Discover 27 mind-blowing facts about Oscar's Best Picture winner: Oppenheimer.
Cillian Murphy’s Bowie-inspired trousers, noisy cameras, Christopher Nolan’s toilet habits... the secrets behind 2024′s Best Picture winner.
As expected, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was an explosive Oscars success. And like any big-budget, megawatt-cast, three-hour treatise on humanity’s ability to destroy itself, there are many fascinating nuggets from its making that you’ve probably never heard about.
1. There would be no Oppenheimer without Sting. Well, in a roundabout way anyway. Nolan’s memory of first becoming aware of Oppenheimer the man was in a lyric from the yogic bass supremo’s 1985 single Russians: “How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy?” So: thanks, Sting.
2. The script was written entirely in the first person. “I’ve never seen that done before,” Matt Damon told Vulture. “Instead of ‘Oppenheimer walks across the room,’ it’s ‘I walk across the room.’ This was a way for him to signal that, okay, this is what the movie’s going to feel like. It’s going to feel immediate.”
3. Like other Nolan scripts, the printouts which actors were given to read the script for the first time were in black type on red paper - it’s harder to photocopy and leak them that way.
4. Cillian Murphy’s script came with a handwritten message from Nolan on the front: “Dearest Cillian. Finally, a chance to see you lead... Love, Chris.”
5. The working title was Gadget, just as the working name for the atomic bomb had been among scientists and the American military.
6. Damon was on a break from acting at large before Nolan cast him, a decision which came from his wife in couples’ therapy sessions. “I had been in Interstellar, and then Chris put me on ice for a couple of movies, so I wasn’t in the rotation, but I actually negotiated in couples therapy - this is a true story - the one caveat to my taking time off was if Chris Nolan called,” Damon told Entertainment Weekly. “This is without knowing whether or not he was working on anything, because he never tells you. He just calls you out of the blue.”
7. The look of Oppenheimer himself was based in part on how David Bowie looked in his mid-70s milk-and-red-peppers-diet phase, “when he was so skinny and kind of emaciated but had these wonderful tailored suits with the trousers”, Murphy told Vulture.
8. That did manifest itself in Murphy not joining the rest of the cast for big family dinners and his eating regimen going off-kilter for some time. “You become competitive with yourself a little bit, which is not healthy,” Murphy said. “I don’t advise it.” Co-star Emily Blunt added: “He could only eat, like, an almond every day. He was so emaciated.”
9. After filming ended, Murphy celebrated by eating a frankly staggering amount of cheese. “Cheese is a great decompression,” Blunt offered by way of explanation.
10. Nolan is a known Imax obsessive and his commitment to making Oppenheimer a very analogue kind of modern blockbuster stretched the tech to its limits. It stretched the structural integrity of projection rooms too: the three-hour, 70mm film prints of Oppenheimer contained around 18 kilometres of film and weighed 270 kilos.
11. Oh, and then there was the fact that Kodak, which makes the Imax film stock, doesn’t actually do black and white Imax film stock. Given that vast chunks of Oppenheimer are in monochrome, Nolan and his cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema put in a call to Kodak, which developed a brand new type of film specifically for them. It’s Double XX stock and a version of it was a favourite of photojournalists in the 1940s.
12. And the cameras themselves made such a racket pulling that huge film through that Benny Safdie, who plays Hungarian physicist Edward Teller, assumed something had gone wrong and waited for “cut!” to be called. Hoytema compared the sound to “a little diesel engine”.
13. One of the good things about that massive film stock is you can see details like the nicotine stains on the chain-smoking Oppenheimer’s hands, painted on by makeup artist Luisa Abel.
14. Given Nolan’s reputation for trying to do things for real - and his promise to recreate the Trinity test without CGI - film fans were only half-joking when they said he’d become a one-man nuclear state. The explosion effect itself was a mixture of real fire effects from petrol and propane, plus magnesium and aluminium powder for the nuclear flash, plus some digital mixing.
15. The explosions weren’t nuclear-scale. But they weren’t tiny. “We don’t call them miniatures; we call them ‘big-atures’,” special effects supervisor Scott R. Fisher told Total Film. “We do them as big as we possibly can, but we do reduce the scale so it’s manageable.” Forced perspective made the models look bigger still, and Fisher and his team prepped the explosive mixture so it would go up with the required mushroom cloud.
16. Effects technician Andrew Fisher also showed Nolan an “explosion demo reel”, a kind of mood board of different bangs made with different techniques at different scales - some absolutely miniscule. “I just played that on a big screen and said: ‘Is there anything here that you find interesting?’,” Fisher told Total Film.
17. Many of the interior scenes at Los Alamos were shot at the actual Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has been preserved as it was during the Manhattan Project years. Murphy and Blunt’s sequences at home with the Oppenheimers were filmed in Robert and Kitty Oppenheimer’s real home and Oppenheimer’s original office at Los Alamos was used too.
18. The town of Los Alamos itself wasn’t considered though; Nolan found on a recce that its main street included a Starbucks.
19. The shooting schedule was pacy: originally pegged at 85 days, budget constraints meant that Nolan and his crew had to find a way of saving 30 days’ shooting if they still wanted to do all the location filming they had planned as well as building their own version of the Los Alamos. In the end, it took just 57 days.
20. That pressure not to mess up the schedule extended to Nolan’s own bladder. “He doesn’t even really like it when you go to the bathroom, but he understands you have to,” Downey Jr told Vanity Fair. “And I asked him: ‘Dude, when do you go?’ And he goes, ‘11am and 6pm’. And I was like: ‘Are you f***ing with me?’”
21. Having a Nobel Laureate on hand to explain the physics at the heart of the bomb is handy, especially one who actually knew Oppenheimer. “I was able to put Kip Thorne on the phone with Cillian,” Nolan told the New York Times. “When Kip was at Princeton, he was able to attend seminars at the Institute for Advanced Study, which Oppenheimer ran.”
22. But the actor Safdie didn’t need much help. At high school, he had wanted to be a nuclear phycisist, and worked with a physicist at Columbia University. “I was doing cosmic rays,” Safdie explained. “It actually is a deep passion of mine.”
23. Oppenheimer composer Ludwig Göransson’s score is almost as complex as the particle physics which the scientists are trying to pin down. He told Empire magazine that some sections feature “21 tempo changes in one piece of music”, all played in a single live take. “That was something that I didn’t think was possible,” Göransson said.
24. Remember the sex scene when Oppenheimer and Florence Pugh’s Jean Tatlock get it on after reading some of the Bhagavad Gita? Pugh’s naked body was digitally covered up with a fairly unconvincing black dress in India and the Middle East. The fiery doom of all life on the planet: fine. Nipples: absolutely not.
25. In one particularly gnarly sequence, Oppenheimer is overwhelmed with guilt over what he’s invented and sees a young woman in a crowd with flaps of skin hanging off her face - like the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She’s played by Flora Nolan, the director’s daughter. “If you create the ultimate destructive power, it will also destroy those who are near and dear to you,” he told the Telegraph. “I suppose this was my way of expressing that in what, to me, were the strongest possible terms.”
26. There are a lot of characters, a lot of timeframes and a lot of overlapping narratives in Oppenheimer. To try to keep a handle on them, Nolan and his editor Jennifer Lame took on what they referred to as “character passes”; that meant watching the movie again and again while paying attention to a specific character’s arc each time. “You have to tighten the corners opposite so that everything stays in balance,” Nolan told Vulture.
27. The vast cast kept in touch via a WhatsApp group chat named “Oppenhomies”.
This story originally featured in the Telegraph UK
Film distributor A24 used this to promote Celine Song's 'Materialists'.