The movie Christopher Nolan told Cillian Murphy to watch before making ‘Oppenheimer’
Very few films have caused as much of a cultural stir as the latest offering from Christopher Nolan. Between box office battles with Barbie, the presence of Hollywood darling Cillian Murphy, and the weight of the real-life story behind it, Oppenheimer captured audiences worldwide to become the second highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, losing out on the top spot only to Todd Phillips’ Joker.
The film told the story of its real-life titular character, played by Murphy, and how he led the Manhattan Project to build the first nuclear weapons. After witnessing the impact of his work and the resulting praise from the American public, Murphy’s Oppenheimer is overcome with guilt and shifts his stance, working to stop further use of the new weapons.
In between Oppenheimer’s work on the Manhattan Project and his romantic endeavours with Florence Pugh’s Jean Tatlock and Emily Blunt’s Kitty Oppenheimer, the film weaves in a rivalry with Robert Downey Jr’s character, Lewis Strauss. By the end of the film, this relationship comes to the forefront as he plots Oppenheimer’s downfall.
Though Nolan’s film was influenced by the actual events surrounding the creation of the atomic bomb, the central rivalry also took inspiration from Miloš Forman’s 1984 period drama, Amadeus. Starring F. Murray Abraham as Antonio Salieri and Tom Hulce as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the film imagined an intense rivalry between the two.
When Nolan and Murphy took a trip to a Parisian video store for Konbini, Nolan picked out the DVD of the film, dubbing it a “wonderful story of rivalry” and suggesting that it had a big influence on Oppenheimer. It was so influential that the director even encouraged his lead actor to watch it ahead of shooting. As Murphy recalls to Nolan: “You told me to rewatch that movie in preparation for this, because the Salieri/Mozart dynamic is very similar to the Strauss/Oppenheimer dynamic in our movie.”
Nolan explains the tense relationship, sharing, “It’s a complicated relationship, and we have two strands to the movie, one very much from Oppenheimer’s point of view, which is the colour sequence, and then the black and white stuff is Robert Downey Jr, Lewis Strauss’s point of view. They have a complicated relationship.”
Murphy also praises F. Murray Abraham’s performance in the film, for which he won ‘Best Actor’ at the Academy Awards, beating out his fictional rival. Meanwhile, Nolan admires the film’s use of makeup: “They did the lenses with the bloodshot eyes and everything, very cool.”
Though Amadeus follows a rivalry between artists while Oppenheimer focuses on science and government, it makes sense that Nolan was inspired by the central rivalry. His recommendation to Murphy certainly didn’t go amiss, either, who delivered an all-time great performance.
