There are some new images and details for Oppenheimer, thanks to a new published article
by Total Film Magazine here in the UK. We primarily get interviews with Christopher
Nolan and his extended cast, where he reveals the runtime
of the film, details on Cillian Murphy's performance, the main differences between the black and
white and colour sequences in the film, and how they were able to recreate the trinity
test using no CGI. 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
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further a do, lets discuss the new images and details for Oppenheimer from Total Film.
So the road to Oppenheimer has well and truly begun, and the new edition of Total Film magazine
has provided us with a lot of new images and interviews for the highly
anticipated film. The new article features two covers, one standard and one subscriber
version, alongside multiple images and details from interviews with director Christopher
Nolan, lead actor Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Josh
Hartnett and visual effects supervisors. The images include Cillian Murphy's Oppenheimer
surveying the location of his built atom bomb, an exclusive look at Murphy and Matt Damon's
Leslie Groves, a young Oppenheimer, Emily Blunt's Katherine, Josh Hartnett's Ernest
Lawrence, Florence Pugh's Jean Tatlock, Robert Downey Jr's Lewis Strauss during Oppenheimer's
hearings, and multiple behind the scenes shots from the film's production, including one
of Nolan working with regular cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema. I will show these images
on screen again as I get into all the details, so speaking of that, let's dive into those
mentioned interviews.
So at the start of this new article, Total Film details what they saw and what Nolan
said to them while they were watching him and his team put a sound mix together from
a moment in the film. They talk about how the stage that they
were mixing the sound at, was one that both Nolan and his producing partner Emma Thomas
has worked at since 2006's The Prestige and that
they and editor Jennifer Lame were working on precise sountrack tweaks during the showcase
of stunning footage. They say that the footage included a black and white trial scene in
which Robert Downey Jr's Lewis Strauss asks questions about an FBI file on Oppenheimer
himself. Total Film said that the scene cut back to a young Oppenheimer at Berkeley university,
showing the time-hopping narrative that was once again going to be on display in a Nolan
film. They said that the sound design rumbled and shook the room, outlining both the precise
detail and large cinematic experience that this film is aiming to put on screen. So right
from the get-go in this new article, we learn that Oppenheimer is confirmed to have time
jumps and that like I and others predicted before,
the black and white and colour will be intercut throughout the film. It's something that reminds
us of Nolan's earlier work on Memento and how both of those different sequences involved
were subjective and objective sides to that narrative. And in the article, Nolan does
finally confirm what both of those intercutting sequences throughout the film will include.
In my video the other week I predicted that the court scenes in black and white would
be the subjective part of the narrative and that the development of the bomb in colour
would be the objective side. But it turns out that Nolan
is actually doing a reverse of that in Oppenheimer and I must admit, once I think about it a
bit more, it actually makes a lot of sense. Nolan said, "I wrote the script in the first
person, which I'd never done before. I don't know if anyone has ever done that, or if that's
a thing people do or not… The film is objective and subjective. The colour scenes are subjective;
the black-and-white scenes are objective. I wrote the colour scenes from the first person.
So for an actor reading that, in some ways, I think it'd be quite daunting." So Nolan
has essentially confirmed the narrative structure that we've all been theorising over for quite
some time, and like I said before, it definitely reminds me of his work on Memento
and how he told the complex and psychological story of man suffering from short term memory
loss in both of those sequences. It seems like
Oppenheimer is going cut back and forth between subjective colour scenes that showcase the
developing of the bomb, with objective black and white moments that show the humiliation
of Oppenheimer in court, as they investige whether
he was feeding information to the soviet union. And as Total Film says, this is all to highlight
the extreme contradictions that permeate Oppenheimer's life and work, and its an effort
to stay truthful to the source material, in Kai Bird and Martic Sherwin's American Prometheus.
Moving on, Nolan starts to share a few more details surrounding both the runtime of the
film and his extended thoughts on Cillian Murphy's lead performance. On the runtime
the director said, "it's slightly longer than the longest
we've done, it's kissing three hours." This means that Oppenheimer is Nolan's longest
film and it beats Interstellar's running time of
2 hours and 49 minutes. When it comes to the character and Cillian's performance, he added,
"I'm drawn to interesting protagonists – protagonists who have ambiguity to them. I
think of any character I've dealt with, Oppenheimer is by far the most ambiguous and paradoxical.
Which, given that I've made three Batman films, is saying a lot. There are no easy
answers to any aspect of the story. I think, in a way, he's the extreme type of protagonist
I've been interested in over the years. In truth, there are just not that many actors
that you could say, on a first-person approach, 'Yeah,
we’re going to be this guy for three hours. You’re making a demand of an actor that
very few actors in the history of film can rise to. I
will say that even with that confidence in him, he was continually surprising me on set
every day. And when we got into the edit suite and were putting the performance together,
and seeing the truth of it, I was absolutely blown
away." When it came to the specifics of Murphy's performance and how he would transmit the
situations that appear in broad strokes in the source material, Nolan then said that
it was a hell of a task for the actor to really convey that character fully. The director
said, "He's playing a massive swathe of the guy's
life and that presents challenges. Yes, there are physical challenges with that. But more
than that, the psychological challenge is trying to absorb an entire life experience
of somebody else. Not just a moment in time,
but whole periods of his life and to show that to the audience to feel that with him.
It's a big challenge I've set him. He stepped up far
beyond what I would have imagined was possible, just in taking you into his head and his experience".
So after Nolan gave his thoughts on certain aspects of the film and specifically Cillian
Murphy's performance, it was then time to hear from the actors towards their performances
and the film as a whole. Cillian Murphy admitted to
Total Film that he had only a surface awareness of J. Robert Oppenheimer before agreeing to
take on the role. He said, "I think I had kind of
Wikipedia-level of knowledge of Oppenheimer, like most people, so then it was… Well,
it was just starting from scratch, really. Chris guided me through that. You can only
do it one bite at a time. You have to go slowly. And thankfully
we had time." On the performance itself he said, "it was very helpful to me to find that
silhouette, to be able to embrace the iconography of him, which was the hat and
the pipe, and certainly the cut of his suits, and to try to find a physical shape that would
make that as iconic as [he was in real life]. Because he was very conscious about that.
It wasn’t by accident. He chose that look for himself." And on the Genre of the film,
he explained, “there are elements of thriller in it, and
it has that epic quality". Emily Blunt who plays Oppenheimer Wife, echoed similar thoughts,
but also talked a bit more about the complex nature of her character in the midst of
speaking about Cillian. She said, "The script was so emotional, and it reads like a thriller.
It's almost like Nolan has Trojan-Horsed a biopic into a thriller. It's really pulse-racing,
the whole thing. I was just completely arrested by the story, the portrait of this man, and,
I guess, the trauma of a brain like that." On her character she mentioned, "Kitty is
a very big personality. Not necessarily one to conform
to a housewife ideal of the time. For anyone who knows anything about Kitty, she was a
pretty monumental presence in his life as a
confidante, and as a real scientific brain herself". And the final actor that shared
some details on their character was actually Josh Hartnett, who if you remember, who once
almost cast as Batman in Nolan's Batman Begins. After
saying that the film felt initimate even though it was big movie with lots of actors on set,
he explained a bit more about his character, Ernest Lawrence, who was a long time friend
of Oppenheimer. He said, "I knew very little about him before taking on this role, and
it's surprising to me that someone who was so
instrumental in the choices that were made surrounding both the Manhattan Project and
also the Rad Lab and physics within the US generally. For me to have very little familiarity
with him as a historical figure was surprising.
Lawrence named one of his kids after Oppenheimer and they worked together very closely for
a long time, and ended up being close colleagues". Nolan ended this segment by concluding that,
"it's a really fun and challenging combination of an incredible ensemble, but the film is
so focused on one man's experience, and one man's
view of the world".
Coming now to another element that was discussed in the article, we did actually get an interview
with Oppenheimer's special effects supervisor Scott R. Fisher, about the challenges of
emulating the destruction of the trinity test without using CGI. He said, "it was my sixth
film with Chris. Compared to a lot of the other ones we've done, it was definitely not
as rigorous with day-to-day filming. 'There's
not as much stuff for you on this as the other one, but there's a couple of things we do
have to cover.' And that was, of course, the Trinity
explosion, and some prop builds, and elements of different things that we had throughout
the film." According to the article, both Fisher and Nolan used the method of old-fashioned
miniatures, but applied them to explosions. The aim was to make them big enough so that
they looked real, but also small enough so that the camera could be put closer to it.
I did actually say in my creating the Nuke scene
video the other day that I thought they might take an approach involving minatures and also
that I though the perspective would shift when
that bomb goes off to give us closer angles of the explosion. A way of shifting the perspective
if you will from Oppenheimers point of view to the audience themselves. And based on what
Fisher said here about using Bigatures and keeping the camera close, it does sound like
it's along the same lines. He said: "It is like an old-school technique. We don't call
them miniatures; we call them big-atures. We do
them as big as we possibly can, but we do reduce the scale so it's manageable. It's
getting it closer to camera, and doing it as big as you
can in the environment." On discussing the practical ingredients of the scene, he continued
by saying... "It's mostly gasoline, propane, any of that kind of stuff, because you get
so much bang for your buck. But then we also
bring in stuff like aluminum powder and magnesium to really enhance the brightness, and give
it a certain look. We did a bit of that on this,
because we really wanted everyone to talk about that flash moment and that brightness.
So we tried to replicate that as much as we could." Total Film had also spoke with visual
effect supervisor, Andrew Jackson, who apparently
had a lot of experience with filming bombs and explosions. He showed Nolan an explosion
demo reel and the director selected the look of what
he wanted from Jackson's visual album. Jackson said, "I've been doing this for years. I
had years of little samples and things that I filmed. So I put together a single screen
with little thumbnails of all these different effects
and things that I filmed that I thought were interesting. And I just played that on a big
screen and said, 'Is there anything here that you find interesting?'"
On top of visualising the atomic bomb from a visual and practical level, Andrew Jackson
also revealed a bit more about some of those trippy visuals that we've already seen in
the trailers. According to Nolan, these scientific
visuals are actually the visuals that manifest in Oppenheimer's mind surrounding all of the
science, and it's a way of putting the audience even more in the character's
shoes. He said, "Yes, we've got to represent the trinity test, but we also have to represent
these images, these things in Oppenheimer's head. His ability to look into matter and
see and feel energy there. The most obvious thing to do would be to do them all with computer
graphics. But I knew that that was not going to
achieve the sort of tactile, ragged, real nature of what I wanted. And so the goal was
(and in the end, we have achieved it), to have everything that appears in the film be
photographed. And have the computer used for what it's best
for, which is compositing, and putting ideas together". Speaking of how they ensured the
reality of the film and making sure it's believable and historically accurate, Nolan
did finish off this section by listing some of the things they did to make that possible.
According to him, they recreating Los Alamos at the
exact location, they hired real scientists as extras, like I detailed before they reproduced
bomb tests with no CGI, and they filmed inside of the Manhattan Project buildings, with one
of them being Oppenheimer’s actual home. It really is extroadinary to hear how they've
really kept this as accurate as possible, and while we've seen Nolan focus on reality
in all of his previous films, I think this definitely
sounds like the furthest that he and his team have gone when it comes to showcasing the
reality of this history.
The whole article then comes to an end, and they leave on a very important note, one which
highlights the importance of this film in general. Total film explained that the danger
of the power that Oppenheimer and his team unleashed
has never gone away, and that the film's central themes and the main character's turmoil might
now feel more relevant than ever, as the threat of nuclear war has been brought back
in recent times. Nolan commented on this, saying, "I think right now, people are very,
very aware of it, and thinking about it a lot with the
developments in Ukraine. But it's something that, from Hiroshima on, has never gone anywhere
as a threat". Emily Blunt added to this by saying, "I think it was surreal that that
was starting in Russia and Ukraine when we were
filming. It was obviously unexpected by Chris and Emma. But yes, very timely. A timely subject
matter, a complicated, paradoxical protagonist, a gold standard racing thriller. It's an overwhelming
experience and I felt like my bones would shatter watching it." And Nolan finished the
whole article by quoting, "You hope to catch the right moment in time, and that's
in the hands of the movie gods. But there should never be a distinction between these
things. When you look at Oppenheimer's experience, he's dealing with some of the most tense and
paradoxical scenarios that are far beyond anything you can put into fiction". I am actually
planning a video on this for my Road To Oppenheimer series, and I'm going to be looking
at how Nolan, with the case study of The Dark Knight, makes the right movie at the right
time to reflect the themes and questions of a
particular period. That will be coming very soon, but yeah, everything they say about
the importance of this movie in today's landscape, is something that I think will attract a lot
of people. We'll have to see, but so far everything
that's been said about the film only adds to my anticipation for it, and I can't wait
to see how all of these details are present in the
film, when we finally see it this July.
But they were the main images and details released from the new Total Film edition of
Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. There is so much to be excited about when it comes
to everything that was said here, and hearing how Nolan,
Cillian and the cast and crew have gone to extreme measures to capture the real details
of this story,it makes me even more fascinated to see
how they translate the American Prometheus book to the big screen. But I'm interested
to hear what you guys think towards the new images and details, alongside what personally
excites you the most about Nolan's upcoming film.
So let me know down below in the comments section.
For much more videos and news on Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, then subscribe to the
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