Next month sees the release of filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” a biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who helped create the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project.
“The Dark Knight” director is famous for his relentless desire to film everything as practically as possible – no green screen and CG only when necessary.
So when it came time for the film to recreate the Trinity test, the first nuclear weapon detonation they intended to do ‘for real’ was met with the response you’d expect: “Nolan’s gonna Nolan”.
Of course, they’re not actually going to set off a nuclear bomb, but pulling off a real-life major explosion that would recreate the visual look of the New Mexico experiment was doable.
Speaking with Total Film (via Slashfilm), the film’s special effects supervisor Scott R. Fisher says they used old-fashioned miniatures, but ones big enough to look real:
“It is like an old-school technique. We don’t call them miniatures; we call them bigatures. We do them as big as we possibly can, but we do reduce the scale so it’s manageable. It’s getting it closer to camera and doing it as big as you can in the environment.”
Also involved was a lot of experimentation to find a way to recreate the shape and look of a mushroom cloud. Discussing what they came up with, Fisher says whilst the result was what you’d expect – “mostly gasoline, propane” – other minerals were added to recreate the initial flash:
“To really enhance the brightness, and give it a certain look … We did a bit of that on this because we really wanted everyone to talk about that flash, that brightness. So we tried to replicate that as much as we could.”
Effects technician Andrew Jackson revealed he came up with an “explosion demo reel” to show off to Nolan, with the filmmaker selecting the look of what he wanted from that visual album.
The $100 million budgeted film, Nolan’s most cost-effective effort in some time, it boasts a stacked cast including Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer; Emily Blunt as his wife, biologist and botanist Katherine ‘Kitty’; Matt Damon as Manhattan Project director General Leslie Groves Jr.; Robert Downey, Jr as U.S. Atomic Energy Commission founder Lewis Strauss; Florence Pugh plays psychiatrist Jean Tatlock; Benny Safdie as theoretical physicist Edward Teller; and Josh Hartnett as pioneering nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence.
Oppenheimer is filmed in a combination of IMAX 65mm and 65mm large-format film photography, including, for the first time ever, sections in IMAX black and white analogue photography. The film will be released exclusively in cinemas on July 21st with 70mm, 35mm and IMAX print engagements.
