There are some new images and details for Oppenheimer, thanks to a newly published article
by Empire Magazine here in the UK.
We get interviews with Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy,
where they talk about visualising the physics in J. Robert Oppenheimer's mind onscreen,
the movie being an essential cinematic experience and much more surrounding the filmmaking
process.
In this video, I'm going to be discussing the images and details shared, breaking down
the newest info from the film.
Before I get into it though, if you want to keep up to
date on any of my content surrounding Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, then don't forget to
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But without further a do, lets discuss the new images and details for Oppenheimer.
So the the new edition of Empire magazine has provided us with a lot of new images and
interviews for Christopher Nolan's highly anticipated film.
The new article details an extended conversation with Christopher Nolan at his
post-production facility in LA, where he's putting the final touches on the movie, and
Empire was also able to speak to lead actor Cillian
Murphy about the whole process and certain elements of this gripping story.
The images in the article include Cillian Murphy's Oppenheimer and Matt Damon's Leslie
Groves surveying the test location of the atomic bomb, more exclusive
looks at that location during the night of the testing, multiple behind the scenes shots
of Nolan and his cast on set and a image of both Murphy and Robert Downey Jr's characters
meeting for the first time, showcasing a once friendly relationship that's soon to become
a heated rivalry.
There's other images in this article as well and I will be presenting them
onscreen throughout the video.
Something to note is that a handful of these images aren't in the greatest of quality because
of how small they are on the page, but I did do my absolute
best to scan them in the best possible quality I could.
But now that the intro is out the way lets get into the extended interviews and
all of the most interesting things that were mentioned in this new article.
So after Empire were treated behind closed doors to some new footage from Oppenheimer,
which they called unnerving, Christopher Nolan began talking about how he first became hooked
on the idea of taking on this story.
He said "I actually don't remember when I first got hooked by the notion of, you know,
they literally thought they might destroy the world".
But he then explains that when making Tenet there
was a pivotal moment that shifted his focus towards taking it on.
That film made a reference to Oppenheimer with Priya's character telling
John david Washington's Protagonist that as Oppenheimer's team approached the trinity
test, he became concerned that the detonation might produce a chain reaction, engulfing
the world.
The fillmaker said that following that moment he couldn't stop thinking about the idea.
He said, "it was this idea that these guys did this calculation, and couldn't eliminate
the possibility that they'd set fire to the atmosphere
and destory the whole world.
But they had to go ahead and do the trinity test anyway.
You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, which was really what Tenet was about.
In dealing with that I then became interested in looking at that story, not as a analogy
for a science fiction concept, but for its own sake,
because it is just so irresistably dramatic".
The article also mentions the moment where Robert Pattinson gave Christopher Nolan a
book of Oppenheimer's speeches during the Tenet wrap
party and that this led to the filmmaker eventually reading American prometheus, the book that
his new movie is based on.
Nolan said, "it was these people trying to adapt to a new
world in which this terrible power exists, and trying to figure out how, geopolitically,
the world could deal with it, what the consequence was going to be, when it was absolutely new
and fresh.
It's a provocative statement, but I believe it to be true, that Oppenheimer is the most
important man who ever lived.
Whether you like it or not".
Once Empire followed this up by asking Nolan whether the film would
be a psychological deep dive as well, he replied by saying, "really, you have to look at it
in terms of story.
It's a story of someone who's involved in a very specific and revolutionary
turn in the world.
He's there at the dawn of quantum physics, quantum mechanics and the incorportation of
that, this revolutionary shift in thinking about physics."
And when touching on that idea of really seeing this revolutionary turn, Christopher Nolan
made it clear that he wanted to portray this from a central perspective.
While there's apparently many test explosions and big climatic
moments in the film, the most difficult part for Nolan was working out how to put the audience
inside the mind of J. Robert Oppenheimer and showcase the integral thought behind that
process on screen.
He said, “there’s the idea of how we get in somebody’s head and see how they were
visualising this radical reinvention of physics.
One of the things that cinema has struggled with historically is the representation of
intelligence or genius.
It very often fails to engage people.
The first person I showed the script to when it was finished
after Emma Thomas read it was Andrew Jackson, the visual effects supervisor.
I said to him, we have to find a way into this guy’s head.
We’ve gotta see the world the way he sees it, we’ve
gotta see the atoms moving, we’ve gotta see the way he’s imagining waves of energy,
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 all this somehow.
My challenge to him was, let’s do all these things, but without any computer
graphics.
It's more then people writing on a window".
And it turns out that this thought very much guided Nolan when it came to the structure
of the film that he was putting on screen, and specifically, his desire to keep the film
as subjective as possible, which also affected the script.
He continued by saying, “I actually wrote in the first-person, which I’ve never
done before.
I don’t know if anyone’s ever done it before.
But the point of it is, with the colour sequences, which is the bulk of the film, everything
is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view — you’re literally kind of looking
through his eyes.
When he says everything, he means everything – descriptions, directions, all of it.
It's an odd thing to do, but it was a reminder to me of how to shoot the film.
It was a reminder to everybody involved in the project, okay, this is the point of view
of every scene.
I wanted to really go through this story with Oppenheimer.
I didn’t want to sit by him and judge him.
That seemed a pointless exercise.
That’s more the stuff of documentary, or political theory, or history of science.
This is a story that you experience with him — you
don’t judge him.
You are faced with these ethical dilemmas with him.”
Now what Nolan said here is probabaly the most interesting thing I've heard
about the film so far.
Having read most of the book, one of the things that I probabaly wanted a tad more of is that
exploration of the science or thoughts inside of Oppenheimer's mind.
It deals specificially with his experience and talks about the reactions of others towards
certain events but we rarely go into his mind and get a clearer picture of how everything
adds up from a scientific standpoint.
And if Nolan is doing that like he says and he's expanding visually on those thoughts,
I think it sounds like this film is actually going beyond what's
on the pages.
It really excites me and like he said in the interview, it really gives a more detailed
perspective of the intelligence or genius when it comes to the central character.
Speaking about Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy was then included in this article, and Empire
began to speak to him about taking on the role.
He said, "the prospect of playing Oppenheimer was
terrifying and exciting in equal measure.
Which I think is the best place to be as an actor starting off on a project.
You can't sit back and think, this is going a pice of piss.
It started and so did the hunger.
I could feel this hunger for the character and for the job.
He is this iconic figure, the father of the atomic bomb, the man who stole fire from the
gods.
He's a divisive character, and he's a very hard, complex character to figure out, kind
of unknowable.
So that is different than playing a cop who's got scruples in a TV show.
Not that those aren't worthy things to make.
But this has an added layer to it.
I think it's a truly essential cinematic experience.
And I know that's what I'm supposed to say, that's the
studio line.
But you have to see this in the cinema on the biggest f'ing screen possible.
There are moments in it that will blow people's lids off.”
So its clear that Cillian is really excited about how people will react
to Oppenheimer and also how interesting it was for him to really delve into the mind
of that character and try to present his inner intelligence, his almost alien-like mannerisms
and his eventual grief that takes form internally.
Empire makes it clear that this is only the acting, and that the filmmaking was going
to go even deeper.
Coming to the very point, Nolan starts to detail a bit more about filming one of the
most anticipated scenes of the year, and capturing it using practical effects.
Nolan wanted to literally blow people away by shooting a recreation
of the Trinity test out in the New Mexico desert using absolutely no CGI.
He said "I find CG rarely is able to grab you.
It tends to feel safe.
Even if it's impressive and beautiful, it's difficult to make you feel danger.
We needed it to feel threatening, nasty and frightening to the audience.
I’ve done a lot of explosions in a lot of films.
But there is something very unique and particular about being out in a desert in the middle
of the night with a big cast, and really just doing some
enormous explosions and capturing that.
You couldn’t help but come back to this moment when they were doing this on the ultimate
scale, that in the back of their minds they knew there
was this possibility that they would set fire to the atmosphere.
It was pretty amazing to engage in that kind of tension.”
He then spoke of special effects supervisor Scott Fisher,
elaborating a bit more on the various approaches that were taken to pull off these large scale
explosions.
He said, "there were very experimental approaches, some microscopic and tiny,
some on a giant scale using explosives and magnesium flares and big, black powder explosions
of petrol.
And then some absolute tiny ones, using interations of different particles,
different oils, different liquids."
So that's what we got surrounding specific details on how they approached the filmmaking,
but before the article came to an end, Nolan and Murphy did speak about the overall importance
of this story.
Of course, it doesn’t get much bigger or important than tackling the creation of the
first atomic bomb, and in turn, the potential destruction of the world.
The director said, “look, the ultimate stakes of any big blockbuster is the survival of
the world, and that’s what this story is.
I know of no story with higher stakes than Oppenheimer’s story.
That’s just the truth of it.
It’s tricky using a word like entertainment when you’re talking about something so serious,
but entertainment in movies takes many forms.
This is such an involving, compelling tale that we had the privilege of telling.
On that level, I've really enjoyed it.
But there have been times where, yeah it is unnerving, and
a sense of despair can set in.
The film contains a great adventure, a great love story, it has esponiage, thriller elements
and all the rest.”
And Cillian Murphy added to this idea of importance that Nolan talked about by mentioning
how the film affected him with all of the current fears surrounding a nuclear threat.
He said, "I do think about it an awful lot.
It brought home to me just what these guys were
doing, and how the world would never be the same again.
Wait till you see the film, its so unnerving.
It has definitely stayed with me.
I'm a pretty positive, optimistic person, and
in the work environment, it doesn't help anybody to be going around with your knap sack of
doom.
I don't know if it's healthy to walk around thinking about it all the time.
I certainly don't know if I have the intellectual or emotional capacity for that.
But maybe these men did.
Many people spoke about Oppenheimer being the
most brilliant of them all.
I think that intellect becomes a burden, because it's like you have access to a different dimension
in your thinking.
And if you're in that dimension all the time, that must be really hard on yout personal
life."
And of course, if you've read the later stages of the book, you'll know that what Cillian
said here is tragically true when it comes to the story of Oppenheimer.
It escalated to a point of revoking his security clearance and he was humiliated and tried
for feeding information to the soviets.
To me this story really is one about the idea of trust, and
how the world had little of it and still has little of it today.
It's why tensions have only increased between countries and individuals with
different ideologies and I think what Cillian says here is completely bang on the money
surrounding the themes that Oppenheimer deals with.
I can't wait to see it and I'm sure we'll be
getting much more interviews and marketing material in the builup to July 21st, giving
us further insights on the creative process and also the thematic importance of this story.
But they were the main images and details released from the new Empire edition of Christopher
Nolan's Oppenheimer.
I'm interested to hear what you guys think towards the new images and
details discussed, alongside what personally excites you the most about Nolan's upcoming
film.
So let me know down below in the comments section.
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