Christopher Nolan reveals the unique way he wrote ‘Oppenheimer’
Director Christopher Nolan has revealed that he wrote the script for his upcoming Oppenheimer movie in the first person, something that he’d never done before. The film stars Cillian Murphy in the lead role and will be released on 21st July this year.
Nolan revealed all during an interview with Empire: “There’s the idea of how we get in somebody’s head and see how they were visualizing this radical reinvention of physics,” Nolan said. “One of the things that cinema has struggled with historically is the representation of intelligence or genius. It very often fails to engage people.”
The British-American filmmaker told his visual effects lead Andrew Jackson of the importance of getting into Oppenheimer’s head. “We’ve gotta see the world the way he sees it,” he said. “We’ve gotta see the atoms moving; we’ve gotta see the way he’s imagining waves of energy, the quantum world.”
“And then, we have to see how that translates into the Trinity test. And we have to feel the danger, feel the threat of all this somehow,” Nolan added. “My challenge to him was, ‘Let’s do all these things but without any computer graphics’.”
Describing the process of writing the script, the director continued: “I actually wrote in the first-person, which I’ve never done before. I don’t know if anyone’s ever done it before. But the point of it is, with the colour sequences, which is the bulk of the film, everything is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view — you’re literally kind of looking through his eyes.”
“Odd thing to do,” he added. “But it was a reminder to me of how to shoot the film. It was a reminder to everybody involved in the project, ‘Okay, this is the point of view of every scene.’ I wanted to really go through this story with Oppenheimer; I didn’t want to sit by him and judge him. That seemed a pointless exercise.”
There’s a sense in Nolan that he wants to elevate the biography of his main character beyond his mere history. “That’s more the stuff of documentary, or political theory, or history of science,” he noted. “This is a story that you experience with him — you don’t judge him. You are faced with these irreconcilable ethical dilemmas with him.”
Check out the trailer for Oppenheimer, starring Cillian Murphy, below.
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