Christopher Nolan did not want Oppenheimer to follow usual biopic conventions

NEW YORK – It is not easy making biographical films, or biopics, these days.

Viewers are less willing to fall for the standard storytelling tricks, says British-American film-maker Christopher Nolan.

For his fact-based film Oppenheimer, which opens in Singapore cinemas on Thursday, the writer-director of the fact-based historical drama Dunkirk (2017) and the science-based space epic Interstellar (2014) opted for unconventional methods to capture the spirit of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the enigmatic man known as the father of the atomic bomb.

Nolan opted to include an unusually large ensemble of scientist characters, taking the film’s runtime to three hours.

He shot the film in the wide-screen Imax format, then framed each actor’s face in close-up. He also made chronological jumps and changes in the point of view.

Explaining his reasons, he tells journalists at a roundtable at the Four Seasons hotel in New York City that biopic-makers who use widely accepted techniques are now looked on with suspicion.

Should they omit inconvenient facts or collapse several characters into one, “viewers can immediately Google the facts of what they’ve just seen, and look on Wikipedia and see if you’ve completely manipulated the truth”, says Nolan.

Audiences may love classic portraits of real heroes such as the Oscar-winning Lawrence Of Arabia (1962), but have come to see that they are being sold a myth.

“No one looks at Lawrence Of Arabia and calls it a biopic,” says Nolan, 52.

For his take on the life of the American physicist who headed the laboratory that created the atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, Nolan chose immersion over information.

It is all his way of conveying the massive scale of the enterprise codenamed the Manhattan Project.

“There were about 600,000 people involved, all working on pieces of the puzzle. I wanted you to get a sense of the breadth and complexity of what Oppenheimer had to deal with,” Nolan says.

Once viewers are drawn into the mind of the central character, the story should snap into focus, even when it deals with thorny scientific concepts, he adds.

“If we can feel that Oppenheimer understands something in his head, we can understand it as well.”

The film is adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph And Tragedy Of J. Robert Oppenheimer, written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

With Irish actor Cillian Murphy in the title role, the screen adaptation covers the scientist’s life from before WWII to a few decades afterwards.

It deals with his involvement in the Manhattan Project and his relationships with women, in particular, psychiatrist Jean Tatlock and biologist Katherine Puening, played by British actresses Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt respectively.

He is drawn into the orbits of powerful men in the American political and military establishment, such as the banker and businessman Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr) and Major General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), the overall director of the Manhattan Project.

Murphy has worked with Nolan on Batman films The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005 to 2012), the sci-fi thriller Inception (2010) and Dunkirk.

Speaking to roundtable journalists at the same New York event, Murphy, 47, says he has become accustomed to Nolan’s “succinct and precise” manner of speaking with actors on the set.

His sets offer fewer comforts by Hollywood standards, but in return, actors get cool, decisive leadership.

“He’s unbelievably calm. There’s no waiting around. There is no one on their phones. There are no phones. There is no hierarchy in trailers,” Murphy says, referring to the preferential treatment some stars get in the size of their accommodations.

American star Downey Jr, 58, who was paired with Murphy at the roundtable, says that “folks are saying maybe this is the best film I have ever been in”.

Then he makes a quip about leaving Nolan’s bare-bones set for a Hollywood production, for which he is an executive producer. He realised how much he missed his creature comforts, he says.

“Oh, the delicious cappuccinos. I have been to the set three times and I have a chair with my name on it,” he says.

There is a portion of the film in which Downey Jr’s Strauss and Oppenheimer are drawn into a conflict over Strauss’ belief that America needs to be as well-armed as its Cold War enemies, if not more.

Strauss, unlike Oppenheimer, believed that MAD – mutually assured destruction – would keep the world safe.

Downey Jr thinks that on that count, his personal beliefs and those of his character are aligned.

“I would lean into Strauss’ conservative opinion. He was of great service to his country,” he says, and later adds that his character’s brand of 1950s conservatism is nothing like the kind seen today in the right wing of American politics.

Oppenheimer’s leftist leanings, coupled with his superstar status among the American intelligentsia, would lead to friction with Strauss.

“It’s unfortunate that they, in some way, destroyed each other,” says Downey Jr.

Blunt, speaking to the press at another roundtable, calls Nolan “the most English man I’ve met in my life” because of his unflappable manner and low-key way of speaking.

The 40-year-old actress – who previously starred alongside Murphy playing allied survivors of an alien invasion in the post-apocalyptic horror sequel A Quiet Place Part II (2021) – says that her character Kitty and Oppenheimer had a “tumultuous” marriage.

In the film, their friction exposes the hidden side of a man who would otherwise remain an enigma. “Kitty was a bit of a force, so I knew that my job in those very emotional and very raw scenes was to show that side of him – the shadow of his whole life, really,” Blunt says.

Their relationship might have been marked by fights, but Blunt believes Kitty was drawn to his singular mind.

“She truly worshipped him. She wasn’t a person who was easily awestruck – she lived a full life and he was her fourth husband. She was attracted to him intellectually, and also to his non-conformist aspects. It was truly a meeting of minds,” she says.

American actor Matt Damon, who had a surprise cameo in Nolan’s Interstellar, says that to the brilliant minds of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer was not just an intellectual equal, but also someone they admired.

“His charisma was something everyone noticed. These world-class intellects just idolised him. He taught himself Sanskrit and could speak six languages,” says Damon, 52, who was paired with Blunt at the roundtable.

Blunt added that the film gets into the head of a man shouldering a responsibility that he alone had to bear. “It’s about the trauma of living with that brain and when we get inside his head, we become as traumatised as he is,” she says.

Oppenheimer opens in cinemas on Thursday.

Blasts from the past

From the day J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team made a mushroom cloud rise above the desert sands of New Mexico in July 1945, marking the first atomic blast, the shadow of annihilation has hung over the world.

Since then, film-makers have created stories – cautionary tales, mostly – about the era the Manhattan Project ushered in.

Barefoot Gen (1983)

Japanese artist and writer Keiji Nakazawa’s popular semi-biographical manga series, first published in 1973, has spawned several feature film and television adaptations.

The story opens in 1945 and Gen is a boy whose family is struggling to survive in a Japan still at war. Then, in August of that year, a lone American bomber flies over their city of Hiroshima, carrying a powerful new payload.

After the blast, Gen and his mother are the only survivors in his family. They find themselves in a city filled with the dead and dying. In the 1983 animated film, there is a famously gruesome scene of atomic incineration.

Threads (1984)

The seminal British television movie co-produced by the BBC was among the first to realistically depict a nuclear attack and its aftermath.

The tragedy is seen through the eyes of two families living in Northern England. Tensions in the Persian Gulf have escalated to the point where the United States and the Soviet Union stand on the brink of war. Social order collapses in the United Kingdom.

The nuclear exchange begins, and the film’s stark depiction of its horrors and the public discussion it generated have earned this drama a place in broadcast history.

Watchmen (2009)

The superhero movie was not a box-office success, but it does include many of the ideas that made the graphic novel series of the same name (1986 to 1987) from which it was adapted, a critical success.

The film carries some of the comics’ pessimistic take on the aggressive nature of humans.

Writer Alan Moore saw a world in which superheroes are allied with state governments, fighting wars on their behalf. Dr Manhattan (Billy Crudup) – named after the Manhattan Project – is a being who can manipulate atomic particles, giving him godlike powers of destruction.

With this deity on its side, the US wins every war it gets itself involved in, but even Dr Manhattan cannot prevent the Cold War from turning hot.