes on very straight genre premises: Superheroes, space travel, noir, war movies, and more. In that light, it’s interesting to hear how he views the film, not as a departure, but a continuation of that earlier work, and why he finds the superficial label “useless”:
Biopic is something that applies to a film that is not quite registering in a dramatic fashion. You don’t talk about Laurence of Arabia as a biopic. You don’t talk about Citizen Kane as a biopic. It’s an adventure film. It’s a film about somebody’s life. It’s not a useful genre the same way drama is not a useful genre. It doesn’t give you anything to hold onto.
Of course, it worked out pretty well, in so far as Oppenheimer is now the most successful biopic of all time, having surpassed previous record holder Bohemian Rhapsody. Just, uh, don’t tell Christopher Nolan that, huh?