Christopher Nolan has admitted that he followed a “no Uggs on set” policy while filming Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer and the newly released film The Odyssey.
“I want to stay in the moment. I want actors to stay in the moment,” Nolan told Gayle King on Monday’s episode of “CBS Morning.” “For me, UGG boots are a symbol of modernity.”
The director of “Oppenheimer” said that when the actors sometimes show up on set wearing “big, fluffy, comfortable” sheepskin slippers, they “strangely take you out of reality.”
Director Nolan pointed out how the popular boots were more offensive to the realism on set than the entire film crew.
“What’s funny is sometimes there’s a guy on set with a microphone, there’s a huge camera, and there’s staff everywhere.”
The “Interstellar” director went on to say, “There’s a reminder that you’re in the real world, not the world we’re trying to create for the actors.”
The Oscar winner even compared the distraction to an off-camera snack.
“It’s like someone eating a bag of chips off camera,” he said, noting that the shoes can take away from the world created by the set.
“UGGs are great,” the 55-year-old filmmaker declared. But he doesn’t want to see them while filming the award-winning movie.
In an interview with USA Today, Anne Hathaway and Matt Damon discussed the director’s shoe preferences.
“One day I showed up with Uggs and he looked down and said, ‘No!'” Hathaway said of her experience on the set of The Odyssey.
When asked about Nolan’s opinion on Australian slippers, Damon laughed and said, “He hates Uggs more than anything.”
The Best Director winner wasn’t just harsh on the set of “The Odyssey,” as Emily Blunt revealed that director Nolan wouldn’t let her wear cozy boots on the set of “Oppenheimer.”
“He’s got such a problem with Ugg’s boots. It’s a serious problem,” the “Disclosure Day” star told Stephen Colbert on a January 2024 episode of “The Late Show.”
“One day I came in wearing it and I was like, ‘The Devil Wears Prada.’ He was literally just staring at it. I was like, ‘Chris, come on.’ He said, ‘Take that off.’ ”
“But he didn’t like them, so I gave him some,” the 43-year-old actress joked.
The director of “Inception” is known for wanting his sets to be as authentic as possible, opting to shoot scenes in remote locations rather than settling for green screens, and creating realistic visual effects instead of relying on post-production techniques.
Computer-generated imagery (CGI) “always tends to feel a little bit safer to me. I think if you want something to have a little bit of bite, you need to have a little bit of menace in the image.”
In a 2023 interview with Wired, director Nolan said, “What you see on camera is real. I think you’ll get a better result that way.”
Shot entirely with high-definition IMAX cameras, “The Odyssey” was released in theaters on July 17th and grossed $124.5 million domestically on its opening weekend.
