To delve into knottier topics that exist within Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan's critically-acclaimed new film about the creator of the atomic bomb, Esquire hosted a conversation between Nolan and Professor Brian Cox – no stranger to communicating complicated science on a mass scale.

How, exactly, do you prepare a cast for a film of this scale and scientific complexity? What’s up with those black-and-white scenes? And how does Oppenheimer fit alongside Nolan’s much-loved filmography, from time-travel thriller Tenet to wartime epic Dunkirk? You will not need a science textbook to understand everything going on, but it might be helpful to have Google open.

OPPENHEIMER is in cinemas 21st July
Watch the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KD8JwDmMFA

#oppenheimer #christophernolan #cillianmurphy

Well hello I'm Brian Cox, I'm here for British Esquire and talking to Christopher Nolan about his film Oppenheimer.

We imagine a future and our imaginings horrify us.

Well I've been fascinated by Oppenheimer for many years, both scientifically and philosophically, actually, and politically.

And I think it's safe to say that the film deepened my appreciation of

I think it's a triumph, artistically but also intellectually.

And I wanted to ask you why you came to him and why you came to that subject matter initially.

I think it's been a sort of long, slow creep towards something, which is very often the case in my life and career.

I first heard about Oppenheimer through, I mean, the 80s, Sting's song, Russians.

I actually referred to him in my previous film, Tenet, because we'd come to realize, you know, there's this moment in the Manhattan Project where Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists couldn't completely rule out the possibility of a chain reaction that would set fire to the atmosphere before they conducted the Trinity test.

And yet they went ahead and pushed that button.

But ultimately I just thought, what a dramatic moment.

I mean, what an incredible thing for them to have done.

And what would it be like to take the audience there?

Are we saying there's a chance that when we push that button, we destroy the world?

I came to read Kai Bird and Martin Showen's American Prometheus, which is a book that they wrote and researched over 25 years.

So it's a very, very well-written, well-researched, authoritative account of Oppenheimer.

And That gives you confidence to think, okay, well, we could base our telling on this source.

I thought it was interesting that you started with Quantum mechanics, which was clearly in the air and in his thoughts before the war But you you were really explicit in the film that you started with that showed that to the audience and I'm interested in it because I know after the war the bbc wreath lectures that he gave He used quantum mechanics as a 1 of the analogies to illustrate how he was thinking about society in general and how we could control the power of nuclear weapons.

So I wondered why you chose to start with the physics, with quantum mechanics as such a strange view of nature.

For exactly that reason, it's a strange view of nature.

It was a time of, as you know, radical reinvention of the way in which we describe the universe around us, the way in which we understand the universe.

And that clash, ultimately, between classical physics and quantum physics, which has still never been reconciled.

I didn't want to try and explain that to the audience, but the idea is we want to see how radical this thinking was.

You know, you want to see this guy almost like an apprentice magician, you know, when he's sort of meeting Niels Bohr.

It's kind of like Obi-Wan Kenobi or something.

So he's visualizing these things and he's sort of feeling these things that he can just about understand or begin to play with, but it's almost, we want it to feel like an almost frightening insight.

So these guys are looking at the stuff around us and they're seeing energy.

And that energy and that thing that he's seeing, ultimately the thread runs right the way through to the destructive power of the atomic bomb.

And so really wanted to come back and start from that smallest thing.

And 1 of the first conversations I had about the imagery of it was with a great physicist called Robert Dijkgraaf.

He was the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, and I went to scout it because that's where Oppenheimer was director for many years.

And he said this, for me, very frightening thing.

He said, well, 1 of the things that was alienating about it for some physicists was you can no longer visualize the atom That's frightening to a filmmaker who's about to embark on a film where 1 of the first task is visualizing the atom But in talking to him, You know, we talked about cinema and how you can use the idea of, you know, Eisenstein put it as you have shot A and you follow it with shot B, and that gives you thought C.

And so film can be more than the sum of its parts.

And So the feeling was if we started experimenting with imagery, looking at waveforms, particle behavior, and so forth, we could, by combining these images in different ways, we could give the audience a feeling of what it might be like for a physicist to visualize these things.

And a thread that could run right the way through to the destruction of it.

It's probably more for you to say whether we got it right or not.

No, I think you captured this sense of hidden power in nature, which I think runs through a lot of your film.

It's interstellar as well, of course, isn't

That sense that there's a power there that's beautiful and perhaps comprehensible and incomprehensible at the same time.

And I think comprehensible and incomprehensible at the same time is a big part of the why of it.

And it's because when I was doing Interstellar with my friend Kip Thorne, who you know, Nobel Prize winning physicist, we came to realize mutually that the process of writers and artists is not so different to the process of physicists.

He made it clear to me that intuition, the feeling of understanding something, is very, very important to physicists.

And so we want to show, in the beginning of the film, and carrying on, we want to show that that energy that he's visualizing is also inside him.

He's trying to channel it into something productive and meaningful and trying to understand it.

I remember in the, I think it was the Rietz lectures.

I love his Rietz lectures in 53, just before the committee actually, where he uses quantum mechanics.

He says that this idea that you can think of an electron as a point like thing, sometimes, or a wavy thing that's extended and fills the space.

And you have these pictures, neither of them are complete pictures.

And he's reflections, he said, and so it is with the society.

So the needs of the individual against the needs of the collective, communism, libertarianism.

So in other words, nature is a training ground that gives you some intellectual tools that might be transferred to running a more peaceful world.

And I want to ask you about that because that's what I got very powerfully from the film, that the complexity of all the characters, all the scientific characters at least, is explicit.

They're kind of being pulled in different directions.

And I wanted to ask you how much, how conscious that was to present these people as extremely complex.

I think they're all very relatively flawed, complicated individuals.

I'm drawn to stories about people who are presented with paradox, people who make decisions that are hard to understand, and maybe they don't fully understand themselves.

And Oppenheimer's the most extreme example.

But everybody around him, as you say, they're all in their own little orbits.

And it's this weird mash-up of personal politics pushing in particular directions that then have massive ramifications.

The biggest version, in a way, in the film, for me, is the fact that Los Alamos, this place that becomes so famous and infamous in history and is still this very important nuclear laboratory research facility to this day, You learn early on in the film, and this is the history, it was just a place he and his brother liked to go camping.

It's like, wow, you can argue this horse about whether these things would have happened without this individual in history, But what's undeniable is that in our world, this person had such a personal relationship to things that then become, well, things that changed the world.

And you described him, I think, at Oppenheimer as the most important person in history.

The obvious statement, I suppose, that he created or played a key role in creating the bomb.

But is there a future role for Oppenheimer?

The way that he thought about the world post-Manhattan Project is extremely important and not well known.

And I wonder whether that was in your mind when you made

As with everything to do with Oppenheimer, you can look at things in very contradictory ways.

And so when he and Niels Bohr are first exploring and articulating the possibility of what is now referred to as mutually assured destruction, you're looking at the world from 2023 and there are 2 ways of looking at his post-war actions.

Everything he said post-1945, he was a very eloquent man, he was incredibly careful, he never apologized for the bombings of Japan, he never expressed individual shame about his role in it or anything like that, but all of his actions and policy decisions or attempts to influence policy post 1945 are those of a deeply guilty man, very aware of the consequences of his actions.

And it's that contradiction that I find really fascinating.

In a way, you can look at it and say, he was ahead of his time.

He may have been naive about how much you can stand up to the establishment when you are ahead of your time.

But a lot of his predictions and beliefs were shown and have continued to be shown to be true.

Yeah, that establishment doesn't come out well, for me anyway, in the film.

There's that beautiful line that Matt Damon delivers where he's given the new guidelines for hiring people and he says not only would I not have hired Oppenheimer but none of them basically.

So all these people that delivered this giant this great breakthrough which did what it did.

Perhaps I did the 1 in the Pacific and you discussed that in the film.

But was that part of your thinking in the film?

Because it does seem to me that the political establishment comes over as being overly simplistic.

The book I'm adapting is subtitled The Triumph and Tragedy of J.

And the tragedy is the way in which his past is used against him, the way in which the establishment tries to control him.

And I speak to a lot of scientists today who are very troubled by his story and look to, particularly people working in the field of artificial intelligence, for example.

They see this right now as their Oppenheimer moment.

They look to his story and say, okay, What are our responsibilities?

What are the consequences of – what are our responsibilities for unintended consequences of a technology, a powerful technology that we put out there?

Unfortunately, I don't think Oppenheimer's story offers any easy answers because – it's not really a spoiler to say, But he was ultimately very much crushed by the establishment when he was no longer useful to them.

Hence the line from General Groves about the world's changed.

There's a scientist who is unnamed and is meant to be representative of certain scientists, but is not 1 specific individual who says, you know, Arpanet says they need us.

And that to me is the prophetic line in the film.

It says, okay, there's going to be a point with the establishment.

And I might quibble with the word simplistic, because I'm not sure they were simplistic in their thinking.

I think they just had very different priorities.

And I think the ways of doing things in the establishment, the government, the media, all these things are so different from science.

And, you know, the scientific method, I think, is the highest philosophical height that mankind has ever produced.

What other philosophy is there that does that?

But integrating that with democracy, or with authoritarianism, or with media, and popular opinion, and everything, it's very, very problematic.

And Oppenheimer's story is 1 of the most extreme examples of that.

I felt it very eloquently, actually, that Oppenheimer, although, as you said, he was clearly flawed and he was crushed, ultimately, and perhaps naive politically.

But also, do you think he had something to say then that we really should be listening to now, that's very relevant now?

I think that he's compromised in his prophetic ability by his complicity in the system.

And, you know, and I'm not even saying that's his fault.

You know, 1 of the things that drew me to the story was they did foresee a lot of these consequences.

They knew what they were doing, but they felt they had no choice.

Somebody asked me the other day, what would you have done?

And as I look at the history, the conversation between Isidore Rabi And Oppenheimer, to me, that's compelling.

The Nazis are trying to make a nuclear bomb.

And that's what makes it dramatic, because these were brilliant people.

And I think some of Oppenheimer's early thoughts about it, inspired very much by Niels Bohr, things like, you know, a bomb big enough to end a war, I think they're rationalizations.

These are brilliant people, and brilliant people can rationalize wonderfully to make them accept what they knew was both necessary and inevitable because at this point the thing was a reality.

I think somebody who's looked at nuclear fire with the naked eye is in a unique position to understand the implications of it.

And he's very good at trying to, he was very good at trying to make this real for people and emotional for people.

Which is what we're trying to do in the film as well.

So I think there is a synchronicity there.

When I came out of the cinema, I found it a very profound experience.

It's a profoundly challenging film, intellectually.

And it's lived with me for, I saw it about 12 hours ago now and it's still

So is that, was that your intention to produce a film that really horn, for me it will haunt audiences

Yeah I mean when you talk about intention I would resist the characterization of polemical, perhaps, because I don't think films work well when they're overly didactic, when they're trying to send a very specific message.

Because the interesting thing about the story, the dramatic thing about the story, is there are no easy answers.

You know, you're asking troubling questions.

I think, you know, as I talk about it and as I think about it, it reminds me when we were doing Dunkirk, you know, a film about something that's very inherently emotional for a lot of particularly British people.

My attempt was to pull against that as far as possible because I knew that the story in its conclusion had inescapable emotional weight.

And I think I've done a similar thing with this film where I've tried to really play against that the whole way through.

We've tried to find the positivity and the understanding in what he's doing, the situations he's in.

We've, in a way, tried to be constructive about it all.

But the fact of what happened, the fact of what they did and where it's left is inescapable.

And I think it does seem to leave people with some appropriately troubling or even distressing questions.

There's a great deal of back story here, of course.

And a lot of, I suppose, a lot of interesting ideas about what Othelmo was thinking about and the ideas that you deliver in the film.

So do you speak to all of the actors about that?

The great thing about, the unique thing about working on a historical story with real people is that I don't have to be the expert on the characters.

I've written my interpretation of the script.

People use the script as the jumping off point, but they can then go away and do all kinds of research on the people they're playing.

That we were able to just sort of let them play and explore the ideas, talk about the ideas.

I was sort of an outside character throwing in ideas, but there were a lot of improvisations, a lot of really interesting discussion because each actor, and the best actors are super smart.

They have this kind of ability to just take on the ideas of the character, even if they don't become physicists or politicians or whatever, but they come into that room with a lively set of ideas for discussion.

And so that discussion becomes very palpably real.

From a cinema point of view, It's actually a bit about the style of the film, the black and white elements and the sound is visceral.

Why do you decide to flip between black and white and colour?

Well in particular the black and white and colour is to help orient the audience in the structure of the story.

The story is structured with 2 threads, the most significant thread being the color, which is Oppenheimer's very subjective point of view.

Really, it's an attempt to jump into his head, see the world the way he saw it, and wind up with understanding rather than judgment.

Contrasting with that, we have a black and white thread that is more the point of view of Robert Downey Jr.'s character, Louis Strauss.

And I want to use the color and the black and white to help just make the audience feel the scenes as different because 1 is a much more objective view of Oppenheimer.

You're sort of seeing him from across the room and perhaps judging him a little more, you know, and the other, you're really in his head, kind of going on the journey with him.


Speaker 0: Well hello I'm Brian Cox, I'm here for British Esquire and talking to Christopher Nolan about his film Oppenheimer. We imagine a future and our imaginings horrify us. Well I've been fascinated by Oppenheimer for many years, both scientifically and philosophically, actually, and politically. And I think it's safe to say that the film deepened my appreciation of

Speaker 1: the character. So thank you for making it.

Speaker 2: Thank you.

Speaker 1: I saw the film yesterday. I think it's a triumph, artistically but also intellectually. So I absolutely loved it. And I wanted to ask you why you came to him and why you came to that subject matter initially.

Speaker 2: I think it's been a sort of long, slow creep towards something, which is very often the case in my life and career. I first heard about Oppenheimer through, I mean, the 80s, Sting's song, Russians. He refers to Oppenheimer's deadly toys. I actually referred to him in my previous film, Tenet, because we'd come to realize, you know, there's this moment in the Manhattan Project where Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists couldn't completely rule out the possibility of a chain reaction that would set fire to the atmosphere before they conducted the Trinity test. And yet they went ahead and pushed that button.

But ultimately I just thought, what a dramatic moment. I mean, what an incredible thing for them to have done. And what would it be like to take the audience there? What would it be like to be there?

Speaker 0: Are we saying there's a chance that when we push that button, we destroy the world? Chances are near 0. Near 0. What do you want from theory of love? 0 would be nice.

Speaker 2: I came to read Kai Bird and Martin Showen's American Prometheus, which is a book that they wrote and researched over 25 years. It won the Pulitzer Prize. So it's a very, very well-written, well-researched, authoritative account of Oppenheimer. And That gives you confidence to think, okay, well, we could base our telling on this source.

Speaker 1: I thought it was interesting that you started with Quantum mechanics, which was clearly in the air and in his thoughts before the war But you you were really explicit in the film that you started with that showed that to the audience and I'm interested in it because I know after the war the bbc wreath lectures that he gave He used quantum mechanics as a 1 of the analogies to illustrate how he was thinking about society in general and how we could control the power of nuclear weapons. So I wondered why you chose to start with the physics, with quantum mechanics as such a strange view of nature.

Speaker 2: For exactly that reason, it's a strange view of nature. It was a time of, as you know, radical reinvention of the way in which we describe the universe around us, the way in which we understand the universe. And that clash, ultimately, between classical physics and quantum physics, which has still never been reconciled. It's a theme in interstellar. It becomes a plot point in interstellar.

You know, that sort of stuff. You know, I'm very aware of that. I didn't want to try and explain that to the audience, but the idea is we want to see how radical this thinking was. You know, you want to see this guy almost like an apprentice magician, you know, when he's sort of meeting Niels Bohr. It's kind of like Obi-Wan Kenobi or something.

So he's visualizing these things and he's sort of feeling these things that he can just about understand or begin to play with, but it's almost, we want it to feel like an almost frightening insight. So these guys are looking at the stuff around us and they're seeing energy. And that energy and that thing that he's seeing, ultimately the thread runs right the way through to the destructive power of the atomic bomb. And so really wanted to come back and start from that smallest thing. And 1 of the first conversations I had about the imagery of it was with a great physicist called Robert Dijkgraaf.

He was the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, and I went to scout it because that's where Oppenheimer was director for many years. And he said this, for me, very frightening thing. He said, well, 1 of the things that was alienating about it for some physicists was you can no longer visualize the atom That's frightening to a filmmaker who's about to embark on a film where 1 of the first task is visualizing the atom But in talking to him, You know, we talked about cinema and how you can use the idea of, you know, Eisenstein put it as you have shot A and you follow it with shot B, and that gives you thought C. And so film can be more than the sum of its parts. And So the feeling was if we started experimenting with imagery, looking at waveforms, particle behavior, and so forth, we could, by combining these images in different ways, we could give the audience a feeling of what it might be like for a physicist to visualize these things.

And a thread that could run right the way through to the destruction of it. It's probably more for you to say whether we got it right or not.

Speaker 1: No, I think you captured this sense of hidden power in nature, which I think runs through a lot of your film. It's interstellar as well, of course, isn't

Speaker 2: it?

Speaker 1: Yeah. That sense that there's a power there that's beautiful and perhaps comprehensible and incomprehensible at the same time.

Speaker 2: And I think comprehensible and incomprehensible at the same time is a big part of the why of it. Why start with that? And it's because when I was doing Interstellar with my friend Kip Thorne, who you know, Nobel Prize winning physicist, we came to realize mutually that the process of writers and artists is not so different to the process of physicists. He made it clear to me that intuition, the feeling of understanding something, is very, very important to physicists. And so we want to show, in the beginning of the film, and carrying on, we want to show that that energy that he's visualizing is also inside him.

And it's torturing him to a degree. He's trying to channel it into something productive and meaningful and trying to understand it. And that felt very relatable. I think anybody can understand that.

Speaker 1: I remember in the, I think it was the Rietz lectures. I love his Rietz lectures in 53, just before the committee actually, where he uses quantum mechanics. He says that this idea that you can think of an electron as a point like thing, sometimes, or a wavy thing that's extended and fills the space. And you have these pictures, neither of them are complete pictures. And he's reflections, he said, and so it is with the society.

So the needs of the individual against the needs of the collective, communism, libertarianism. He goes on to talk about that. So in other words, nature is a training ground that gives you some intellectual tools that might be transferred to running a more peaceful world. And I want to ask you about that because that's what I got very powerfully from the film, that the complexity of all the characters, all the scientific characters at least, is explicit. They're kind of being pulled in different directions.

And I wanted to ask you how much, how conscious that was to present these people as extremely complex.

Speaker 2: I think they're all very relatively flawed, complicated individuals. I'm drawn to stories about people who are presented with paradox, people who make decisions that are hard to understand, and maybe they don't fully understand themselves. And Oppenheimer's the most extreme example. But everybody around him, as you say, they're all in their own little orbits. They're all interacting.

And it's this weird mash-up of personal politics pushing in particular directions that then have massive ramifications. The biggest version, in a way, in the film, for me, is the fact that Los Alamos, this place that becomes so famous and infamous in history and is still this very important nuclear laboratory research facility to this day, You learn early on in the film, and this is the history, it was just a place he and his brother liked to go camping. Just like a beautiful spot. That sort of blew my mind. It's like, wow, you can argue this horse about whether these things would have happened without this individual in history, But what's undeniable is that in our world, this person had such a personal relationship to things that then become, well, things that changed the world.

Speaker 1: And you described him, I think, at Oppenheimer as the most important person in history. The obvious statement, I suppose, that he created or played a key role in creating the bomb. But is there a future role for Oppenheimer? The way that he thought about the world post-Manhattan Project is extremely important and not well known. And I wonder whether that was in your mind when you made

Speaker 2: the film. Definitely. As with everything to do with Oppenheimer, you can look at things in very contradictory ways. And so when he and Niels Bohr are first exploring and articulating the possibility of what is now referred to as mutually assured destruction, you're looking at the world from 2023 and there are 2 ways of looking at his post-war actions. Everything he said post-1945, he was a very eloquent man, he was incredibly careful, he never apologized for the bombings of Japan, he never expressed individual shame about his role in it or anything like that, but all of his actions and policy decisions or attempts to influence policy post 1945 are those of a deeply guilty man, very aware of the consequences of his actions.

And it's that contradiction that I find really fascinating. In a way, you can look at it and say, he was ahead of his time. He may have been naive about how much you can stand up to the establishment when you are ahead of your time. That might be where the naivety lies. But a lot of his predictions and beliefs were shown and have continued to be shown to be true.

Speaker 1: Yeah, that establishment doesn't come out well, for me anyway, in the film. There's that beautiful line that Matt Damon delivers where he's given the new guidelines for hiring people and he says not only would I not have hired Oppenheimer but none of them basically. So all these people that delivered this giant this great breakthrough which did what it did. Perhaps I did the 1 in the Pacific and you discussed that in the film. But was that part of your thinking in the film?

Because it does seem to me that the political establishment comes over as being overly simplistic.

Speaker 2: The book I'm adapting is subtitled The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. And I think it's very apt. It is a truly Shakespearean story. And the tragedy is the way in which his past is used against him, the way in which the establishment tries to control him.

And I speak to a lot of scientists today who are very troubled by his story and look to, particularly people working in the field of artificial intelligence, for example. They see this right now as their Oppenheimer moment. They look to his story and say, okay, What are our responsibilities? What are the consequences of – what are our responsibilities for unintended consequences of a technology, a powerful technology that we put out there? Unfortunately, I don't think Oppenheimer's story offers any easy answers because – it's not really a spoiler to say, But he was ultimately very much crushed by the establishment when he was no longer useful to them.

Hence the line from General Groves about the world's changed. Back in 1942, they needed these people. There's a scientist who is unnamed and is meant to be representative of certain scientists, but is not 1 specific individual who says, you know, Arpanet says they need us. And he says, yeah, until they don't. And that to me is the prophetic line in the film.

It says, okay, there's going to be a point with the establishment. And I might quibble with the word simplistic, because I'm not sure they were simplistic in their thinking. I think they just had very different priorities. And I think the ways of doing things in the establishment, the government, the media, all these things are so different from science. And, you know, the scientific method, I think, is the highest philosophical height that mankind has ever produced.

It seeks constantly to disprove itself. What other philosophy is there that does that? But integrating that with democracy, or with authoritarianism, or with media, and popular opinion, and everything, it's very, very problematic. It's very, very tricky. And Oppenheimer's story is 1 of the most extreme examples of that.

Speaker 1: And I got that from the film. I felt it very eloquently, actually, that Oppenheimer, although, as you said, he was clearly flawed and he was crushed, ultimately, and perhaps naive politically. But also, do you think he had something to say then that we really should be listening to now, that's very relevant now?

Speaker 2: I think so. I think that he's compromised in his prophetic ability by his complicity in the system. And, you know, and I'm not even saying that's his fault. You know, 1 of the things that drew me to the story was they did foresee a lot of these consequences. They knew what they were doing, but they felt they had no choice.

That makes it a much, it's a dilemma. It's an impossible dilemma. Somebody asked me the other day, what would you have done? Would you have invented the bomb? And as I look at the history, the conversation between Isidore Rabi And Oppenheimer, to me, that's compelling.

The Nazis are trying to make a nuclear bomb. Think of the consequences of that. They really felt they had no choice. And that's what makes it dramatic, because these were brilliant people. They knew where this would go.

And I think some of Oppenheimer's early thoughts about it, inspired very much by Niels Bohr, things like, you know, a bomb big enough to end a war, I think they're rationalizations. These are brilliant people, and brilliant people can rationalize wonderfully to make them accept what they knew was both necessary and inevitable because at this point the thing was a reality. I think somebody who's looked at nuclear fire with the naked eye is in a unique position to understand the implications of it. And he's very good at trying to, he was very good at trying to make this real for people and emotional for people. Which is what we're trying to do in the film as well.

So I think there is a synchronicity there.

Speaker 1: When I came out of the cinema, I found it a very profound experience. It's a profoundly challenging film, intellectually. And it's lived with me for, I saw it about 12 hours ago now and it's still

Speaker 0: right there. So is that, was that your intention to produce a film that really horn, for me it will haunt audiences

Speaker 1: because of its power?

Speaker 2: Yeah I mean when you talk about intention I would resist the characterization of polemical, perhaps, because I don't think films work well when they're overly didactic, when they're trying to send a very specific message. Because the interesting thing about the story, the dramatic thing about the story, is there are no easy answers. You know, you're asking troubling questions. I think, you know, as I talk about it and as I think about it, it reminds me when we were doing Dunkirk, you know, a film about something that's very inherently emotional for a lot of particularly British people. My attempt was to pull against that as far as possible because I knew that the story in its conclusion had inescapable emotional weight.

And I think I've done a similar thing with this film where I've tried to really play against that the whole way through. We've tried to find the positivity and the understanding in what he's doing, the situations he's in. We've, in a way, tried to be constructive about it all. But the fact of what happened, the fact of what they did and where it's left is inescapable. And so it just seeps into the film.

And I think it does seem to leave people with some appropriately troubling or even distressing questions.

Speaker 1: Yeah. There's a great deal of back story here, of course. And a lot of, I suppose, a lot of interesting ideas about what Othelmo was thinking about and the ideas that you deliver in the film. So do you speak to all of the actors about that?

Speaker 2: Only in a sort of organic way. The great thing about, the unique thing about working on a historical story with real people is that I don't have to be the expert on the characters. I've written my interpretation of the script. People use the script as the jumping off point, but they can then go away and do all kinds of research on the people they're playing. That we were able to just sort of let them play and explore the ideas, talk about the ideas.

I was sort of an outside character throwing in ideas, but there were a lot of improvisations, a lot of really interesting discussion because each actor, and the best actors are super smart. They have this kind of ability to just take on the ideas of the character, even if they don't become physicists or politicians or whatever, but they come into that room with a lively set of ideas for discussion. And so that discussion becomes very palpably real.

Speaker 1: From a cinema point of view, It's actually a bit about the style of the film, the black and white elements and the sound is visceral. So how do you make those choices? Why do you decide to flip between black and white and colour?

Speaker 2: Well in particular the black and white and colour is to help orient the audience in the structure of the story. The story is structured with 2 threads, the most significant thread being the color, which is Oppenheimer's very subjective point of view. Really, it's an attempt to jump into his head, see the world the way he saw it, and wind up with understanding rather than judgment. Contrasting with that, we have a black and white thread that is more the point of view of Robert Downey Jr.'s character, Louis Strauss. And I want to use the color and the black and white to help just make the audience feel the scenes as different because 1 is a much more objective view of Oppenheimer.

You're sort of seeing him from across the room and perhaps judging him a little more, you know, and the other, you're really in his head, kind of going on the journey with him.

Speaker 0: Thank you very much. And thank you for watching. You can see Oppenheimer, and as You

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Christopher Nolan Breaks Down ‘Oppenheimer’ With Professor Brian Cox