Christoper Nolan is known for delivering cerebral movies masquerading as commercial cinema. His latest movie though feels like a far departure from the illustrious director’s career. Ever since the first teaser for Oppenheimer dropped last year, fans have been theorizing what the black-and-white and color sequence mean. And they had mostly deciphered the gist of it, until Nolan revealed some stupefying details about the movie’s script.
In an interview with Total Film magazine, Nolan pointed out how the script was written in first person from J. Robert Oppenheimer’s perspective, with the colored sequences representing a subjective point-of-view and the black-and-white sequences representing an objective point-of-view.
I wrote the script in the first person, which I’d never done before. I don’t know if anyone has ever done that, or if that’s a thing people do or not… The film is objective and subjective. The colour scenes are subjective; the black-and-white scenes are objective. I wrote the colour scenes from the first person. So for an actor reading that, in some ways, I think it’d be quite daunting.
And daunting it was for Cillian Murphy who plays the titular physicist in one of the most challenging roles of his career. In an interview done a few weeks back before the trailer’s release, he described the script as the best he’s ever read and laid out his excitement on receiving the call to step up as Nolan’s lead man.
It was one of the best days of my life. There was no preamble or anything, I just got the call. So it was incredibly exciting, and daunting, and terrifying, all at the same time. I’ll say this, it’s the best script I ever read, that’s for sure.
The subjectivity of the color sequences teases some tantalizing possibilities for how Nolan could play with characters. For instance, it’s possible that every character we see in the lead up to the atomic bomb’s detonation is seen from Oppenheimer’s perspective. Some of those characters could act dramatically different should they make an appearance in the courtroom sequences. And like Nolan, I’m unsure as well whether any script has been written in the first person before. Lots to unpack from this brief quote.
Oppenheimer is set for release on July 21, 2023. Directed by Christoper Nolan for Universal Pictures, it features a star-studded cast that includes Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, Jack Quaid, Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek, Gary Oldman, Kenneth Branagh, Alden Ehrenreich, Dane DeHaan, and David Dastmalchian.
