Christoper Nolan On Heath Ledger, Robert Downey, Jr. & ‘Oppenheimer’ [Interview]

There is a bountiful harvest of fantastic performances in Christopher Nolan’s new epic, “Oppenheimer.” Cillian Murphy subtly inhabits the persona of the “Father of the Atomic Bomb.” Emily Blunt brings a genuine ferocity to Oppenheimer’s increasingly frustrated wife. Matt Damon delivers another stellar turn after his work in “Air” this Spring. Florence Pugh is captivating in what may only be 20 minutes of very important screen time. But it’s Robert Downey, Jr.’s performance as Lewis Strauss that will spark the most praise.

READ MORE: ‘Oppenheimer’ early reactions: critics call Christopher Nolan’s film “Incredible,” “Staggering” and “Powerful”

Speaking to Nolan last week, we asked the auteur how he convinced Downey, Jr. to star in his first film since he shot the forgettable “Doolittle” back in 2018.

“Your question reminds me of a conversation that I had with Heath Ledger many years ago when I was talking to him about taking on The Joker, and what he told me is that he needed to be hungry,” Nolan recalls. “He had taken time off and he needed to be hungry to act again, and he knew that about himself. And I’ve not had that conversation with Robert, but I think there’s something similar going on where he was in a place where he was ready to get his teeth into something, and I think the best actors need that. They sometimes need a fallow period to fall back in love with the craft, to need to get out there and express something. And he came to set just fully armed with a passion and an understanding of character and a willingness to lose himself completely in the character in a way that I feel that I haven’t seen him do in many years, and it was just a thrill to be a part of that.”

Over the course of the rest of our conversation, Nolan discusses writing portions of “Oppenheimer” in the first person (an almost unheard of technique for a screenplay), the differences between his film and the non-fiction novel it’s based on, “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” the film’s thematic ties to “Tenet,” when he realized Murphy was the right man to play Oppenheimer, and much, much more.

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The Playlist: Do you consider this the most artistically daring film that you’ve made so far?

Christopher Nolan: Gosh, I’d certainly like to think so. You certainly want to feel that you’re challenging yourself more and more with each film, but it’s a little hard to compare experiences because each film is different and presents unique challenges. But certainly, I’d like to feel as if I’m putting a film out into the world that I’ve pushed things as far as I can, as far as I know how to.

Did someone just pass the “American Prometheus” book your way and say, “Hey, check this out,” or was Oppenheimer’s life something you’d considered tackling before?

Well, as with everything it’s sort of both things are true at the same time. I first became aware of Oppenheimer as a kid growing up in the United Kingdom in the early eighties. The threat of nuclear weapons was very much in the culture, in pop culture. I think particularly of Sting‘s song “Russians” he came up with where he referenced “Oppenheimer’s deadly toy.” It was something very much in all our minds and really infected me like so many people with a fear of nuclear armageddon at that time. And then over the years, I learned more and more about Oppenheimer to the point where I included in “Tenet” a reference to this amazing piece of information that I’d come across, that there’s this moment where Oppenheimer and the leading scientists on the Manhattan Project realized they couldn’t completely eliminate the possibility of a chain reaction from the Trinity test that would destroy the world. And he went ahead and pushed that button. And I included it in “Tenet” because of the sheer relatability and sort of drama of that as applied to a science fiction conceit about “Tenet’s” really a film about can you uninvent a destructive technology. I realized after the fact, of course, it’s about nuclear weapons, and then I became interested in taking that on more directly. Rob Pattinson, who’s in “Tenet,” gave me a book of Oppenheimer speeches as a wrap gift on “Tenet.” And in reading those speeches from the 1950s where you see the scientists trying to deal with the consequences, the terrifying consequences, of what they’ve done, that sort of took me further down the path. And then when I read “American Prometheus,” which is this great book by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin…Martin Sherwin worked on it for 25 years. It has the most incredible story, most beautifully laid out, and most well-researched you could possibly ask for. And I came to realize that Oppenheimer’s story is the most dramatic I’d ever encountered, and at that point, I really wanted to jump in.

I have to say I was shocked that I did not know this footnote to history about Lewis Strauss and his connection to everything that occurred. Were you surprised no one had sort of tackled this in any medium outside of this book before?

I was not entirely surprised because his story, Oppenheimer’s story, is so complex that even in “American Prometheus,” which is 700 plus pages, Lewis Strauss is not tangentially referred to. The book does raise his actions in regard to the security hearings, but it doesn’t give anyone nearly as much time as I chose to in the script. And this is the thing, when you’re adapting and you feel free and empowered to adapt, you could follow the thread of things. And so I mean, obviously I don’t want to give away too much.

Of course.

But there’s a reference to the confirmation hearings of Lewis Strauss in “American Prometheus,” and so I was able to go back and read the transcript of those days in the Senate and look at what had been said by the different people about Strauss who found these uncanny parallels with the earlier security hearings against Oppenheimer because the transcript of those security hearings was published at the time. It’s rather long. So I’m not entirely surprised, but I think also, and maybe this is getting too explicit for people who haven’t seen the film, but I think a lot of people take a bit of a shortcut on the antagonist, Edward Teller [Benny Safdie] because there’s such a sort of interesting relationship between Teller and the H-bomb and Oppenheimer and the A-bomb. But I found Strauss to be the much more compelling antagonist. For me, the relationship with Teller was more interestingly addressed in a somewhat more fraternal way, and I partly felt that because in reading the book and conducting further research, and I’ve spent time with physicists like [Kip] Thorne, for example, on “Interstellar,” and I developed an understanding and massive respect for the way scientists relate to each other. They are very much a community, scientists at the highest level, and they have respect for truth, so there’s rivalry, there’s politics like in every other field, but there’s this sort of acknowledgment of truth, absolute truth. And when a discovery is made, it lays waste to what came before it, and everybody accepts that and understands that. So there’s a sort of mutual respect, even when there’s a rivalry that’s very unique, and I really wanted Benny and Cillian to get that across. I really wanted to use Teller, as I say, in a more fraternal way, even though obviously they’re at odds in a lot of ways. And so maybe those were all reasons that perhaps people hadn’t drilled down on the other aspects. But look, it’s not a documentary, it’s a dramatic interpretation. And with Cillian playing Oppenheimer, it was important. This is not an impersonation, it was one of the things we first talked about. It was important that this be a dramatic interpretation of the character and a dramatic interpretation of the events.

After seeing the movie, I found some interviews with Oppenheimer on YouTube, and he does inhabit him, in no way mimicking him, but he does inhabit him in a remarkable way.

Yeah.

Had you thought about him while you were writing the script?

Well, when I write, I try to be disciplined and not write with actors in mind because if you’re writing with an actor in mind, you’re writing about something they’ve already done and you’re never going to challenge them. I try to write, even with fiction, but especially dealing with historical figures, with real people, I try to write with those characters in mind, and in the case of Oppenheimer when we finished, and there on my desk is this copy of “American Prometheus” I’ve been staring at for months and months and months with this face looking up with this intense blue-eyed stern. And you sort of look at it and you think, “I know who can do that. I know who can be that person.”

And Cillian is one of the greatest actors of his generation or any other, and I’ve known that for 20 years since I started working with him. But I’ve never had the opportunity to work with him as a lead. And in this case, I got to call him up and say, “This is the one. This is you taking center stage. And not just that, I’ve written the script in the first person because I want to show you and everybody involved with the project that we’re going to see everything from Oppenheimer’s point of view. You get to take the audience with you on this journey.” And he has that capacity for empathy that I think the greatest actors have. He has that ability to open up his heart and his mind to the audience and draw them in, so that’s very much what we needed. And I mean, it was amazing to watch him work on set every day, but it really wasn’t until I got in the edit suite and, my editor, and I, studied his work together that you saw the complexity, the subtlety of what he’d done.

I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone say that they wrote any of their script or part of their script in the first person. Where did that inspiration to even do that come from?

I don’t know really. As I started the script, I had my structure worked out and so I knew that I was with the color sequences going to be trying intensely within Oppenheimer’s point of view, and that was sort of the key to how the script was going to work. And just a few pages in really to writing it, something felt wrong with the usual screenplay form and so I just tried it as an experiment. And I showed it to my brother who, even if he’s not involved directly with the script, I always bounce things off him sort of without telling him what I’d done, and he felt that it worked, and so I carried on. Whether somebody’s done it before, I have no idea, but it worked well for this because I needed to remind myself as I was writing, that this is intensively subjective. And then when the script was finished, it was very useful for the reader. It helped distinguish between the two points of view to timelines and then it just sent a reminder to, for example, Hoyte van Hoytema, my director of photography as well as Cillian, that every day we’re turning up on set in terms of the choices we’re making, where we’re putting the camera, how we’re shooting this, how we’re thinking of the scene. That’s always in the first person, which with film, you can’t literally film a first-person perspective. It’s been tried before, things like “Lady in the Lake” or whatever, but it doesn’t really work that way because you have to see the character. So there’s always this kind of third-person quality in camera blocking that you have to embrace, but there are ways of creating intense subjectivity through camera blocking and placement and so forth. And it was a reminder to us to keep doing that.

One of my big takeaways from the film is that I am sad for the art of cinema that Robert Downey Jr. has taken the last five or six years off before making your film because he’s so incredible in this. First, how did you convince him to break his sort of sabbatical? And second, can you convince him to act more for the rest of us?

Your question reminds me of a conversation that I had with Heath Ledger many years ago when I was talking to him about taking on The Joker, and what he told me is that he needed to be hungry. He had taken time off and he needed to be hungry to act again, and he knew that about himself. And I’ve not had that conversation with Robert, but I think there’s something similar going on where he was in a place where he was ready to get his teeth into something, and I think the best actors need that. They sometimes need a fallow period to fall back in love with the craft, to need to get out there and express something. And he came to set just fully armed with a passion and an understanding of character and a willingness to lose himself completely in the character in a way that I feel that I haven’t seen him do in many years, and it was just a thrill to be a part of that.

Before I let you go, I don’t really have a question about it, but I have to tell you, Ludwig Göransson’s score is a masterpiece. It is absolutely stunning and I cannot wait to be able to hear it outside of the context of a theater.

It’s a fabulous soundtrack album, but it’s very long. It’s an hour and a half long because we…there’s so much he brought to the table, it was impossible to condense. But I agree.

Is he going to release it as an hour-and-a-half-long album or soundtrack?

Yes, indeed. Yes. It’s five vinyls, it’s fabulous. I don’t know whether I’m supposed to say that yet or not. I don’t know whether it’s a secret, but it’s fabulous.

“Oppenheimer” opens nationwide on July 21.