“It’s kissing 3 hours” : Christopher Nolan Confirms ‘Oppenheimer’ is Longer Than His Longest $773M Movie He Did 9 Years Ago
One of the most hotly anticipated films of the year is Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., and others. The newly released images in Total Film Magazine have only heightened audience anticipation.
The development of the atomic bomb as a result of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s work on the infamous Manhattan Project during World War II will be highlighted in the biopic of the scientist starring Cillian Murphy. The film is regarded as Nolan’s passion project and is a crucial part of history because it altered the course of events and ushered in a period of potentially catastrophic power. Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film Oppenheimer, which was shot in IMAX and large-format 65mm, is anticipated to be his longest one yet.
Oppenheimer is by far the most ambiguous and paradoxical character
In an exclusive interview with Total Film, Christopher Nolan said, “It’s slightly longer than the longest we’ve done (Interstellar). It’s kissing three hours. I think of any character I’ve dealt with, Oppenheimer is by the most ambiguous and paradoxical. Which, given that I’ve made three Batman films, is saying a lot”.
Interstellar was 2 hours, 49 minutes long. Additionally, Christopher Nolan said in the course of the interview that he is drawn to captivating heroes who have uncertainty in them.
According to the director, Cillian Murphy‘s J. Robert Oppenheimer, who plays the lead role, is the most significant person to have ever lived. Nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer oversaw the development of the atomic bomb as a result of his work on the infamous Manhattan Project during World War II. While Blunt described the film as a heart-pounding thriller that is an overwhelming experience, Murphy added that the film also contains thriller elements while maintaining an epic quality.
Christopher Nolan explains the palette shift in Oppenheimer
One of the interesting things that the audience noticed when the trailer was released was the shift in the palette of the color in the movie. During his conversation with Total Film, the filmmaker explained the shift between the color palette of the movie; colored scenes and white-and-black.
He explained,
“I wrote the script in the first person, which I’d never done before. I don’t know if anyone has ever done that, or if that’s a thing people do or not… The film is objective and subjective. The color scenes are subjective; the black-and-white scenes are objective. I wrote the color scenes from the first person. So for an actor reading that, in some ways, I think it’d be quite daunting.”
Of course, Nolan has used this trick before in his movie Memento, where the black-and-white scenes moved in order of chronology and the color scenes went back in time. For those who were perplexed by movies like Memento and Tenet, Oppenheimer seems to be more interested in shifting perspectives than time-related acrobats.
Christopher Nolan explains why Cillian Murphy was right as Oppenheimer
In his exclusive interview with Total Film magazine, Nolan explained why he thinks that the character of J. Robert Oppenheimer suited best to Peaky Blinders actor Cillian Murphy. He said, “In truth, there are just not that many actors that you could say, on a first-person approach, ‘Yeah, we’re going to be this guy for three hours’. You’re making a demand of an actor that very few actors in the history of film can rise to.”
Nolan further mentioned, “I will say that even with that confidence in him, he was continually surprising me on set every day. And when we got into the edit suite and were putting the performance together, and seeing the truth of it, I was absolutely blown away.”
Cillian Murphy also chimed in with his thoughts, stating that he only had surface-level knowledge of J. Robert Oppenheimer before he signed up for the role. The actor added that after he was finalized he started to learn more; “So then it was… Well, it was just starting from scratch, really. Chris guided me through that. You can only do it one bite at a time. You have to go slowly. And thankfully we had time.”
Matt Damon and Cillian Murphy on the set of #Oppenheimer pic.twitter.com/l0pdC8NmLj
— Christopher Nolan Art & Updates (@NolanAnalyst) May 19, 2023
The actor made it clear that he was never going to impersonate J. Robert Oppenheimer because he desired to create his own J. Robert Oppenheimer, but he said that learning as much as he could about him was very helpful. Murphy said “To find that silhouette, to be able to embrace the iconography of him, which was the hat and the pipe, and certainly the cut of his suits, and to try to find a physical shape that would make that as iconic as [he was in real life]. Because he was very conscious of that. It wasn’t by accident. He chose that look for himself.”
Oppenheimer will open in cinemas on July 21, 2023. The movie also stars Florence Pugh, Jack Quaid, Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek, Gary Oldman, Kenneth Branagh, Alden Ehrenreich, Dane DeHaan, and David Dastmalchian.
Source: Total Film (Via Games Radar)
