Christopher Nolan is one of the most acclaimed filmmakers currently working in Hollywood, something that allows the auteur to do virtually anything he wants with his films. In his latest, Oppenheimer, that freedom afforded Nolan the opportunity to do something he’s never done before: write a script in the first-person. While scripts are virtually always written in the third-person to provide those who read it an objective point of view, Oppenheimer’s script was written from a subjective angle, as if it was typed by J. Robert Oppenheimer himself.
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Oppenheimer star Emily Blunt tells us the point-of-view change made for an incredibly emotional script, one she couldn’t put down once she started reading it.
“I felt like when I read the script, I remember finding it just really pulse racing and emotional and immersive, and that’s clearly his intention. When [Christopher Nolan] wrote it, that it is within the traumatic brain of this one man. That’s why it feels like you’re left kind of destroyed by it because it plays like a horror movie,” Blunt tells ComicBook.com.
She continues, “It’s so internal, the internal storm of this man the whole way through it. You kind of felt that when you read the script. Then I think because Oppenheimer was so enigmatic and ambiguous and it kept you leaning in. Chris wanted these quite, and they were, big personalities in his life that the characters were very colorful. [Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty] was a real fireball, such an extraordinary person, really, not an easy person, but so exciting to play her.”
Matt Damon echoes the sentiment, saying it was clear from the beginning the movie really hinged on Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer, a role that needed to be as dynamic as possible.
“Chris was so clear that with the way that it was written in that subjective voice and that the whole movie lived or died hinged on that performance,” Damon adds. “The book it’s based on won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s called American Prometheus, but Chris said, ‘I’m not calling the movie that. I’m calling it Oppenheimer because that’s that’s our way in.’”
Joining Murphy, Blunt, and Damon are Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, Michael Angarano as Robert Serber, Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence, Dylan Arnold as Frank Oppenheimer, David Krumholtz as Isidor Isaac Rabi, Matthew Modine as Vannevar Bush, Josh Peck as Kenneth Bainbridge, Devon Bostick as Seth Neddermeyer, Matthias Schweighöfer as Werner Heisenberg, Christopher Denham as Klaus Fuchs, Guy Burnet as George Eltenton, Danny Deferrari as Enrico Fermi, Emma Dumont as Jackie Oppenheimer, Gustaf Skarsgård as Hans Bethe, Trond Fausa Aurvåg as George Kistiakowsky, and Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman.
Opening on July 21st, Oppenheimer is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Editor’s note: This interview was conducted prior to the SAG actors’ strike.
