“It very often fails to engage people”- Christopher Nolan on Oppenheimer and representation of intelligence in cinema

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is arguably the most anticipated film of this year. Premiering on July 21, 2023, the film is set to take a deep and intricate look into the mind of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) and his experiments during the Manhattan Project, which led to the development of the infamous atomic bomb.

While Nolan is no stranger to tricky concepts in his films, he revealed in an interview with Empire that his biggest challenge this time wasn't the huge on-screen gimmicks but the attempt to look inside the mind of Oppenheimer. He said:

"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."

Nolan further delved into the intricacies of his attempts at capturing the genius of the scientist who effectively changed the world completely.

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"We have to find a way into this guy’s head"- Christopher Nolan on his attempts to depict J. Robert Oppenheimer

It has always been a difficult deal to see the world through the eyes of someone who sees everything differently. Christopher Nolan revealed that this was a challenge he had to overcome while filming Oppenheimer. He revealed:

The first person I showed the script to when it was finished after [his producer and wife] Emma [Thomas] read it was Andrew Jackson, the visual effects supervisor,...said to him, ‘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.

Nolan added:

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."

He further revealed his method of transcribing the scientist to the script:

"I actually wrote in the first-person, which I’ve never done before. I don’t know if anyone’s ever done it before. But the point of it is, 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."

Oppenheimer is based on the 2005 book American Prometheus by Kai Bird. The film has an ensemble cast comprising some of Hollywood's finest actors, including Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, Benny Safdie, Michael Angarano, Josh Hartnett, and Kenneth Branagh.