Always with plenty to say on the state of cinema in general, and seen by many serious movie fans as a defender of the art, Christopher Nolan was asked in an interview about the release of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour as a concert film.

The interview was part of an event at City University in New York where he was interviewed by American Prometheus author Kai Bird. Bird’s book was the basis for Oppenheimer.

The concert film bypassed the studios and saw Swift do a deal directly with AMC Theaters. In clips released by CUNY via Dark Horizons, Nolan had this to say about that route:

“Taylor Swift is about to show the studios, because her concert film is not being distributed by the studios, it’s being distributed by a theater owner, AMC, and it’s going to make an enormous amount of money.

This is the thing, [theatrical exhibition is] a format and a way of seeing things and sharing stories, or sharing experiences, that’s incredibly valuable. And if [the studios] don’t want it, somebody else will. So that’s just the truth of it.

Any time a film that isn’t expected to succeed, and we vastly exceeded our highest expectations for the project [Oppenheimer], it’s encouraging for the studios and the filmmakers. That tension, that reality… between commerce and art, that formula never changes in Hollywood.”

Swift will take 57% of ticket sales. The rest is shared between the theaters themselves and AMC. If filmmakers and theaters like the look of this type of arrangement, you could find that studios suddenly don’t feel quite so smug about streaming, smaller theatrical windows, and being aggressive with splits.

Oppenheimer will end its record-breaking theatrical run and arrive on PVOD on November 21st.

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