The film plays out across the landscapes of Los Alamos and of Cillian Murphy’s face.
Photo-Illustration: New York Magazine. Photos: Universal Pictures; Getty Images
Of course, screen time wasn’t an issue for him; his character dominates the film. “I’ve played a physicist before, in a movie for Danny Boyle calledso I must have resting physicist face,” Murphy says. “What became clear to me really quickly was that there’s no point in me trying to understand quantum mechanics. I don’t have the intellectual capability. My job is to go after the humanity.” Others arrived armed with a surprising amount of knowledge.
Many of the real-life figures had written books, so cast members came in with a broad sense of their lives. “I always like to empower the actors to try things if they have an idea,” Nolan says. “In the script, the scenes are very, very stripped down. So you have to push your actors to come in with a bigger sense of the world, and walk through the door into the scene knowing what they just said to the security guard outside or whatever coming in.
But the research was the research. When it came time to building the actual town, Nolan wasn’t a stickler for authenticity. “He kept saying, ‘This is my western,’” De Jong says. “He really wanted a very natural world, a very honest world.” She looked at films likeas references as they were location scouting.
,” recalls Nolan. “Other than the fact that it’s a great masterpiece, we found it very useful for looking at the use of elements and the use of textures.” The visions of nature and the subatomic world that Oppenheimer sees throughout Nolan’s film reveal the workings of the physical world, but they also gather metaphoric force as the picture proceeds. “is an incredibly rich visual tapestry,” Nolan says, “but also one in which elements are allowed to breathe in symbolic ways.
To re-create the Trinity test explosion — the first time in world history that a nuclear weapon was detonated — the production had to walk a fine line between the documented footage and artistic interpretation. Visual-effects supervisor Andrew Jackson notes that because Nolan wanted to avoid using too much CGI, they chose to constrain themselves in terms of the materials they could work with.
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