Christopher Nolan Breaks Down ‘Oppenheimer’ With Professor Brian Cox

well hello I'm Brian Cox I'm here for British Esquire and talking to Christopher Noland about his film Oppenheimer we imagine a future and our imaginings horrifiers well I've been fascinated by Oppenheimer for many years both scientifically and philosophically actually and politically and I think it's safe to say that the film deep in my appreciation of the character so thank you for making it thank you I saw the film yesterday I think it's a Triumph artistically but also intellectually so I absolutely loved it and I wanted to ask you why you came to him and why you came to that subject matter initially I think it's been a sort of long slow creep towards something which is very often the case in in my life and career you know I first heard about Oppenheimer through I'm in the 80s sting song Russians he refers to oppenheimer's deadly toys I actually referred to him in my previous film tenor um because we come to realize you know there's this moment in the Manhattan Project where oppenheimer's fellow scientists couldn't completely rule out the possibility of a chain reaction that would set fire to the atmosphere before they conducted the Trinity test and yet they went ahead and pushed the button but ultimately I just thought what a dramatic moment I mean what an incredible thing for them to have done and what would it be like to take the audience that would be like to be there are we saying there's a chance that when we push that button we destroy the world chances are near zero near zero what do you want for Theory alone zero would be nice I came to read um kyber and Martin showings American Prometheus which is a book that they wrote in researched over 25 years it won the Pulitzer Prize so it's a very very well written World researched authoritative you know account of Oppenheimer and that gives you confidence to think okay well we could we could base our telling on on this Source I thought it was interesting that you started with um quantum mechanics which was clearly in the air in his thoughts before the war but you you were really explicit in the film that you started with that showed that to the audience and I'm interested in it because I know after the war the BBC wreath lectures that he gave the use quantum mechanics as a one of the analogies to illustrate how he was thinking about Society in general and how we could control the power of nuclear weapons so I wondered why why you chose to start with a with the physics with quantum mechanics is such a strange view of nature for exactly that reason it's a strange view of nature it was a time of as you know radical reinvention or the way in which we describe the universe around the way in which we understand the universe and that Clash ultimately between classical physics quarter physics which has still never been reconciled it's a theme in interstellar it becomes a plot point in it just tell you the sort of stuff you know I'm very aware of that I didn't want to try and explain that to the audience but the idea is we want to see how radical this thinking was you know you you want to see this guy almost like an apprentice magician you know he's sort of meeting Neil's board it's kind of like Obi-Wan Kenobi or something so he's visualizing these things and he's sort of feeling these things that he can just about understand or begin to play with but it's almost we wanted to feel like an almost frightening insight to you these guys are looking at you know the stuff around us and they're seeing energy and that energy and that that thing that he's seeing ultimately the thread runs right the way through to the destructive power of the atomic bomb and so really wanted to come back and start from that that smallest thing and one of the first conversations I had about the imagery of it was with a great physicist called Robert Digraph he was the director of The Institute for advanced study and I went to scout it because that's where Oppenheimer was director for many years and he said this for me very frightening thing he said well one of the things was alienating about it for some physicists was you can no longer visualize the atom that's frightening to a filmmaker who's about to Embark and film with one of the first tasks is visualizing the atom but in talking to him you know we talked about Cinema on how you can use the idea of you know eisenstein but as you have shot a and you follow the shot B and that gives you thought C and so film could be more than the sum of its parts and so the feeling was if we started experimenting with imagery looking at waveforms particle behavior and so forth we could by combining these images in different ways we could give the audience a Feeling of what it might be like for a physicist to visualize these things and a thread that could run right the way through to the destruction of it it's probably more for you to say whether we got it right or not no I think you captured this sense of um hidden power in nature which I think runs through a lot of your thumb it's in Stellar as well of course yeah that sense that there's a there's a power there that's beautiful and perhaps comprehensible and incomprehensible at the same time and I think corporate all in Commerce at the same time is is a big part of the why of it or you know why start with that and it's because when I was doing Interstellar with my friend Kip the one who you know Nobel prize winning physicists we came to realize mutually that the process of writers and artists Is Not So Different the process of physicists he made it clear to me that intuition the feeling of understanding something is very very important to physicists and so we want to show in the beginning of the film and carrying on we want to show that that energy that he's visualizing is also inside him and it's torturing him to a degree he's trying to channel it into something productive and meaningful trying to understand it and that felt very relatable any I think anybody can understand that I remember in the I can't go back to resletures I I love his wreath lectures in 53 which is just before the committee actually where he uses quantum mechanics he says that with this idea that you can think of an electron as a point-like thing sometimes or a wavy thing that's extended and fills the space and you have these pictures neither of them are complete pictures and these wreath actually so it is with the society so the needs of the individual against the needs of the collective communism libertarianism he goes on to talk about that so you know as nature is a training ground that gives you some intellectual tools that might be transferred to running a more peaceful world and I went to ask you about that because that's what I got very powerfully from the film The the complexity of all the characters I thought all the scientific characters at least is is explicit the the they're kind of been pulled in different directions and I want to ask you how much how conscious that was to present these people as extremely complex I think they're all very relatably flawed complicated individuals I'm drawn to stories about people who are presented with Paradox people who make decisions that are hard to understand and maybe they don't fully understand themselves and our Prime is the most extreme example but everybody random as you say they're all in their own Little Orbits they're all interacting and it's it's this weird mashup of personal politics pushing in particular directions that then have massive ramifications the biggest version in a way in the film for me is the fact that Los Alamos this place that becomes so famous and Infamous in history and is still this very important nuclear you know laboratory research facility to this day you learn early on in the film and this is the history you know it was just a place he and his brother like to go camping just like a beautiful spot that sort of blew my mind it's like wow you can argue this horse about whether these things would have happened whether without this individual in history you know but what's undeniable is that in our world this person had such a personal relationship to things that then become uh well things that changed the world and you described him I think Oppenheimer is the most important person in history the obvious statement I suppose that he created or played a key role in creating the bomb but is there a future role for Oppenheimer the way that he thought about the world post Manhattan Project is extremely important and not well known and I wonder whether that was in your mind when you made the film uh definitely um as with everything to do with Oppenheimer you can look look at things in very contradiction ways and so when he and Niels Bora first exploring and articulating the possibility of what is now referred to as mutually assured destruction you're looking at the world from 2023 and there are two ways of looking at his post-war actions everything he said post 1945 he was a very eloquent man he's incredibly careful he never apologized for the bombings of Japan he never expressed individual Shame about his role in it or anything like that but all of his actions and policy decisions or attempts to influence policy post 1945 are those of a deeply guilty man very aware of the consequences of his actions and it's that contradiction that I find really fascinating in a way you can look at and say he was ahead of his time he may have been naive about how much you can stand up to the establishment when you are ahead of your time that might be where the naivety lies but a lot of his predictions and beliefs were shown and have and continue to be shown to be true yeah that establishment doesn't um come out well for me anyway in the film there's that beautiful line that Matt Damon delivers where he's given the new guidelines for hiring people and he says Not only would I not have had oftenham but none of them basically so all these people that delivered this giant this great breakthrough which did what it did yeah perhaps under the way in the Pacific and you discuss that in the film but it it was that part of your think in the film because it it does seem to me that the the political establishment comes over has been overly simplistic the book I'm adapting is subtitled the Triumph and tragedy of Jay Robert and I think it's very apt it is a truly Shakespearean story and the tragedy is you know the way in which his past is used against them the way in which the establishment tries to control him and I speak to a lot of scientists today who who are very troubled by his story and and looked at particularly people work in the field of artificial intelligence for example they see this right now as their Oppenheimer moment they look to Historic circuit what are our responsibilities what are the consequences of what are our responsibilities for unintended consequences of a technology the powerful technology that we put out that unfortunately I don't think often have a story offers any easy answers because it's not really spoilers to say but he was ultimately you know very much crushed by The Establishment when he was no longer useful to that hence the life of John Rhodes buddy the world's changed you know it back in back in 1942 they needed these people there's a there's a scientist who is unnamed and is is meant to be representative of certain scientists but it's not one specific individual who says you know often a success they need us and he says yeah until they don't and that to me is the prophetic line the film it says okay there's going to be a point with the establishment and I might quibble with the word simplistic because I'm not sure there was simplistic and they're thinking I think they just had very different priorities and I think the ways of doing things in the establishment the government the media all these things are so different from science and you know the scientific method I think is the the highest philosophical hype that mankind has ever produced it it seeks constantly to disprove itself you know what other philosophy is there that does that but integrating that with democracy or with authoritarianism or with media and you know popular opinion and everything it's very very problematic it's very very tricky and all the time of story is one of the most extreme examples of that and I I got that from the from the film I felt it very eloquently actually the Oppenheimer although as you said he was he was clearly flawed and he was going to crush the ultimately perhaps naive politically but also do you think he had something to say then that we really should be listening to now that's very relevant now I think so I think that he's compromised in his prophetic ability by his complicity in the system and and you know I and I'm not even saying that's his fault you know one of the things that Drew me to the story was they did foresee a lot of these consequences they knew what they were doing but they felt they had no choice that makes it a much more it's a dilemma it's an impossible dilemma somebody asked me the other day you know what would you have done would you have invented the bomb or would you and as I look at the history the conversation between is it already and and our private to me that that's compelling the Nazis are trying to make a nuclear bomb think of the consequences of that you know they they really felt they had no choice and that's what makes it dramatic because these were brilliant people they knew where this would go and I think some of oppenheimer's early thoughts about it inspired very much by Niels Bohr things like you know bomb big enough to end a war I think the rationalizations these are brilliant people brilliant people can rationalize wonderfully to make them accept what they knew was both necessary and inevitable because at this point the thing was a reality I think somebody who's looked at nuclear fire with naked eye is in a unique position to to understand the implications of it and he's very good at trying to he was very good at trying to make this real for people and emotional for people which is what we're trying to do in the film as well so I think there there is a synchronicity there when I came out of the cinema I was uh I found it a very a profound experience it's a profoundly challenging film intellectually and I it's it's lived with me but I saw it about 12 hours ago now and it's still right there is that was that your intention to produce a film that really home for me it will haunt audiences because of its power yeah I mean when you talk about intention I would resist the characterization of polemical perhaps because I I don't think films work well when they're overly didactic or when they're trying to send a very specific message because the interesting thing about this or the dramatic thing about the story is there are no easy answers you know you're asking troubling questions I think you know as I talk about it as I think about it um it reminds me when we were doing Dunkirk you know a film about something that's very inherently emotional for a lot of particularly British people my attempt was to pull against that as far as possible because I knew that the story and its conclusion had inescapable emotional weight and I think I've done a similar thing with this film where tried to really play against that the whole way through try to find the positivity and the understanding of what he's doing the situations he is in we've in a way tried to be constructive about it all but the fact of what happened the fact of what they did and where it's left is is inescapable and so it just seeps into the film and and I think it does seem to leave people with some appropriately troubling or even distressing questions yeah there's a great deal of backstory here of course and a lot of it I suppose a lot of interesting ideas about what Arthur IMO was thinking about and the ideas that you deliver in the film so do you do you speak to all of the actors about that encouragement only in it only in a sort of organic way but the great thing about the unique thing about working on a historical story with real people is that I don't have to be the expert on the characters I've written my interpretation in the script people use the script as the jumping off point but they can then go away and do all kinds of research on on the people that play that we were able to just sort of let them play and explore the ideas talk about the ideas I was sort of a outside character throwing in ideas but there were a lot of improvisations a lot of really interesting discussion because each actor and the best actors are super smart they have this kind of ability to just take on the ideas of the character even if they don't you know become physicists you know or politicians or whatever but they come into that room with a lively set of ideas for discussion and so that discussion becomes very palpably real from a cinema point of view it's actually a bit about the style of the film The Black and White elements and the the sound is visceral so I I had you made those choices why do you decide to flip between black and white and color well in particular the black one color is to help Orient the audience in the in the structure of the story the story is structured with you know two threads the most significant thread being the color which is oppenheimer's very subjective point of view real is an attempt to jump into his head see the world the way he saw it and wind up with understanding rather than judgment contrasting with that we have a black and white thread that is more the point of view of Robert Downey Jr's character Lewis straws and I want to use the color in the black and white to help just make the audience feel the scenes as different because one is a much more objective view of Albertina you're sort of seeing him from across the room and perhaps judging him a little more you know and the other you're really in his head kind of going on the journey with him thank you very much and and thank you for watching you can see Oppenheimer and as you probably gathered I strongly recommend it in theaters from July the 21st

Channel: Esquire UK

Views: 1,460,647

Keywords: Oppenheimer, Oppenhimer, openhimer, Oppenhemer, Christopher Nolan, Cilian Murphy, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox, oppenheimer interview, Christopher Nolan interview

Id: AZaF_JFxBpE

Length: 19min 8sec (1148 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 20 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/BreakingBrak]

Never seen this many clips of Nolan interviews as for Oppenheimer. Partly because the stars aren't allowed to promote but it really does seem like he feels that there are high stakes

[u/peon_taking_credit]

Chris! Don't spill that thermos!