Universal Pictures
Given his prestige as a filmmaker at the largest scale, there are things said about Christopher Nolan that simply would not be believable if it was any other director.
For example, for the last year or so in the lead-up to the release of Oppenheimer, there have been rumors out there that Nolan actually set off some kind of nuclear explosion for the film.
Speaking ahead of the film’s premiere earlier this week, the 52-year-old The Dark Knight director addressed those rumors and said that he’s flattered that fans think he could pull something like that off,
“It’s flattering that people would think I would be capable of something as extreme as that on the one hand, but it’s also a little bit scary,” Nolan said, via The Hollywood Reporter.
While Nolan did confirm that the much-talked-about explosion in the film is not an actual nuclear detonation, he played it coy when explaining how they pulled it off and reiterated that it wasn’t done with CG.
“CG inherently is quite comfortable to look at. It’s safe, anodyne. And what I said [on] Oppenheimer is, ‘This can’t be safe. It can’t be comfortable to look at it. It has to have bite. It’s got to be beautiful and threatening in equal measure.”
Oppenheimer, which will be hitting movie theaters in the United States one week from today on Friday, July 21, has been hailed by some critics as Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece.
Alongside Cillian Murphy in the lead role of J. Robert Oppenheimer — who is infamously known as the “Father of the Atomic Bomb,” — the film stars Emily Blunt as Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer, Matt Damon as Leslie Groves, Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss.
Check out the official trailer for Oppenheimer, which has an official runtime of 3 hours long and is expected to be an Academy Awards contender, below.