Nolan wrote ‘Oppenheimer’ in first person 2023
Christopher Nolan, the director of ”Oppenheimer,” claims he wrote the screenplay from the first-person perspective to give the audience a direct look into the psyche of his protagonist.
The acclaimed director of films such as ”The Prestige,” ”The Dark Knight” trilogy starring Christian Bale, and ”Inception” stated that this was his first subjective screenplay.
”I wrote in the first person, which is something I’ve never done before. I do not know if it has ever been done before. With the colour sequences, which comprise the majority of the film, everything is told from Oppenheimer’s perspective — you’re gazing through his eyes,” Nolan told the British magazine The Empire.
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book ”American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin and starring Cilian Murphy as the titular theoretical physicist regarded as one of the atomic bomb’s founding fathers, the Universal Pictures project stars Cilian Murphy as Oppenheimer.
After sending the completed script for ”Oppenheimer” to visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson, the director stated that he told his colleague, ”we have to find a way into this guy’s mind”.
”We have to see the world as he does, we have to see the atoms moving, we have to see how he envisions energy waves, the quantum world. Then, we must determine how this translates to the Trinity test.
And we must sense the peril, the threat of this situation in some way.’ My challenge to him was, ‘Let’s do all of these things without the use of computer graphics,” he said.
Nolan said he must not criticize Oppenheimer’s actions.
”The notion is to get inside someone’s mind and determine how they envisioned this radical reinvention of physics. The depiction of intellect or genius has historically been a source of difficulty for the film industry. It frequently fails to engage people,” he continued.
”I wanted to go through this narrative with Oppenheimer; I didn’t want to evaluate him while he sat next to me. That seemed like a futile endeavor.
”This is more documentary, political theory, or history of science material. This is a story that you share with him; you do not pass judgment on him. You confront these insurmountable ethical dilemmas with him,” he explained.
Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, Benny Safdie, Josh Hartnett, Dane DeHaan, Jack Quaid, Matthew Modine, Alden Ehrenreich, David Dastmalchian, Michael Angarano, Matthias Schweighofer, Gary Oldman, Harrison Gilbertson, Emma Dumont, Devon Bostick, and Trond Faust also appear in ”Oppenheimer”.
The film, shot with IMAX film cameras, will be released in theaters on July 21.
