Christoper Nolan Reveals He Wrote the OPPENHEIMER Script in the First Person as Oppenheimer
Christoper Nolan revealed in a recent interview with Empire magazine that when he wrote the script for Oppenheimer, he wrote it in the first person as J. Robert Oppenheimer, which is something that he’s never done before. He explained:
“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.”
Even the script’s character descriptions, setting details and stage directions were all written in the first person as Oppenheimer. Nolan admitted:
“Odd thing to do. 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. That’s more the stuff of documentary, or political theory, or history of science. This is a story that you experience with him — you don’t judge him. You are faced with these irreconcilable ethical dilemmas with him.”
Knowing this info makes the film even more interesting. What a wild way to go about writing a script, but I’m sure that the film will be that much better because of it. The filmmaker went on to say:
“There’s the idea of how we get in somebody’s head and see how they were visualizing this radical reinvention of physics. One of the things that cinema has struggled with historically is the representation of intelligence or genius. It very often fails to engage people.”
After Nolan sent the screenplay to his visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson, Nolan said that he stressed to him that “we have to find a way into this guy’s head. We’ve gotta see the world the way he sees it, 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 went on to say that he challenged Jackson to “do all these things, but without any computer graphics.” That’s the other reason I’m so excited about watching this movie. Seeing how exactly they pulled that off is going to be cool!
The film stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who ran the Manhattan Project that led to the creation of the atomic bomb during World War II. The film has been described as an “epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it.”
Murphy is joined in the film by Emily Blunt as biologist and botanist Kitty Oppenheimer; Robert Downey, Jr. as founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Lewis Strauss; Matt Damon as Manhattan Project director Leslie Groves Jr.; Florence Pugh as psychiatrist Jean Tatlock; Benny Safdie as theoretical physicist Edward Teller; and Josh Hartnett as pioneering American nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence. The movie also stars Rami Malek, Gary Oldman, Michael Angarano, Olivia Thirlby, Dane DeHaan, Jack Quaid, Matthew Modine, Alden Ehrenreich, Jason Clarke, David Krumholtz, Kenneth Branagh, and David Dastmalchian.
Oppenheimer will be rated R and its runtime is 2 hours and 49 minutes. It will be released in theaters on July 21, 2023.