It should go without saying that Oppenheimer, director Christopher Nolan’s big screen biopic of American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, will focus on the build-up and fallout of the moment he unleashed hell upon the world, in the form of the atomic bomb that he had helped develop.
Oppenheimer’s work changed humanity forever. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the close of World War II claimed the lives of over 130,000 people.
The world had never seen anything like this before, and in the first ever test explosion – known as Trinity, in a desert in New Mexico in 1945 – an onlooker at the time described it as “amazingly bright. It turned yellow, then red, and then beautiful purple. At first it had a translucent character, but shortly turned to a tinted or coloured white smoke appearance. The ball of fire seemed to rise in something of toadstool effect.”
The difficult task for Nolan then, was recreating this retina-bursting moment on screen.
Strangely enough – and unlike many of his other explosion-heavy films – Nolan has revealed that he chose to do it all without the use of CGI. Instead he’s focused on the internal POV of Oppenheimer, and the way in which he experiences the world.
In an interview with Empire, Nolan explained: “I said to Andrew Jackson, the visual effects supervisor, ‘We have to find a way into this guy’s head. We’ve gotta see the world 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.’
“My challenge to him was, ‘Let’s do all these things, but without any computer graphics.’”
“The point of it is,” he added, “with the colour 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.”
He added that by getting cerebral about it, Oppenheimer will hopefully push new boundaries in filmmaking: “There’s the idea of how we get in somebody’s head and see how they were visualising this radical reinvention of physics…One of the things that cinema has struggled with historically is the representation of intelligence or genius. It very often fails to engage people.”
Oppenheimer is on general release on 21 July.
