Christopher Nolan Reveals He Wrote 'Oppenheimer' Script in First-Person

Gearing up for the theatrical release of Oppenheimer, director Christopher Nolan sat down for an interview with Empire to discuss what makes this film unique.

The filmmaker revealed to the publication that when he first developed the story for the film, his process was nothing like any of his projects he has done in the two decades Nolan has been making films. Nolan revealed that he wrote the script in first person, visualizing himself as J. Robert Oppenheimer himself. Nolan said, “There’s the idea of how we get in somebody’s head and see how they were visualizing this radical reinvention of physics.” He added, “One of the things that cinema has struggled with historically is the representation of intelligence or genius. It very often fails to engage people.”

Nolan spoke about sending over the finished screenplay to his visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson stating, “we have to find a way into this guy’s head. We’ve gotta see the wold the way he sees it, we’ve gotta see the atoms moving, we’ve gotta see the way he’s imagining waves of energy, the quantum world. And then we have to see how that translates into the Trinity test. And we have to feel the danger, feel the threat of all this somehow.” He added, “My challenge to him was, ‘Let’s do all these things, but without any computer graphics.”

Nolan’s film is told in the perspective of the main character, Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy, who led the Manhattan Project in creating the atomic bomb. The filmmaker shared, “I actually wrote in the first-person, which I’ve never done before. I don’t know if anyone’s ever done it before. But the point of it is, with the color sequences, which is the bulk of the film, everything is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view — you’re literally kind of looking through his eyes.”

Oppenheimer opens in theaters on July 21.

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