“They’re just very, very smart people who have a sense of the narrative.”
During an hour-long interview with Post writer Jada Yuan — who wrote a behind-the-scenes book on the “Oppenheimer” film and whose grandmother Chien-Shiung Wu worked on the Manhattan Project — Nolan discussed how his actors took on the harrowing task of telling Oppenheimer’s story, the end of the SAG-AFTRA strike and whether his next project will be a John F. Kennedy biopic.
“I think that the labor unrest we’ve just been through was a very necessary corrective in the streaming era because the studios had shifted the economics of how they distribute their material without adjusting the deals accordingly. And so it needed to happen,” he said, referring to the recent actors and writers strikes.
“The key thing is to get principles in place. You can always build on what’s been achieved contractually at the next round of negotiations … So I think these are excellent deals.”
With the popularity of streaming-only content, there has also been growing concern about what will happen to works that find themselves hauled off the only places they can be viewed.
“There is a danger, these days, that if things only exist in the streaming version they do get taken down, they come and go,” said Nolan, who made news earlier in the week for joking that he put such care into the physical release of “Oppenheimer” on Blu-ray to ensure that “no evil streaming service can come steal it from you.”
In his conversation with Yuan, he explained, “It was a joke when I said it. But nothing’s a joke when it’s transcribed onto the internet,” before diving into the importance of owning media to preserve art.
The event, held Thursday night at D.C.’s Rubell Museum, kicked off The Post’s Style Sessions — conversations with artists, tastemakers and creatives about how we live now.
Listen to the full conversation with Christopher Nolan here:
