Christopher Nolan, film dialogue and rattling IMAX cameras
[10:47 Sun,20.August 2023 by blip]
It's been a while since we discussed poorly understandable film dialogs here. With Oppenheimer, a film is currently in theaters again that brings this topic to mind - at least we would not have been able to follow the dialogues well in parts without subtitles.
One of the key scenes of Oppenheimer / BTS, (c) Universal Pict.
This is the rule rather than the exception in a Christopher Nolan film - in fact, there are several reasons for this. If you take his preference for IMAX cameras and combine it with his aversion to dubbing, the technical explanation is more or less obvious. Because IMAX cameras, with which Oppenheimer was also shot, are very loud. The following clip shows BTS footage from "No Time to Die" and "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire":
As DoP Hoyte van Hoytema demonstrates quite impressively in an interview with Collider (starting at about 8min40s), they also have to be loud, because much more powerful motors are needed to transport the large-format footage. This is already true for 5perf 70mm and to an even greater extent for true IMAX, i.e. 15perf 70mm. According to Hoytema, it is physically almost impossible to construct such cameras "quietly." For him, this is also their biggest disadvantage. Even when working with sound-dampening "blimps", the camera remains loud.
It seems that Oppenheimer's dialogue scenes were often - but not exclusively - filmed on 5perf 70mm in order to still get usable sound. This was all the more important because Nolan does not have his dialogue recorded again afterwards (additional dialogue recording, ADR). He finds it more important to preserve the original acting performance, he recently confirmed again in an interview. However, there are now software algorithms that are able to filter out camera noise quite effectively. The only thing is that highly processed audio recordings are not automatically crystal clear.
In addition to these two technical reasons, there is another suspicion regarding the acoustically suboptimal audible words in Nolan films: as e.g. this article argues, it is actually not necessary to understand them at all, since they usually have no crucial meaning - the really important things are conveyed to the viewer's feeling in a different way, cinematically, via music, lighting, composition and last but not least the acting expression. A rather interesting idea, in our opinion - so the above decisions for a visually powerful camera with limited sound and against post-synchronization make much more sense, anyway.
;)
