Christopher Nolan and the Contradictions of J. Robert Oppenheimer

For example, there is a time when James Remar played [Henry L. Stimson, Truman’s secretary of war], kept talking to me about how he learned that Stimson and his wife were honeymooning in Kyoto. And that was one of the reasons Stimson took Kyoto off the list to be bombed.

I had him cross the city off the list because of its cultural significance, but I’m like, add that. It’s a fantastically exciting moment where no one in the room knows how to react.

How do you shoot with such a huge cast and so many locations?

Every time you get to countless locations, with many different actors, it always becomes a puzzle. I insisted on planning it around Cillian’s haircut. [Laughs] Because I am very allergic to wigs in movies. I really wanted the movie to have no obvious artifice when it came to the way characters presented themselves.

One of the key moments that really hooked me to the story, which I referenced in my last movie, “Tenet” [2020]was this idea that when the scientists did their calculations, they possibility that they could set fire to the atmosphere and destroy the world. And they went ahead and pushed that button. But my feeling was, what if you could be in that room? What would that be like?

How do they feel about that? You can minimize that and say they thought it was a small possibility. But having done a lot of gigantic explosions on movie sets myself, where safety is paramount, the tension around those detonations is incredible. It’s very hard for the special effects guys to quantify to us exactly what it’s going to sound like, exactly what it’s going to look like. So when that countdown comes, it’s incredibly exciting, and extrapolating that to the Manhattan Project, to the Trinity test, I couldn’t even imagine. I was excited to try to give the audience a sense of that, to live in that room.

In this case it worked and the world survived. Who made that calculation?

It came from Teller. One of the few things I’ve changed is that it wasn’t Einstein who consulted Oppenheimer about it, but Arthur Compton who ran an outpost of the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago. But I shifted that to Einstein.