DIRECTORS CHRISTOPHER NOLAN AND ALFRED Hitchcock do not have a whole lot in common-very different styles, very different eras, very different tales. All the same, during the five months in early 2022 when Nolan was shooting his blockbuster Oppenheimer, he found that Hitchcock's work bubbled to mind more than once-specifically the iconic scene in Psycho in which Anthony Perkins stabs an unsuspecting Janet Leigh as she showers.
The scene is savage, but after the mayhem is over, all turns orderly. Perkins washes down the shower, swaddles up the body, and places it in the trunk of a car which he tries to sink in a swamp. Halfway down, however, the car stops, its rear end poking above the water.
"[Perkins] looks worried," Nolan says during a conversation in New York City in early January. "And suddenly you're worried as well. How did that go from someone being massacred to me being worried that the guy covering up the murder is going to get caught?"
The answer is in what Nolan calls "cinema's magical point of view," the camera's ability to immerse the audience so deeply in the experiences of the people on the screen that we feel what they're feeling-root for what they're doing-even if we don't want to. A lot of that was necessary in Oppenheimer, Nolan's film of the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who led the Manhattan Project-the government program that developed the atom bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Oppenheimer's work, unlike the murder in Psycho, claimed 200,000 lives, not just one. And Oppenheimer's really happened: those cities were incinerated; those 200,000 lives were lost.
Esta historia es de la edición February 26, 2024 de Time.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición February 26, 2024 de Time.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
Michael Crow The president of Arizona State on handling campus protests, embracing AI, the future of college sports, and partying
Since Oct. 7, protests and conflicts over free speech have erupted on college campuses and beyond. It seems that the job of university president has become one of the more stressful occupations in America. What's your stress level right now?
The most anticipated summer TV shows
The sun is coming out, the days are getting longer, and life somehow just seems that little bit happier. But even as nature beckons us out of doors, the lure of the fluorescent blue-light box remains, especially as a season once associated with reruns and stagnation only seems to get more packed with appointment viewing.
The decades-long build to Eruption
WHEN MICHAEL CRICHTON AND HIS WIFE SHERRI FIRST started dating, all they did was hike. Every weekend there they were, taking in the scenery from the coasts of California to the mountains of Hawaii. The island of Kauai was their favorite place, its rivers carving through volcanic rock and steep, jagged cliffs cutting the sky. The couple would wake before dawn to be first ones out on the trails, and together they'd take in the sunrise.
OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES
A new comedy takes on the unfiltered realities of pregnancy, motherhood, and friendship
MOST INFLUENTIAL COMPANIES 2024
From retail behemoths to AI pioneers, these are the businesses shaping our world
EL LOCO
PRESIDENT JAVIER MILEI'S MISSION TO REMAKE ARGENTINA
The parents who regret having children
NO ONE REGRETS HAVING A CHILD, OR SO IT'S SAID. I'VE heard this often, usually after I'm asked if I have children, then, when I say I don't, if I plan to. I tend to evade the question, as I find that the truth-I have no plans to be a parent is likely to invite swift dissent. I'll be told that I'll change my mind, that I'm wrong, and that while I'll regret not having a child, people don't regret the obverse. Close family, acquaintances, and total strangers have said this for years; I let it slide, knowing that at the very least, the last part is a fiction.
Health Matters
TICK SEASON IS ONCE AGAIN UPON us, and so are fears of Lyme disease. Most people who contract Lyme after a tick bite fully recover after a course of antibiotics-but for roughly 10% of people, for reasons doctors don't fully understand, the medicine doesn't take, leaving them with chronic symptoms including fatigue, brain fog, and neurological issues that can be completely debilitating. Other people with Lyme are never treated at all, which can cause lasting issues without clear knowledge of where they originated.
Japan's ruling party burns through another leader
IT'S NOT EASY BEING JAPAN'S Prime Minister. Though the center-right Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has dominated the country's politics for nearly seven decades, the top job has frequently changed hands. Fumio Kishida is just the third leader in the past quarter-century to last at least two years. Yet once again, change is coming.
DEMONIZING RURAL AMERICA
By the time I was 7 or 8 years old, I was keenly aware of my father's drug use. He didn't snort pills in front of me yet―he saved that for my teen years—but he talked about pills freely, and I knew he took them. And by the time I became an adult, everyone in my nuclear family-and plenty in my extended family-was struggling to cope with the impacts of violence, incarceration, and addiction.
