If you have been wondering why the trailers for Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” feature color and black-and-white footage, join the club. While audiences can recognize this as an artistic choice Nolan has made before, it was hard to say what Nolan would be doing with color in his latest release. But thanks to a new round of interviews, it now looks like Nolan can confirm that he is returning to a process he refined in “Memento” to anchor his latest movie in the objective and the subjective natures of memory.
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In a recent interview with Total Film magazine (via parent company GamesRadar+), Nolan described his use of color in “Memento” as something that tied to the subjective lens of the title character. “I wrote the script in the first person, which I’d never done before. I don’t know if anyone has ever done that, or if that’s a thing people do or not,” the filmmaker explained. “The film is objective and subjective. The colour scenes are subjective; the black-and-white scenes are objective. I wrote the colour scenes from the first person. So for an actor reading that, in some ways, I think it’d be quite daunting.”
Nolan fans will recognize this as the same approach taken in “Memento,” Nolan’s breakthrough 2000 release that cemented his status as a filmmaker obsessed with structure and form. In contemporary interviews, Nolan has spoken about how color allowed him to break up the subjective and the objective nature of information in “Memento.” “As the film progresses, the color sequences become a little less intensely subjective,” Nolan explained at the time. “The black-and-white scenes, on the other hand, as the movie progress, they become less and less objective. We start to get more and more into his head as he exists in this motel room. And, in fact, then, the black and white and the color scenes actually meet towards the end of the movie.”
Therefore, Nolan used color and black-and-white photography in “Memento” to speak to the subjective or objective nature of what Guy Pearce’s Leonard Shelby was seeing. In the black-and-white sequences, Shelby recounts the story of Sammy Jankis, an amnesiac who accidentally causes his wife’s death when he cannot remember the number of insulin shots he has administered. With this approach in mind, it will be interesting to see how “Oppenheimer” evolved this approach to color — whether subjectivity belongs to the character’s role in our collective history or his own perception of his actions.
Either way, we won’t need to wait too much longer to find out. “Oppenheimer” will hit theaters on July 21, 2023.