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Nolan's defence of his sound mixing is a bit much. He thinks audiences don't care about dialogue as long as they get the gist, and that'd be fine if the dialogue wasn't framed as vitally important. The audience isn't going "I get the gist," they're going "Eh? Come again? WTF?"
Like, cool that that's your vision dude, but an actual audience that is not you is watching your movies
There is one (1) Christopher Nolan movie in which dialogue truly does not matter: the one with the least dialogue (Dunkirk). I love that movie, but cerebral sci-fi movies can't play by the same rules as a WWII thriller, where everyone understands the basic setup automatically
Correct! But it is FRAMED that way. Because the high-concept central conceit is introduced through a verbose exposition drop, the audience is trained to believe that more exposition will explain it further - and when they can't hear that exposition, it's intensely frustrating. https://twitter.com/LORDEMAXUS/status/1301122474994814976
To put it incredibly bluntly, Chris, if you think dialogue doesn't matter in your movie,
DON'T SHOOT SO MUCH FUCKING DIALOGUE
DON'T SHOOT SO MUCH FUCKING DIALOGUE
I agree with Nolan in that dialogue is overrated as a storytelling tool and audiences generally pick up more from visuals and sound/music than we give them credit for, but if you're gonna lean into that, just...cut the unnecessary dialogue? It's that fucking simple?
And if you absolutely must shoot mountains of dialogue that doesn't matter to your film, don't shoot it in close-ups and two-shots, making the inaudible dialogue overtly the subject?
This isn't even a Tenet thing specifically, it's basic audience psychology and film grammar, the latter of which at least is something that Nolan is otherwise really fucking fluent in
