'I try not to analyze my own intentions': Christopher Nolan Photo: Magnus Nolan she wanted to visit him at work and got her face blown off by a nuclear explosion.
“Wait a minute,” Nolan says, laughing awkwardly, over the phone from Los Angeles. “That's right, but a little cart before the horse.” The director of The Dark Knight, Interstellar and Dunkirk trilogy explains how it really happened: Flora, the eldest of his four children, along with his wife and producer Emma Thomas, just arrived for a week on the set of his upcoming film Oppenheimer, about the man who catapulted humanity into the atomic age. a nameless young woman who appears to the protagonist in a hellish, conscience-wrenching vision in which the flesh is torn from her face by a piercing white light.
“We needed someone to do this little bit of a somewhat experimental and spontaneous sequence,” he continues, “so it was great to just have her kind of in it.” Come on, to convey the horrors that Oppenheimer's invention will cause by faking the death of one's own firstborn is, well, a kind of choice.
“I hope you don't make me sound like Michael Powell from Peeping Tom,” he chuckles again. (In this gruesome 1960 painting, Powell portrayed his nine-year-old son as the childhood incarnation of a serial killer and himself as the boy's sadistic father.) “But yeah, I mean, damn, you're not mistaken. Honestly, I try not to analyze my own intentions. But the fact is that if you create a higher destructive force, it will also destroy those who are near and dear to you. So I guess that was my way of expressing what for me was the strongest possible term.” “I don't make films to get a message across”: Nolan (right) with Cillian Murphy. Credit & Copyright: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
Persuading the famously secretive 52-year-old Nolan to talk about his work is like trying to get a tune out of a Swiss watch: as complex as the movement is, it just wasn't designed for that purpose. (“Self-awareness is death to a filmmaker,” he once told his alleged biographer Tom Shawn, and the fact that he only has a biographer tells you everything you need to know.) Yet Oppenheimer, his 12th feature film, a fast-paced, sensational masterpiece, feels startlingly personal, despite the consequences and scope of its plot.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, magnetically played by Cillian Murphy, was a theoretical physicist at the forefront of the US government's Manhattan Project that carried out the first successful test of an atomic bomb in 1945 at a remote laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Nolan's script portrays him as a man who sees reality itself as something that can be taken apart and rearranged, with jets of pure energy escaping like steam from cracks. For the director of Flashback and Inception, thrillers that play with chronology and imagined cubist intersections of mental and physical space, this makes him something of a kindred spirit.
Naturally, Nolan brushes aside pure autobiographical reading. But he was visibly excited by the thought that a single human mind could—and indeed—shatter the world as we know it.“I was looking for a thread connecting the quantum world, the vibration of energy, and Oppenheimer's personal journey,” he explains. “He suffered from his epiphanies in his youth and was something of a late bloomer sexually. So he had a lot of very strong and powerful energy vibrating through his system, not focused. As for many people, when he finally opened up to the opposite sex, his intellect also found expression.”
Nolan's films have been criticized for being genderless in the past, but Oppenheimer certainly bucks the trend. Murphy's character has a passionate affair with Jean Tatlock, a psychiatrist and communist organizer played by Florence Pugh: a part of his life that, in Nolan's words, “can't be shy about or dance around.” The thought of filming scenes, he says, was “intimidating and challenging at first, but it was a fitting challenge for the story. I try not to think about why something goes into the film, just like I try not to think: “What haven’t I done before?”. He once wrote that growth as a director is not about not repeating yourself, but about not repeating yourself.
Oppenheimer's seeds came from Tenet, the film that immediately preceded him. This 2020 sci-fi thriller likens technology that can reverse the flow of time to an atomic bomb that can incinerate reality as we know it if the submolecular shifts it causes flare up and cannot be stopped.
'Oppenheimer sexually late bloomed': stars Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh in 'Oppenheimer'. Photo: Universal Studios. All rights reserved.
At the end of Tenet filming, one of its stars, Robert Pattinson, presented Nolan with a book of Oppenheimer's speeches made as the scientist struggled with the consequences of his creation. Tenet's vanity, according to Nolan, “was what if you could invent a terrible technology? What if toothpaste could be put back into the tube? I guess every time travel movie is about the fantasy of righting some of the wrongs of the past. But in the real world, it's a one-way street.”
Nolan was born in London and grew up between England and the US: his mother was a flight attendant (and later a teacher) from Chicago; his father was a British publicity manager whose job often took him across the Atlantic. He was 11 years old attending a Catholic preparatory school in Weybridge, Surrey, when anti-nuclear protests erupted at RAF Greenham Common, and the news burned into his youthful mind. “It was the era of CND – a time of mass fear of a nuclear catastrophe,” he recalls. “And while our relationship with this fear has waned and waned over time, the threat itself has never really gone away.”
He recalls talking to his family about an early draft of Oppenheimer in 2021, “and one of my sons literally said to me, 'But dad, no one else worries about it.' At the time, I thought, 'Well, you should probably,' and that was the reason for me to make the film.” Then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the specter of nuclear war returned. “And of course my son doesn't talk like that anymore.”
An alarming forecast: Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017). Photo: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo
Nolan's films are often unsettlingly predictive of the time they will be released. Dunkirk famously resurfaced in the post-Brexit summer, and in 2012, The Dark Knight Rises showed modern America tearing itself apart over crazy but seductive populist rhetoric. Now the saber-rattling from Russia has given Oppenheimer a grim urgency that Nolan never predicted. He believes that the character played by Robert Downey Jr., an ardent strategist shaken by Oppenheimer's late moral arm-twisting, “feels more complex and multifaceted – which I think is a good thing.”
However, do not confuse Oppenheimer with a pro- (or anti-) nuclear film. Nolan's personal politics are hard to decipher—in 2008, both liberals and conservatives vehemently claimed that the Dark Knight was on their side in the civil liberties debate—and he says that's how it's always been meant to be.
“I don't make films to get a message across,” he says. “I get them to ask interesting questions, I try to entertain the audience and give them an exciting experience that I hope will last for a long time. And I think when you take on topics like Oppenheimer, like Dunkirk, you're ideally trying to do a Rorschach test. The film has different interpretations and evokes different responses from different people – if we've done our job right.”
Christian Bale in a scene from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises. Warner Bros.
Like 11 of Nolan's other films, Oppenheimer was conceived for the big screen: it's visually and audibly stunning, and not just during Trinity's test explosion (which, oddly enough, the director recreated on a purpose-built set with gasoline, propane, aluminum powder, and magnesium – but no CGI or real fissioned atomic nuclei). And it was shot on IMAX film, the vividly detailed analogue format that, before The Dark Knight proved viable for blockbusters, was mostly used for nature documentaries. Throughout his career, Nolan has championed the theatrical experience, which has earned him many friends in the industry, though it has also caused some chagrin lately.
Tom Cruise was said to have lamented the realization that his latest Mission: Impossible used only British and American IMAX screens for two weeks, as Universal booked every single one to show Oppenheimer at its release. And his 19-year relationship with Warner Bros came to an end due to the studio's hard turn to a home video streaming business model in 2021 (which made their subsequent decision to release a Greta Gerwig Barbie film on the same day as Oppenheimer feel like a nose with a thumb).
Nolan refuses to delve into the subject. “I don't think I'd like to talk about it, thanks,” he says warmly but firmly. However, he genuinely despairs of the studios' increasingly narrow view of what a big-screen movie really is. Christopher Nolan films with Cillian Murphy on an IMAX camera. Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
The problem, he says, is that executives think of the movie as nothing more than a story vehicle: “Whether for budget or control reasons, studios now look at a script as a series of events and say 'that's the point of the movie.' And it's completely at odds with how cinema has evolved since the Lumière Brothers train pulling into the station as a purely audiovisual experience. But it's a very popular misconception – sometimes with critics, frankly – that all that matters is the scale of the story being told.”
One of his own formative film experiences was watching Star Wars while visiting his grandmother in Ohio, a few months before its UK release in 1977. (When he returned to school, his classmates had no idea what he was raving about.)
“People will tell you that the success of Star Wars has nothing to do with the visuals, it's all about the great story,” he continues. “But I mean, that is clearly not the case. It's a really great story, but it's also an incredible visual and auditory experience. So, this is a deliberate denial of what films really are. People will say, “Why would you want to watch something like After the Sun — the acclaimed 2022 coming-of-age film by young British director Charlotte Welles — on the big screen?” But of course you should. It also plays great on TV, but that's not the point.” (Nolan has never watched movies on a cell phone, not least because he doesn't have one.)
Emily Blunt in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. Credit & Copyright: Universal Studios. All rights reserved.
Half dreamer, half traditionalist. What would Nolan do if he were Oppenheimer? If the red button was under his thumb and the dawn of the atomic age with all its wonders and horrors depended on its pressing, would he do it?
He gives a long, convoluted answer containing the phrases “the language of probabilities”, “ethical paradox”, “practical realities of theory” and various thought experiments for weighing risk in everyday life.
Yes, yes, Christopher, but would you press the button? He stops and finally says, in what sounds a lot like a smile: “The expression of my answer is the film.”
Oppenheimer in theaters from Friday
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