Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker that tackles interesting subjects with fascinating themes and heady concepts. Be it the backwards narrative of Memento, the dream-within-dream-within-dream construct of Inception, time relativity in Interstellar, three parallel timelines running in harmony in Dunkirk or time inversion in Tenet, his films abound in head-scratching elements presented in entertaining ways that leave audiences gasping for more. For a man then who can make a film about anything (and film it for real too), what drew Nolan towards tackling the famed theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer?
Empire posed that question to him in their exclusive feature and got some answers. At the beginning, Nolan plays coy, unable to recollect when exactly he found himself drawn into the world embodied by the physicist during World War II.
I actually don’t remember when I first got hooked by the notion of, you know, they literally thought they might destroy the world.
But Nolan has had thoughts about Oppenheimer since his last feature. And fans certainly haven’t forgotten the reference in Tenet, when Dimple Kapadia’s character Priya lays out this precise analogy, about how Oppenheimer’s team became concerned about a chain reaction that could threaten to destroy the world. Ever since, the thought refused to leave Nolan’s mind.
This idea that these guys did this calculation, and couldn’t eliminate the possibility that they’d set fire to the atmosphere and destroy the whole world. But they had to go ahead and do the Trinity test anyway. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, which was really what Tenet was about. In dealing with that I then became interested in looking at that story, not as analogy for a science-fiction concept, but for its own sake, because it is just so irresistibly dramatic.
His Tenet co-lead Robert Pattinson stoked his curiosity further. Empire reveals that once Tenet wrapped, Pattinson handed Nolan a book containing Oppenheimer’s speeches that the duo had discussed on the sets of Tenet. Nolan found himself irresistibly drawn towards that world.
[I was drawn to the stories of] these people trying to adapt to a new world in which this terrible power exists, and trying to figure out how, geopolitically, the world could deal with it, what the consequence was going to be, when it was absolutely new and fresh.
This in turn led him to read the definitive biography of Oppenheimer. American Prometheus – The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Pulitzer Price winning book penned by authors Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin convinced Nolan that Oppenheimer was the most important man who lived in the last century, further influencing him to conduct more research and write a script. And for all the physics and science behidn it, at the core of it for Nolan was the story.
Really, you have to look at it in terms of story. It’s a story of someone who’s involved in a very specific and revolutionary turn in the world. He’s there at the dawn of quantum physics, quantum mechanics and the incorporation of that, this revolutionary shift in thinking about physics.
Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan, is set for release on July 21, 2023. For more of my coverage on the movie, click on the title tag below.
