Christopher Nolan, Kai Bird on adapting ‘American Prometheus’; Disney’s proxy war wages on

The Business

KCRW

Tv & Film

4.6 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2024

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kim Masters and Matt Belloni examine the latest updates in the Disney proxy vote saga. Also, has peak TV officially ended? The banter partners break down FX chairman John Landgraf’s recent remarks on the current state of television.

Plus, Masters speaks to Oppenheimer writer and director Christopher Nolan and American Prometheus co-author Kai Bird about adapting the film’s Pulitzer Prize winning source material. Bird talks about the 25 years it took to complete the sprawling biography with co-author Martin Sherwin, and Nolan shares how he approached adapting their 700-page book into a summer blockbuster hit.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, I'm Kim Masters, and this is The Business.
0:05.6	When Christopher Nolan set out to adapt American Prometheus,
0:08.9	a sprawling biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer,
0:12.0	he got an early warning not to make it too wonky.
0:15.3	Hollywood has struggled often with the portrayal of different forms of genius.
0:19.7	It's a difficult thing to get the audience into this mindset.
0:23.6	And so I think early on, one of my sons I was talking to you about the film said,
0:27.6	you're not really going to try to explain quantum physics in this film,
0:30.6	are you dead? Because that won't work.
0:31.6	And I said, no, point well taken.
0:33.6	Today we're joined by Nolan and Kai Bird,
0:35.6	who won a Pulitzer for his work on American
0:38.4	Prometheus, a project that took him and his co-author 25 years to complete. Nolan explains why,
0:45.3	when negotiating with Universal, he felt confident insisting that the film had to be a three-hour-long
0:51.5	R-rated depiction of people talking in rooms, as he puts it.
0:55.9	But first we banter. Stick around. It's the business from KCRW.
1:00.8	I am joined by my colleague in banter, Matt Bellany. Hello, Matt.
1:04.4	Hi there.
1:05.2	So the tit for tat between Disney and the dissident shareholders, Nelson Peltz, backed by Ike Perlmutter, and with
1:13.2	Jay Rissulo, the former Disney executive joining that team, you know, they're fighting for a couple of
1:17.7	seats on the Disney board. This is a heated war, at least in their minds. I don't know how
1:24.2	the shareholders feel. We'll see how they vote. They sent a letter,
	...

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