Christopher Nolan and the contradictions of J. Robert Oppenheimer

With the biopic Oppenheimer, writer-director Christopher Nolan, known for brain-twisting films like Interstellar and Inception, addresses an old childhood dread — one based not on science fiction but on real science, namely the threat of thermonuclear war and human annihilation.

The film follows the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the cerebral, charismatic and tortured physicist (played by Cillian Murphy, the star of Peaky Blinders) who was tapped to lead the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to build the atomic bomb during World War II.

The subsequent bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war against Japan in 1945 (Germany had already surrendered) and Oppenheimer was hailed as a hero. But only a few years later, in 1954, his security clearance was revoked in an infamous hearing of advisers to the Atomic Energy Commission that declared him a security threat based on leftist ties at the University of California, Berkeley — among other things, a girlfriend and his brother, Frank, were Communist Party members — and his opposition to building an even bigger bomb, the “Super” or hydrogen bomb espoused by his colleague Edward Teller.

That was the end of Oppenheimer's career in government circles and of his ability to influence the future of atomic energy in the Cold War. As a result he became a martyr to the scientific community. Many physicists, including Albert Einstein, were disappointed that the United States had dropped the bomb without warning on an enemy that was already defeated, while Oppenheimer hoped that the advent of the bomb would make war unthinkable and lead to international controls on such weapons. Once the Russians had the bomb, however, that dream had no chance with hard-liners like the president at the time, Harry S. Truman, who called Oppenheimer a “crybaby.”

The film’s huge cast includes Matt Damon as the crusty Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, who was in overall charge of the project, and Robert Downey Jr. as Adm. Lewis Strauss, chair of the Atomic Energy Commission. Strauss led the postwar charge against Oppenheimer, and his nomination for secretary of Commerce under President Dwight D. Eisenhower was killed by the Senate partly because of his role in Oppenheimer’s downfall.

The movie, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, is the most recent in a stream of books, features and documentaries that have chronicled the tragic birth of atomic weapons, including another Pulitzer Prize winner, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes; a seven-part BBC series, Oppenheimer; Fat Man and Little Boy, starring Paul Newman as Groves; another documentary, The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer; and even a John Adams opera, Doctor Atomic.

Over tea at his office in a quiet residential neighbourhood in Los Angeles, Nolan discussed why he thought Oppenheimer was the most important person who ever lived, choosing between myths and the record, Cillian Murphy’s haircut and how he came to make this movie. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.

In the production notes you say, “Like it or not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived.” Why?

In Hollywood, we’re not afraid of a little hype. Do I genuinely believe it? Absolutely. Because if my worst fears are true, he’ll be the man who destroyed the world. Who’s more important than that?

Maybe the man who pushed the button that did destroy the world.

Got to have a button to push.

I think it’s very easy to make the case for Oppenheimer as the most important person who ever lived, because he is the person who facilitated and achieved atomic weapons and indeed the hydrogen bomb, because he let Teller work on it. So he is the individual who was able to marshal the forces effectively.

Is there a parallel universe in which it wasn’t him, but it was somebody else and that would’ve happened? Quite possibly. That’s the argument for diminishing his importance in history. But that’s an assumption that history is made simply by movements of society and not by individuals. It’s a very philosophical debate.

Apparently within about 15 minutes of hearing that the atom had been split, he was suggesting that you could make a bomb in a chain reaction. But I think a lot of scientists had that same, “Oh, this could be a bomb.”

His story is central to the way in which we live now and the way we are going to live forever. It absolutely changed the world in a way that no one else has changed the world. You talk about the advent of the printing press or something. He gave the world the power to destroy itself. No one has done that before.

That’s a pessimistic view if his invention actually ended the world. If it didn’t, he’s still the most important man because the bomb would’ve stopped war forever. We haven’t had a world war since 1945 based on the threat of mutual assured destruction.

So there are two ways of looking at this contribution. And we don’t know which one is right. A lot of what he said about arms control and the way in which events would unfold has proven to be absolutely true. A lot of it has also seemed hopelessly naive. This is a story that doesn’t have an ending yet.

For better or for worse, I really believe him to be one of the more clearly ambiguous figures in history.

The burning question that we have is why? Why Oppenheimer now?

There are certain stories that you want to kind of wait until you feel ready to tell them. (This) story is one that I’ve known about since I was a kid growing up in the shadow of nuclear weapons in the early ’80s in the United Kingdom. It was very much in the pop culture. It was the days of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and protests of Greenham Common and about the stationing of nuclear cruise missiles. For me, it’s always seemed one of those stories that I don’t think it’s been told in any definitive movie sense. And yet it’s one of the most important and dramatic stories there are.

So reading American Prometheus — it’s such a well-researched and well-told book — gave me confidence. That could be the basis, you know, of a film or a screenplay.

It seems like nuclear dread has come back...

I was talking to Steven Spielberg about this recently. He grew up at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, the ’60s, high Cold War. It was a period in which there was an enormous amount of fear. And then the wave I described in the early ’80s. A lot of things pop culturally came out of that, including Sting’s song, Russians, about global tensions, that refers to “Oppenheimer’s deadly toy.”

I think our relationship with nuclear weapons in pop culture is very complicated, and it ebbs and flows. When I first told one of my teenage sons what I was writing, he literally said to me, “That’s just not something anybody worries about anymore.”

We went to the book to fact-check the movie and was surprised to read that Truman really did call him a crybaby.

Doesn’t seem very presidential, does it?

Given recent history it sounds very presidential. That was an enormous dramatic point in the film because it just made it so completely clear how badly Oppenheimer had misled himself.

That’s a good way of putting it. There are different accounts of that meeting, but these are things that Truman recollected.

I feel it’s only fair to present things the way he saw them. Because in that moment, you’re looking for a huge shift in perception about the reality of Oppenheimer’s situation. Those two men come into that room with completely different expectations about what that meeting is. And I think that was a massive moment of disillusion, a huge turning point (for Oppenheimer) in his approach to trying to deal with the consequences of what he’d been involved with.

Were there any surprises for you in the way the actors played their parts?

It was a continual process of surprise. Sometimes you’d have a really invigorating discussion about what’s really going on, because this is a story where people’s behavior, political or personal, is riddled with ambiguities.

For example, there’s a moment where James Remar, who played (Henry L. Stimson, Truman’s secretary of war), kept talking to me about how he learned that Stimson and his wife had honeymooned in Kyoto. And that was one of the reasons that Stimson took Kyoto off the list to be bombed.

I had him crossing the city off the list because of its cultural significance, but I’m like, just 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 giant cast and so many locations?

Anytime you get into myriad locations, a lot of different actors, it’s always going to be a puzzle. I did insist on scheduling it around Cillian’s haircut. (Laughs) Because I’m very allergic to wigs in movies. I really wanted the film to not have any obvious artifice when it came to the way characters presented themselves.

One of the key moments that really hooked me on the story, which I referred to in my last movie, Tenet (2020), was this idea that when the scientists did their calculations, they couldn’t completely eliminate the possibility that they might 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 tiny possibility. But having done a lot of giant explosions on film sets myself, where safety is the absolute most important thing, the tension around those ignitions is unbelievable. It’s very hard for the special effects guys to quantify to us exactly how it’ll sound, exactly how it’ll look. So as that countdown comes, it’s incredibly tense, 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 feel of that, to live in that room.

Oppenheimer does come across in the movie as a tremendously tortured person, and sparks always seem to be going off in his head...

Well look, the film is my interpretation of his life. I wanted it to be a strong interpretation, a very personal interpretation. I didn’t want to make a documentary. As far as the adherence to the historical record, I think the film is much more accurate than people will imagine. A lot of the things that potentially seem like contrivances turn out to be true.

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.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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