Christopher Nolan On 'Oppenheimer' — His Most Ambitious Film Yet

This week on FilmWeek, writer/director Christopher Nolan, whose credits include "Interstellar," "Inception," "Memento" and many others, joined Larry Mantle to discuss his new historical drama, "Oppenheimer".

"Oppenheimer" stars an impressive cast of familiar faces — Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, among many others. While the film only shot for 57 days, the end product is a 3-hour Imax thriller that thrusts audiences into the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who spearheaded the development of the atomic bomb.

The following is Larry Mantle's FilmWeek interview with Christopher Nolan. It has been edited for brevity.

Larry Mantle: Christopher Nolan, it's great to have you with us today on FilmWeek. Share with us your attraction to the book and adapting the complex life of Oppenheimer to film. What sold you on making this movie?

OPPENHEIMER, written and directed by Christopher Nolan

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Chris Nolan: I've been interested in Oppenheimer for a lot of years. He's a figure from my childhood. I think of Sting's song, Russians, that came out in the 1980s when I was a teenager, where he referred to Oppenheimer's deadly toy, meaning the atomic bomb. Then over the years, I'd learned various things about him, one in particular that I included in dialogue in my previous film, Tenet, which was this fact that Oppenheimer and his fellow lead scientists on the Manhattan Project, in the build-up to Trinity, realized they could not completely eliminate the possibility of a chain reaction from the test they were about to conduct that would set fire to the atmosphere and destroy the entire world.

And yet they went ahead and pushed that button. And that to me was literally the most dramatic situation I've ever heard of. So I fell into interested over the years. And then when I came to the book, "American Prometheus" by Kai Bird and Martin Schoen, it offered everything. It won the Pulitzer Prize. It's an incredibly well-written, authoritative account of Oppenheimer's life. So it gave me the confidence to work from that book, gave me the confidence to take on this very dramatic and incredibly complicated story.

Your film is going to rise and fall on the ability of that actor and what led you to Cillian Murphy, someone with whom you'd worked in a number of films, but what led you to believe he had the ability to portray this person, who was charismatic brilliant, had a theatrical side, a very tough character to play?

A very tough character to play, and I wanted him to play it in such a way that he would take the audience into the viewpoint of Oppenheimer. I actually wrote the script in the first person. So instead of stage directions. [He] didn't read Oppenheimer, he came in, he sat down at his desk, they read, I came in, I sat down at the desk.

That's the script that I handed Cillian. I've known him for 20 years. As soon as I started working with him on Batman Begins, it was clear to me that he's one of the great actors of his or any generation. And I don't think of actors while I'm writing the script. I try to not write to things that actors have already done.

I try to be pure to the process of creating new characters. Or in the case of Oppenheimer, I'm writing historical fact, I'm writing people who actually lived. So I can have them in my mind as I'm writing as that creative journey takes place. And then when I'm finished, I'm looking at the book, American Prometheus, with this photograph of Oppenheimer with his intense blue-eyed stare, and I think I know who can do that and Killian has that tremendous ability, that empathetic ability to open up The thoughts of a character and the emotions of a character to the audience so that they can come with us on that journey.

Did you know from looking at the first footage that you shot that you had it right, that he was the right person?

I think I knew that we'd be okay. But it wasn't until I got in the edit suite that I saw that he had truly created a genuinely remarkable performance, the type of performance that does not come along every film by any means. And every time I see the film, I see different nuances that he's bringing to it, different layers.

Chris, talk about Robert Downey Jr., with such an important role here as a foil to Oppenheimer and your decision of casting him in this role. What went into that?

LONDON, ENGLAND - JULY 13: (L-R) Rami Malek, Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, Cillian Murphy and Christopher Nolan attend the "Oppenheimer" UK Premiere at Odeon Luxe Leicester Square on July 13, 2023 in London, England. (Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images)

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What went into that was always having been an admirer of Robert Downey Jr's. I've watched with admiration over the last few years as his charisma as a movie star has spoken to the whole world. And it'd been a long time since we'd seen him lose himself in a character. And Louis Strauss is a very important figure in Oppenheimer's life. And the relationship between them has these incredible sort of twists and turns.

It's got this really multilayered set of contradictions in the way they relate to each other and where that leads. And it becomes so important for the fate of the entire planet. That's a tall order. So for me to be able to convince Downey to come and just lose himself in a character that he really connected with, saw his point of view entirely and portrays the truth of that. It was a really fun thing to be a part of. It was fun to work with him and it was amazing to just watch him create.

A great cast all around: Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett. I wanted to ask you about the locations for the film, because New Mexico, Los Alamos, of course, where the Manhattan Project was based. What, if any, significant challenges did you face in going to the actual locations and doing this?

I think there were a lot of different challenges depending on which areas you're talking about. We weren't necessarily going to shoot in the real Los Alamos at all. I had been there with one of my sons the summer before when I was researching the project and realized it's a very modern town.

As you say, it has a laboratory, a very modern facility now, and there's a Starbucks there and all that stuff. So I had written it off. But my designer, Ruth De Jong went to the real Los Alamos and realized that there are so many great interiors there. So yes, we couldn't do our exteriors there, but Oppenheimer's house, the house that Kitty and Robert lived in for those three years, was there and available and untouched really from the 1940s. So Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt, they got to tread the floorboards that the Oppenheimer's treaded on.

L to R: Emily Blunt is Kitty Oppenheimer and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.

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The nuclear explosion of the Trinity test is such an incredible sequence in the film. Share with us how long it took to put that all together. I can't imagine the complexity of shooting that.

We knew that the Trinity test had to be a showstopper. It's the hinge point of the film. It's the moment the world changed forever and will never change back.

We put a lot of attention in right from the beginning. Very early on, I showed the script to my visual effects supervisor, Andrew Jackson, and I said to him, let's try and do this with no computer graphics. Let's take that off the table and let's look for analog methods that would have a bit more bite to the imagery.

We knew that this had to be absolutely beautiful and terrifying in equal measure. And so we looked for real world solutions with a lot of different mixtures, whether it's magnesium flares, petrol explosions with black powder, things like that. All of these different techniques coming to produce this complicated montage of how to get across the beauty and terror of what these scientists were experiencing.

But having real gigantic explosive events meant we were out in the desert with the cast in bunkers, the way the scientists on the Manhattan project would have been. And obviously what we were doing had to be done very carefully and safely. So there's a tension around that.

A photograph on display at The Bradbury Science Museum shows the first atomic bomb test On July 16, 1945, at 5:29:45am, at Trinity Site in New Mexico, U.S.A. The museum is Los Alamos National Laboratory's window to the public. The Museum displays the Laboratory's current research and presents the history of the Laboratory's role in the Manhattan Project during World War II. (photograph on display in the Bradbury Science museum, photo copied by Joe Raedle)

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Can you share how many times you actually detonated to get the look of what you want?

Quite a few. There's a fair amount of explosives used because, of course, as you know from having seen the film, the event has to be seen from a lot of different points of view.

So there were scientists in the control bunker to trigger the actual test. They were the closest. And then there's base camp, which was another five miles away from that bunker. And then there's a position on the hilltop where a lot of the other scientists were watching from much further away.

One of the things we tried to do in the film was to get across the magnitude of the event, to try and see it from these different perspectives. And so it involved a lot of different coverage, a lot of detail work, as well as the large explosions from very different points of view.

And with the large format you shoot on, it is so immersive for a viewer sitting there, as though you're there in the bunker and the concussive sound and the light flash, all of that is extraordinary. And I just thought, how different would this film be if you shot this to stream as opposed to large format on a big screen theatrical experience? It would not be the same film.

Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.

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No, it wouldn't. It's made for the big screen. We've tried to have an epic telling of the biggest story I know of. That's what the big screen can do. And for me, there's been too much of a tendency of late to try and divide movies into different categories that we decide 'Oh, that requires the big screen, that's for the small screen' or whatever. I think really, movies can be anything. They could take you anywhere. They could put you in any time or place and make you feel something and I think for me, there was no question that this story should play out on the biggest screen possible.

Chris, just in closing, I wanted to ask about your wife, Emma Thomas. She's a big part of your team. She has worked with you on all of your films. As a collaborator on these projects, how does that change your work?

It's tough for me to answer how it changes my work because we've always worked together. Emma's been producing my films since we were students together in college. I've been fortunate to have a partner working with me, with an absolute focus on getting the best possible telling of any particular story. She's simply the best producer there is.

It makes my job much easier as a director and it allows me to focus on the things that matter.

Chris, thank you so much for joining us on FilmWeek and talking about Oppenheimer. It's an extraordinary achievement and we appreciate you joining us to discuss it today. Thank you.

You can listen to the entire episode of FilmWeek anywhere you get your podcasts or on LAist.com.