“Oppenheimer”: Read the script for Christopher Nolan’s biographical thriller

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series, highlighting the year’s most talked about screenplays, continues with Christopher Nolan’s epic biographical thriller Oppenheimer. Related to American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy by J. Robert Oppenheimer Written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Nolan wrote the screenplay about the titular complicated and brilliant physicist charged with leading the Manhattan Project, the secret effort to build the atomic bomb, and the moral and political struggle that followed.

The man Oppenheimer, as the film tells us, struggled with mental health problems in his youth and developed into an unparalleled intellectual, but not exactly a likable figure. After the war, he was a staunch opponent of nuclear weapons and withdrew his security clearance in 1954 during a hearing that focused on his maybe/maybe non-communist connections.

The story unfolds in an unusual first-person perspective, with a moral conundrum arising in Oppenheimer’s mind as he begins to imagine the dangers beyond the short-term use of a weapon that could trigger an arms race and a new world mission (and it did too). ). Order that changed us forever. The film presents the audience with numerous philosophical dilemmas.

Cillian Murphy plays the eponymous theoretical physicist and previously told Deadline that when Nolan had him read the script for the first time in Dublin, he knew it was something special.

“The script was honestly one of the best things I’ve ever read,” Murphy said. “It was breathtaking in terms of ambition and scope, but also in terms of clarity [Nolan] reviewed Oppenheimer’s story. He wrote it in the first person, which I had never experienced before, so it was a new experience for me when I read it.

Murphy continued, “It’s the biggest moral dilemmas possible, the biggest drama possible, the things that all these characters are struggling with, so you just have to go with it… But Chris wrote it and took it from the book and did it. “so empathised. He has had such a good understanding of the story and how he wants to tell the story and how the character should be portrayed for a long time.

Oppenheimer There is also a large and star-studded cast including Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Jason Clarke, Kenneth Branagh and an unrecognizable Gary Oldman, among many others.

Universal released the film in July amid a unique blockbuster called Barbenheimer. Nolan’s film has grossed $952 million worldwide and is confirmed for a 2024 release in Japan, although an exact date has not yet been set.

Oppenheimer has 13 Critics Choice nominations and eight Golden Globe nominations. The film also belongs to the elite group of ten films selected for the prestigious AFI Awards.

Producer Emma Thomas told Deadline: “Every film you make has its own challenges and I think I often get a bit super nervous when I read the scripts that Chris writes because I think about what the hell they’re up to in the next few years , but also how on earth we are going to do these things. With this script it was actually quite different because I felt that we had a handle on the experiences we had so far… There are also big problems, deep moral ambiguity, how do we set a film like this out in the summer and people get it? I am working on it and making a film that can entertain and challenge people at the same time with the ideas in it.

Nolan himself received the Federation of American Scientists’ Public Service Award last month in recognition of his cultural contributions to bringing J. Robert Oppenheimer’s story to a wider audience through film.

In his speech accepting the honor, he discussed the dichotomy between scientist and artist in terms of their relationship to and dialogue with society as a whole. As a filmmaker, he explained, you are given a certain permission to create meaning through a “dramatic choice.” It happened to him Oppenheimer as he wrestles with the end of his story, which, depending on the setting, can lean toward hope for the world’s future or despair. Frankly, Nolan said, the full history of nuclear power is still being written, well beyond the years covered in his film, as geopolitical power shifts and technology continue to evolve. But either way, he chose despair out of a desire to remind audiences of Oppenheimer, a man haunted by the possibility that his work could harm people.

Read the script below.