One big difference between Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” and some of his other films is budget. At a price tag of $100 million, Nolan crafted the adult drama at a lower cost than his usual fare and at around half the budget of his prior film “Tenet”.
A big reason for this was revealed in July by the film’s star Cillian Murphy who says the film was shot in less than 60 days – a rather short window for a film of this scale and with this many actors involved.
It turns out, the shoot would’ve gone for much longer, but Nolan slashed a month of filming in order to reallocate funds from the budget towards the film’s production design and locations.
The film’s production designer Ruth De Jong revealed this during a recent appearance on the Team Deakins podcast, saying the film felt like a $100 million indie and was decidedly different from “Tenet”.
Originally Nolan wanted to shoot all over the United States, but the costs kept spiralling:
“I have to build Los Alamos, it doesn’t exist. That’s where I really felt like it was impossible. Chris said, ‘Forget the money. Let’s just design what we want.’ So that’s what we did, and when construction first budgeted my town it was $20 million. Chris was like, ‘Yeah, no. Stop.’ We had this huge white model and I started pulling buildings out of it, not to mention we want to shoot in New York and New Jersey and Berkley and Los Angeles and New Mexico.”
That’s when Nolan told her, “I’ve got to go do my homework” which led to a re-organizing of the film’s shooting schedule in order to consolidate days and free up the budget for the production design.
The project was originally planned for at least an 85-day shoot, but Nolan cut that down by at least 30 days:
“The producers were asking what I could do on my end to shrink [the budget]. Tom [executive producer] then comes into my office and says, ‘Chris is going to shoot this in 55 days.’ That is a lot of money we get back! At that point, you feel like I have to deliver above and beyond because he just went and gave up his days. He, more than anyone, knows what he wants to get in every single day and how he wants to get it, and he goes from 85 to 55 days.”
“Oppenheimer” is set to cross the $800 million mark at the worldwide box office in the coming week.
Nolan’s acclaimed Batman trilogy is set to return to the big screen in celebration of Batman Day on September 16th. Showcase Cinemas has revealed on Twitter it is bringing back The Dark Knight trilogy on that day with all three films – “Batman Begins,” “The Dark Knight,” and “The Dark Knight Rises” – to screen for one day only. Tickets are on sale now.
