Christoper Nolan reveals he wrote the script for OPPENHEIMER in the first person as Oppenheimer

Christoper Nolan revealed in a recent interview with Empire magazine that when he wrote the screenplay for Oppenheimer, wrote it in the first person as J. Robert Oppenheimer, which he had never done before. He explained:

“I actually wrote in the first person, which I’ve never done before. I don’t know if anyone has ever done this before. But the point is, with the color sequences, which are the bulk of the film, everything is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view: you’re literally looking through his eyes.

Even the script’s character descriptions, setting details, and captions were all written in Oppenheimer’s first person. Nolan admitted:

“Strange thing to do. But she reminded me how to shoot the film. It was a reminder to everyone involved in the project, ‘Okay, this is the point of view of each scene.’ I really wanted to go over this story with Oppenheimer; I didn’t want to sit next to him and judge him. It felt like a futile exercise. It’s more documentary stuff, or political theory, or history of science. This is a story that you live with him, you don’t judge him. You are faced with these irreconcilable ethical dilemmas with him.

Knowing this information makes the film even more interesting. What a wild way to write a screenplay, but I’m sure the movie will be so much better because of this. The director continued:

“There’s this idea of ​​how to get inside someone’s head and see how they were viewing this radical reinvention of physics. One of the things that cinema has historically struggled with is the depiction of intelligence or genius. Very often it fails to engage people.”

After Nolan sent the script to his visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson, Nolan said he stressed to him that “we have to find a way to get inside this guy’s head. We have to see the world as he sees it, we have to see the atoms moving, we have to see the way he imagines energy waves, the quantum world. And then we have to see how that translates into the Trinity test. And we have to feel the danger, feel the threat of it all in some way.

Nolan went on to say that he challenged Jackson to “do all of these things, but without computer graphics.” This is the other reason I’m so excited to watch this movie. Seeing how exactly they did it will be awesome!

The film is the protagonist Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who ran the Manhattan Project that led to the creation of the atomic bomb during World War II. The film has been described as an “epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the heart-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world to save it.”

Murphy is joined in the film by Emilia Blunt as biologist and botanist Kitty Oppenheimer; Robert Downey Jr. as founding commissioner of the US Atomic Energy Commission Lewis Strauss; Matt Damon as Manhattan Project director Leslie Groves Jr.; Florence Pug as psychiatrist Jean Tatlock; Benny Safdie as theoretical physicist Edward Teller; AND Josh Hartnett as pioneered by American nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence. The film is also the protagonist Rami Malek, Gary Oldmann, Michael Angarano, Olivia Thirlby, Dane DeHaan, Jack Quaid, Matthew Modine, Alden Ehrenreich, Jason Clarke, David Krumholtz, Kenneth Branagh, AND David Dastmalchian.

Oppenheimer it will be classified R and its autonomy is 2 hours and 49 minutes. It will be released in theaters on July 21, 2023.