Wrote ‘Oppenheimer’ script in first person: Christopher Nolan

The director is known for acclaimed films such as ‘The Prestige’, ‘The Dark Knight’ trilogy starring Christian Bale and ‘Inception’

Starring Cillian Murphy as the titular theoretical physicist regarded as one of the fathers of the atom bomb, the film is based on the Pulitzer Prizewinning book ‘American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer’

LONDON: Filmmaker Christopher Nolan wrote the script of ‘Oppenheimer’ in the first person perspective as he wanted to give the audience a direct peek into the mind of his titular protagonist.

The director, known for acclaimed films such as ‘The Prestige’, ‘The Dark Knight’ trilogy starring Christian Bale and ‘Inception’, said this was the first time he penned a subjective story for the screen. “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 are the bulk of the film, everything is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view - you’re literally kind of looking through his eyes,” Nolan told British magazine ‘The Empire’.

Starring Cilian Murphy as the titular theoretical physicist regarded as one of the fathers of the atom bomb, the ‘Universal Pictures’ project is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book ‘American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer’ by Kai Bird and the late Martin J Sherwin.

Once he sent the finished screenplay of ‘Oppenheimer’ to his visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson, the director said he told his associate that ‘we have to find a way into this guy’s head’.

“We’ve got to see the world the way he sees it. We’ve got to see the atoms moving.

We’ve got to see the way he’s imagining waves of energy and the quantum world. Then we have to see how that translates into the Trinity test. And we have to feel the danger and threat of all this somehow. My challenge to him was, ‘Let’s do all these things, but without any computer graphics’,” he said.

He added, “There’s the idea of how we get in somebody’s head and see how they were visualising this radical reinvention of physics. One of the things that cinema has struggled with historically is the representation of intelligence or genius. It very often fails to engage people.”