'Don't try to understand it, feel it,' says 'Oppenheimer' director Christopher Nolan on the complexities of his films

Christopher Nolan, who is fresh off the success of Oppenheimer, recently spoke about the complexities of his films’ narrative and choosing a non-linear approach to tell his stories. He said, “Don’t try to understand it, just feel it. I don’t see movies in terms of a balance between simplicity and complexity. I think it’s really about mystery.”

He added, “And our expectations of films, really my whole life, but really since the 1950s, they’ve been informed by television and the expectations of television.”

On using non-linear structures

And sometimes that’s unfortunate. So I often use non-chronological structures, non-linear structures. That was something that was done a lot in the silent era, in early talkies, right up until television comes along. And then television sort of imposes a more linear, a more simple approach, because of the way in which we watched television from the 1950s onwards.

He continued, “Then when home video DVD comes along and now streaming we can once again be more adventurous because you can watch something, you can stop it, you can rewind something, have a look at it. And so we can make more dense narratives, more complicated narratives.”

Why Oppenheimer opened bigger than Barbie in India

It is too early to say if the domestic market in India will ultimately follow international trends for these two films, but right now winds of the ‘desi’ box office seem to be blowing in the direction of Oppenheimer. Estimated figures at the time of publishing on the trade website koimoi.com pin the domestic collection of Oppenheimer at Rs 49.50 crore till Monday while the box office intake for Barbie stands at Rs 18.50 over the same period.