Why Oppenheimer Director Christopher Nolan Didn't Give Audiences An Intermission
2023 was a big year for long movies. "Beau is Afraid," "Oppenheimer," and "Killers of the Flower Moon" have all been over three hours long, and they've all invited some public debate over the merits of bringing back intermissions. Why not take a cue from Indian cinema and let audiences have a small break to use the bathroom without missing anything? For a convoluted, fast-paced film like "Oppenheimer" especially, there's definitely an argument to be made that viewers don't want to miss a single moment and the movie should make that easier for them. But director Christopher Nolan says that intermissions aren't as simple as they sound.
"I'm not sure how well that would work with a modern audience," he said in a recent interview with Total Film. Although he acknowledged that the uninterrupted 3-hour runtime of "Oppenheimer" was a big ask for viewers, he didn't think the alternative was necessarily better: "It's also asking a lot of an audience to get to the end of the second act, and then take a break, change the energy completely, think about other things, maybe talk about the film with people and have a drink at the bar, and then go back in."
Nolan's hardly the only modern director to argue against intermissions for his films. When director James Cameron was asked about how he expected most viewers to sit through his 192-minute "Avatar: The Way of Water" without missing a scene to use the bathroom, he responded simply, "They can see the scene they missed when they come see it again." You may not like it, but if the box office results are anything to go by, some people definitely took his advice.
Nolan's larger thoughts on intermissions
Pro-intermission readers shouldn't be too upset with Nolan, however. He clarified that although he doesn't think an intermission would work for "Oppenheimer" specifically, he doesn't think it's an inherently bad idea. "'The Hateful Eight' — I thought the intermission worked tremendously well," he said. But Quentin Tarantino's 2015 film was episodic in its pacing, quite literally divided into chapters; it was a story with a lot of natural pauses to choose from. Nolan's latest film, on the other hand?
"It's a complicated issue because if you look at 'Lawrence of Arabia,' for example, the intermission, it tends to come... It's not halfway through the film. It tends to come two-thirds of the way through. With 'Oppenheimer,' you would have to put it at the end of the Trinity Test. Then the audience would take a break and come back in for the last hour of the movie."
This would undeniably be the smartest place to put the intermission, but it still feels awkward considering how "Oppenheimer" is structured. The movie constantly jumps back and forth through time, as well as back and forth through Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss's perspective. The trial might technically make up the final third of the film, but we already see quite a bit of it throughout the first two thirds as well.
An intermission would make sense for a version of this movie that was told in a straightforward, linear fashion, but Nolan has never been a huge fan of that style of storytelling. It also helps that "Oppenheimer" is an incredibly fast-paced, tightly-edited movie. It might technically be about the same length as "Babylon" or Peter Jackson's "King Kong," but it certainly feels a lot shorter. Sure, your bladder probably won't be able to appreciate this difference, but maybe James Cameron's advice of watching the movie twice is worth taking. For a movie like "Oppenheimer," after all, there will almost always be something you'll only catch on repeat viewings.