NAB
For a film
in which there are a lot of men talking in rooms, Oppenheimer seems
to move at a propulsive pace. Writer and director Christopher Nolan seems to
challenge himself in creating a thriller out of a biopic with scientists and
politicians, but achieves it with the skillful work of editor Jennifer Lame,
ACE.
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She edited
Nolan’s previous film Tenet, as well
as Marriage Story for Noah Baumbach, and says that her priority
while editing Oppenheimer was constantly moving the story
forward by “cutting all over the room” rather than “lingering on a shot because
of its quality or composition.”
“When
you’re dealing with a three-hour biopic based on a ginormous topic, and a
ginormous book, pacing is a problem,” she tells Matt Feury in an episode of the
Avid-sponsored podcast The Rough Cut.
“Honestly, a lot of people felt earlier drafts of the movie were too
fast, which is hilarious, because it was obviously longer than three hours for
quite a long time.
“[The challenge was] how do you make people feel like they’re not being
rushed through something but also not make this a four-hour movie?”
Fortunately, Lame finds dialogue scenes among her favorite to craft. “I
like scenes with awkward human interactions. That’s my special thing. There
were so many amazing scenes for me in the movie that I could have spent like
three weeks cutting.”
She picks out the scene in which Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is being
none-too-subtly interrogated by an army officer played by Casey Affleck as one
of these. Another is the scene in which Oppenheimer meets President Truman
(Gary Oldman) in the Oval office, plus all the scenes in room 2022 — where the
tribunal deciding Oppenheimer’s security clearance post-war is made behind
closed doors.
“Every scene in room 2022 I love. I also love every scene with Lewis
Strauss [the US businessman and naval officer and played by Robert Downey Jr.]
because Strauss is my favorite character,” she says. “He performs one way, but
then reveals himself in a different light so the question was how sympathetic
do you want people to be about him?
“I found
the different onion layers of his personality and his psychology to be
incredibly fascinating. And I actually feel for him. I don’t see him as a
straight villain as some people do. I have so much empathy for him. I see him
as like the Willy Loman character [from Miller’s Death of a Salesman],
who thinks that he’s good at playing this game but actually he’s so not good at
it.”
Part of the
reason why Oppenheimer feels like it barrels along is the
time-hopping structure that is the Nolan’s signature storytelling mode and
thematic preoccupation.
“Chris spends a lot of time structuring the script before it’s shot. The
intimidating thing about scripts like that is making that come to fruition
because — since he spent a lot of time writing it and he knows that he shot it
— he expects that it’ll be great.
“I also tend to work with writer-directors because it’s like their baby,
but also weirdly, I feel like they are kind of okay with killing their babies
to some degree,” having the film reborn, in other words, in the edit.
Also in the interview, Lame expresses her appreciation for the
efficiency of a Christopher Nolan movie. Even with a massive budget and the
freedom of an auteur he sticks to deadlines.
“The whole thing is tight, he’s kind of obsessed with time,” Lame says.
“What I also love working about with him is that dates never move. We hit our
dates. He’s just so efficient on every level of the process, not just with
shooting, but also all the way to finishing the movie. We have screenings every
Friday, like it’s this adrenaline rush. It’s, like, hyper focusing in a way
that I’ve never hyper focused on a job before, which is just really fun.”
One visual and sonic element that pervades the film is that of particles
and waves which we learn exist simultaneously as characteristics of matter at
the quantum level.
“Those were written into scenes,” says Lame, “But there was a creative
process of figuring out when and how to cut those in. And like I would say that
montage was very, like free flowing. It’s very hard to talk about editing on
some level, because you try things in terms of rhythm, and it’s like trial and
error.”
It’s also why the editor does few interviews, because she finds talking
about editing like “talking about playing the piano. You just practice a lot
and you get better at it but sometimes it’s kind of boring to talk about.”
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