Christopher Nolan certainly knows how to get his reader in the mind of a character.
When you’re reading a screenplay, all the parts written in the action are usually in the third person. That means you read things like: “James walks across the room,” or “She pours herself a coffee.” You’re on the outside imagining what’s happening on screen.
But for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming movie, Oppenheimer, Nolan took a different route.
We’ll get to that.
In a new conversation with EW, Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy spoke about working on Oppenheimer together and the unique script. But before that could all happen, they had to meet.
At the time of Batman Begins, Nolan was meeting actors to play Batman. When he met Murphy, there was a kinship, but both of them knew he wasn’t going to play Batman. Still, Nolan was so impressed with him that he made sure the executives came to his screentest and then suggested he play Scarecrow. After that, he made sure Murphy showed up in all three of those movies, and he kept an ongoing friendship with the actor, collaborating with him in Inception and Dunkirk.
When it came time to make Oppenheimer, Nolan knew who to call.
He says, “To be able to pick up the phone and call you, and be like, ‘This is the one where you carry the movie and really get to show what you can do,’ it’s honestly one of my favorite moments in the movie business when I had that conversation with you.”
In reading the script, Murphy elaborated on what made it unique.
He said, “That’s the only script that I’ve ever read that’s been in the first person. It took me a minute, maybe a bit more than a minute, to figure that out. But then it became clear that you wanted it to be completely subjective, that everything was to be seen through the character’s eyes as it were, and, again, yeah, that added massively to the terror. [Laughs] But when it’s Christopher Nolan, you just have that confidence. You believe 100 percent in his vision, as I have always done. So it was terribly exciting.”
I find this to be such a fun leap for a director to make. Doing this, especially if you’re trying to woo an actor who knows you have talent, can help them see the world from your perspective and understand the entire perspective of the character.
It’s such an interesting and exciting experiment.
I wonder if Nolan wrote in different points of view in the story for other actors or if they all got the same sides written from Oppenheimer’s point of view.
Either way, this makes me even more excited to see the film and know a little bit about how it was created.
