Christopher Nolan says ‘Oppenheimer’ has been “on his radar” for decades

Christopher Nolan has said he first conceived the idea of making a film about J. Robert Oppenheimer when he was a teenager.

The director’s hotly-anticipated biopic about the father of the atomic bomb came to cinemas on Friday (July 21). Nolan has said that coming of age at a time where the fear of nuclear war was particularly pronounced formed part of his motivation for exploring Oppenheimer’s story.

“It’s something that’s been on my radar for a number of years. I was a teenager in the ‘80s, the early ‘80s in England,” he told Bulletin [via FilmNews].  It was the peak of CND, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Greenham Common [protest]; the threat of nuclear war was when I was 12, 13, 14—it was the biggest fear we all had.

“I think I first encountered Oppenheimer in that relation; I think he was referred to in Sting’s song about the Russians that came out then and talks about Oppenheimer’s “deadly toys.” He was part of the pop culture then, without us knowing a lot about him.”

The director even said he had inserted a reference to Oppenheimer into 2020’s Tenet based on research he had already gathered.

Cillian Murphy in ‘Oppenheimer’. CREDIT: YouTube

“And at some point, in the intervening decades, I got ahold of the information, the fact that the scientists at Los Alamos at a point had determined there was a small statistical possibility that the Trinity test would ignite the atmosphere and destroy all life on Earth. They couldn’t mathematically, theoretically, completely eliminate that possibility; they went ahead anyway,” he revealed.

“And that struck me as the most dramatic situation in the history of the world, with any sort of possibility being an end to life on Earth. That’s a responsibility that nobody else in the history of the world had ever faced.

“I put a reference to that in my last film, Tenet; there’s dialogue, a reference to that exact situation by Oppenheimer. That film deals with a science-fiction extrapolation of that notion: Can you put the toothpaste back in the tube? The danger of knowledge, once knowledge is unveiled—once it’s known, once it’s fact—you can’t wind the clock back and put that away.”

In a five-star review of Oppenheimer, NME wrote: “Not just the definitive account of the man behind the atom bomb, Oppenheimer is a monumental achievement in grown-up filmmaking. For years, Nolan has been perfecting the art of the serious blockbuster – crafting smart, finely-tuned multiplex epics that demand attention; that can’t be watched anywhere other than in a cinema, uninterrupted, without distractions. But this, somehow, feels bigger.”

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