If Cillian Murphy is to be believed, Oppenheimer is worthy of nothing less than the big screen experience. The biggest screen possible impact. Murphy, who steps up to be Nolan’s lead man after years of hanging around in his movies, oversteps restraint and gets a bit explicit and excited about what’s in store for audiences this summer. In an exclusive for Empire, he couldn’t contain his excitemetn and lets some of it out.
I think it’s a truly essential cinematic experience. And I know that’s what I’m supposed to say, that’s the studio line. But you have to see this in the cinema on the biggest fucking screen possible. There are moments in it that will blow people’s lids off.
Nolan, however, sheds some more light on what really makes it so. A true cornerstone of a theatrical experience is a movie with the highest possible stakes. And for a biopic, nothing really could be more significant than the end of the world. That, quite literally, was what was at stake as Oppenheimer rushed to create the atomic bomb in a race with the Nazis to win World War II. So while studio-speak would have you believe that this is yet another movie with undeniable stakes, Nolan convinces you that the stakes are very much real in this one.
Look, the ultimate stakes of any big blockbuster is the survival of the world. And that’s what this story is. I know of no story with higher stakes than Oppenheimer’s story. That’s just the truth of it. It’s tricky using a word like entertainment when you’re talking about something so serious, but entertainment in movies takes many forms. This is such an involving, compelling tale that we had the privilege of telling.
This was also reflected in their filming methodology. Going the old-school route, Nolan talked about how it was key to do everything in camera as much as possible. This includes creating the explosions that we’ll be seeing in the film, chief of them all being the Trinity Test, which will probably be the film’s climactic explosion. Nolan seemed to cherish the experience of doing something like this for real in an outdoor environment instead of sitting in a studio tucked away behind a computer as VFX technicians presented different variations of an explosion.
I mean, I’ve done a lot of explosions in a lot of films. But there is something very unique and particular about being out in a desert in the middle of the night with a big cast, and really just doing some enormous explosions and capturing that. You couldn’t help but come back to this moment when they were doing this on the ultimate scale, that in the back of their minds they knew there was this possibility that they would set fire to the atmosphere. It was pretty amazing to engage in that kind of tension.
What’s interesting is Nolan’s use of the plural – explosions. Previous rumors have dismissed any possibility of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings making it to the movie. Could this be a hint though that we could see at least one of those? Given the increased emphasis on the film’s subjective narrative, I’m guessing that’s doubtful and these explosions are simply multiple takes of the Trinity Test or some other minor tests before the big one.
Oppenheimer arrives in theaters on July 21, 2023. Tickets for the movie are now on sale.
