He is the greatest man who ever lived,” says Christopher Nolan. He talks about Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist at the service of the US Government who invented the atomic bomb and to whom he dedicates the longest film of his, Oppenheimer, which opens in theaters today.
His inspiration for telling the story was to recreate the moment when scientists working on the Manhattan Project realized that the atomic bomb could set off a chain reaction that would ignite the atmosphere and end life on Earth. “Even though they couldn’t completely eliminate that possibility, they decided to go ahead and push the button,” Nolan told Wired magazine, later continuing: “That must have been an incredibly dramatic moment to witness. And he used his charisma to drag the team into it.”
Oppenheimer is not just any premiere. When Warner Bros announced that all of its movies would hit theaters and HBO at the same time, many thought that this was the end of cinema as we knew it. But Nolan wasn’t about to accept that change without a fight. The director owns an impeccable record of box office successes with titles such as The Dark Knight trilogy, Origin, Interstellar, Dunkirk and Tenet and managed to break the record of 350 million dollars worldwide.
When Nolan set out to find a new home for his next film, a three-hour, $100 million biography of nuclear physicist J.Robert Oppenheimer that would be shot partly in black-and-white with Imax cameras with no room for CGI special effects, the English filmmaker was seduced by the offer of Universal president Donna Longley, who promised that his film would not be released digitally and that it would take over all Imax theaters in the United States during the first three weeks. Longley also included in her proposal that Oppenheimer would be seen exclusively in theaters for 90 days.
Judging by the expectation that the film has generated – to the point that this weekend it has been dubbed Barbieheimer by fans, who have sold out all the tickets to see Nolan’s new proposal in its original format in the United States – it is likely that the battle has been won. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the top executive explained: “When we were coming out of the pandemic, we were wondering how to get audiences back into theaters. Nolan is the answer, one of those few directors whose name inspires moviegoers all over the world to go to the movies.”
Nolan usually writes his scripts on a computer without an internet connection, he doesn’t have email or use a cell phone, and he prepares his films as a family adventure, with the help of his wife, Emma Thomas, his eternal producer, and often with his brother Jonathan as a co-writer. He found out what his next movie would be in an unusual way. When the filming of Tenet concluded, his protagonist, Robert Pattinson, gave him a book with Oppenheimer’s speeches in the 1950s, warning about the dangers of nuclear weapons. That led to Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s American Prometheus, a Pulitzer-winning 864-page tome detailing the scientist’s life as a result of 25-year research, and which became the basis for the screenplay. “Many people know the name, know that he was involved with the atomic bomb, and that something happened afterward that complicated his relationship with the United States. For me, that is the ideal viewer. And the people who don’t know anything about him are going to be the ones who will have the best experience watching the film, because it’s an incredible story”, explains the director at a press conference.
The actor Cillian Murphy, who plays the nuclear physicist, has already had six films with Nolan behind him, including a brief participation in Dunkirk, and received the opportunity of a lifetime thanks to his physical resemblance to the scientist, something that he took advantage of by giving himself body and soul to becoming him, for which he had to lose weight. But in the film there is room for many other actors, including Emily Blunt, who plays his wife; Florence Pugh, to her lover; Robert Downey Jr., who plays Lewis Strauss, head of the US Atomic Energy Commission; and Josh Hartnett, Benny Safdie and Gustaf Skarsgard as some of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project in New Mexico, developing the bomb that would kill 226,000 people at the end of World War II. Gary Oldman, Kenneth Branagh and Matthew Modine also participated: “It was like the cast of Ben-Hur , says Downey Jr , adding: ‘Everyone had their moment, because there are no small scenes.’
