Christopher Nolan Wrote ‘Oppenheimer’ Script in First Person as Oppenheimer, Including Stage Directions: ‘I’ve Never Done That Before’
Zack Sharf Digital News Director Christoper Nolan revealed to Empire magazine that he did something during the development of “Oppenheimer” that he’s never done before in more than two decades of making movies: He wrote a script in the first person. “There’s the idea of how we get in somebody’s head and see how they were visualizing this radical reinvention of physics,” Nolan said. “One of the things that cinema has struggled with historically is the representation of intelligence or genius. It very often fails to engage people.” When sending the finished “Oppenheimer” screenplay to his visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson, Nolan stressed to him that “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.”