Filmmaker Christoper Nolan has spoken more about his upcoming “Oppenheimer” movie and how it undergoes a combined colour and storytelling perspective shift within the narrative.
Talking with Empire Magazine, Nolan says whilst developing the film, he opted to take an approach he’s never done before – writing the script in the first person.
In fact, Nolan went so far as to even put the script’s character descriptions, setting details and stage directions all written from the first person perspective of Oppenheimer himself.
Thus when it came time to make the movie, they had to stress with every scene, every shot, that they were doing the film from the subjective perspective of the main character – at least up to a certain point in the story:
“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.
Odd thing to do, but it was a reminder to me of how to shoot the film. It was a reminder to everybody involved in the project, ‘Okay, this is the point of view of every scene.’ I wanted to really go through this story with Oppenheimer; I didn’t want to sit by him and judge him. That seemed a pointless exercise. That’s more the stuff of documentary, or political theory, or history of science.”
One thing he wanted to show was how the man himself was visualizing “this radical reinvention of physics” with the movie, showcasing how he thought. Upon showing the script to VFX supervisor Andrew Jackson, Nolan said:
“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. 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.”
Thus the majority of the film unfolds from Oppenheimer’s perspective as he led the Manhattan Project and its creation of the atomic bomb. It’s expected after the explosion itself is when the film will switch to both black-and-white and to a more traditional objective third party perspective.
“Oppenheimer” marks Nolan’s first R-rated movie since 2002’s “Insomnia” and officially clocks in at 3 hours and 9 seconds, his longest film to date.
