“We thought we were gonna die”: Christopher Nolan on how the Sting song ‘Russians’ shaped ‘Oppenheimer’
There’s no right or wrong way to find inspiration for a certain project. Whether it’s a great song or crafting an entire album, most musicians can spend ages labouring over what to write about until finding the right project that makes a lightbulb go off in their head. It works the same way on the film side as well, and when Christopher Nolan started making this masterpiece, he managed to take inspiration from one of Sting’s greatest compositions.
When looking back on Nolan’s movies, though, every one of them feels very insular. Although The Dark Knight trilogy was made to deliberately tie into one another, the complex tales in Interstellar and especially Tenet feel like they are completely tied into Nolan’s signature way of crafting movies, which in most cases involves indirect storytelling that plays fast and loose with the concept of time.
Because from day one, Nolan has always felt like a director slightly out of time. There are pieces of his movies that feel incredibly modern, but judging by how much he likes to stay away from CGI and favours more realistic approaches to film, he has always seemed like someone indebted to the days of Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick making the most out of practical effects and the phenomenal actors rather than how much money they can throw at the screen.
Although Sting was never as prolific in his acting career by the time Nolan started making films, that clinical approach to filmmaking also showed up in the bassist’s first solo records. He could still make classics with The Police, but he was interested in making something that blended the weirdness of someone like Frank Zappa with the tasteful playing that you’d find in jazz.
Despite being able to make ‘Every Breath You Take’, a track like ‘If You Love Somebody Set Them Free’ is a much different animal. Sting was now free to get a little freakier while still writing great melodies, but ‘Russians’ became a turning point for him. Outside of the odd time signature of the tune, hearing him talk about the harsh realities of people living with the threat of nuclear war led to Nolan going down the rabbit hole that would eventually lead him to J Robert Oppenheimer.
While Nolan got the basis of the story from the book American Prometheus, he referenced ‘Russians’ directly when talking about his upbringing, saying, “I trace it right back to when I was a kid in the 1980s, and we all thought we were gonna die in nuclear armageddon. Sting had that song ‘Russians’, ‘Oppenheimer had that deadly toy.’”
Looking at how Oppenheimer is structured, though, there are pieces of Sting’s song that are fleshed out a bit more in the film. Compared to the traditional biopics that seek to flatter every piece of a person’s life, seeing them deal with the consequences of dropping a nuclear bomb and the drastic repercussions that come from millions of innocent people getting displaced or burned to a crisp is still at the forefront of the film.
Because Nolan was never looking to have his films perceived in just one way. He had his sights set on different aspects of every story, and that means looking at aspects that some might find inspiring and others might find despicable.
