How Trust Makes Cillian Murphy And Christopher Nolan's Collaborations Great
When you find someone you tend to work with exceedingly well in a job or any other walk of life, chances are you'll try to stick with each other moving forward as much as humanly possible. Filmmakers and actors are no different. Call it a good luck charm, an artist/muse dynamic, or just plain familiarity, but some of the biggest names in the industry seem to lean towards being creatures of habit. Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, Greta Gerwig and Saoirse Ronan ... the list goes on. But when it comes to one of the more underrated collaborations from the last several years, Christopher Nolan and actor Cillian Murphy's work together comes down to a single, all-important factor: Trust.
From "The Dark Knight" trilogy to "Inception" to "Dunkirk," it's been clear that the two always seem to bring out the best in each other. (We once made the case that Murphy has always been Nolan's secret weapon.) With the upcoming "Oppenheimer," Murphy is now stepping into the spotlight as the lead of a Nolan movie for the very first time, giving the two the opportunity to look back fondly at what they've accomplished together to this point. In a joint interview with Entertainment Weekly, both artists opened up about the secret sauce behind their previous movies. According to Murphy:
"I think the best thing that happens from re-collaboration is that you get this level of trust. I think that's allowed us to continue to make interesting work. To me, that's the most important thing. If you trust the director, you can really go out on a limb, and be vulnerable, and expose yourself emotionally."
In Nolan we trust?
What could possibly make an established actor drop everything, agree to sign onto an incredibly technically challenging World War II drama, and do so without even having a fully-written character on the page to play? That was the circumstances surrounding Christopher Nolan's offer to Cillian Murphy in becoming part of the cast of 2017's "Dunkirk." As the filmmaker reminisced with Murphy elsewhere in the EW interview, "In the draft you read, your character was underwritten and unfinished. My pitch was, come with me, spend three weeks on a boat with Mark Rylance and Jack Lowden and Barry Keoghan et al. and we'll figure it out." They certainly did, but that could only come from having such a comfortable working relationship to begin with.
Nolan went on to explain:
"Trust is creatively freeing, because you feel like you can try things, and there are no wrong answers, nobody's going to chastise you, or laugh at you. It's like, okay, let's just try a few different things, and then trust on the fundamental level of, okay, we're going to take you on a boat, and we're going to sit you on top of an overturned hull, and on a cue, you're going to jump off into the sea."
Of course, not only did Murphy willingly climb on top of a dangerous piece of set dressing for the sake of a moving scene in "Dunkirk," but he reveals that he only did so because Nolan himself put himself out there and went up first. With that level of confidence between them, it makes perfect sense why Murphy jumped at the chance to sign onto "Oppenheimer."
What magic will the two weave together this time around? We'll find out when "Oppenheimer" hits theaters on July 21, 2023.