Christopher Nolan and the Contradictions of J. Robert Oppenheimer
A quick question about the Trinity test, when Oppenheimer, Groves and the physicists and engineers set off the first nuclear bomb. How did you get that shot? Was some of it old footage from the test itself?
The way we approached [the] Trinity test was to forgo computer graphic imagery because I think computer graphics are inherently a bit safe, a bit anodyne, so I challenged my effects crew to come up with analog, real-world types of imagery that we could use to pull this off because we knew the Trinity test had to be a showstopper in the film. Some of the things they came up with were extremely small and microscopic that play as bigger. Some were absolutely massive and required all kinds of complicated safety protocols and involved the actors in some very small version of what it must have been like to be there out in the desert at night in those bunkers waiting to detonate that device.
It’s hard to believe you ginned this up in the short time since “Tenet.”
I wrote the script relatively quickly once I started writing, but I had a lot worked out beforehand.
Many years ago, I had written a script about the life of Howard Hughes that never got made because I wrote it right as Scorsese was making his own film. [Laughs] But I cracked the script to my satisfaction, and that gave me a lot of insight on how to distill a person’s life and how to view a person’s life in a thematic way, so that the film is more than the sum of its parts. So in some ways, the script, yes, it took me a few months, but it was really a culmination of 20 years of thinking.
As I do interviews and the film’s coming out, I’m always asked, do you know what you’re doing next?
And the answer is always the same. For me, I do one thing at a time and I put everything into it obsessively, and the film is not finished. Well, the way I like to put it is, the audience finishes the film.
So when the film goes out in cinemas that’s when the film is done and it becomes what it’s going to be in the culture. And that usually has a profound impact on where I go next. It’d be much more sensible to work on three things at once and have the next thing all lined up. A lot of filmmakers do that. I’ve just never been any good at it.
Source: The New York Times
