There was a chance that when they pushed that button, they’d destroy the world. Get a behind-the-scenes look at OPPENHEIMER with Christopher Nolan, the cast and filmmakers. Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer is an IMAX®-shot epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it.
The film stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt as his wife, biologist and botanist Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer. Oscar® winner Matt Damon portrays General Leslie Groves Jr., director of the Manhattan Project, and Robert Downey, Jr. plays Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Academy Award® nominee Florence Pugh plays psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, Benny Safdie plays theoretical physicist Edward Teller, Michael Angarano plays Robert Serber and Josh Hartnett plays pioneering American nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence.
Oppenheimer also stars Oscar® winner Rami Malek and reunites Nolan with eight-time Oscar® nominated actor, writer and filmmaker Kenneth Branagh. The cast includes Dane DeHaan (Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets), Dylan Arnold (Halloween franchise), David Krumholtz (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs), Alden Ehrenreich (Solo: A Star Wars Story) and Matthew Modine (The Dark Knight Rises). The film 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. The film is produced by Emma Thomas, Atlas Entertainment’s Charles Roven and Christopher Nolan. Oppenheimer is filmed in a combination of IMAX® 65mm and 65mm large-format film photography including, for the first time ever, sections in IMAX® black and white analogue photography.
Nolan’s films, including Tenet, Dunkirk, Interstellar, Inception and The Dark Knight trilogy, have earned more than $5 billion at the global box office and have been awarded 11 Oscars and 36 nominations, including two Best Picture nominations.
Featurette with behind the scenes footage
• The creation of the atomic bomb was the top-secret mission of the Manhattan Project, led by theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The U.S. was urgently racing to develop the bomb before Germany did. • After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the Manhattan Project was officially commenced in 1942.
• The making of the atomic bomb, code-named “Gadget,” would involve more than 600,000 people working in locations around the country, but the mind and heart of the operation was “Project Y”: the Los Alamos Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. • Part army camp, part frontier town, part research facility, the Los Alamos Laboratory was a secret city built from scratch on a mesa in the remote New Mexico wilderness. Construction was completed exactly 80 years ago this year, in March 1943.
• At the Los Alamos Laboratory, Oppenheimer assembled a team that included many of the greatest scientific minds of the time.
• The Manhattan Project concluded on July 16, 1945, with the Trinity Test, the first successful detonation of an atomic device. Oppenheimer had dubbed the test “Trinity,” inspired loosely by a sonnet by John Donne, “Batter my heart, three- person’d God …”
• The Trinity Test took place on the plains of the Alamogordo Bombing Range, 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, at 5:29 a.m. MDT on July 16, 1945. This year is the 78th anniversary of the Test.
• The mushroom cloud from the explosion reached 38,000 feet high and left behind a crater 1.5 miles across.
• The flash of light from Trinity could be seen 150 miles away and knocked over a man standing five miles away. Extreme heat from the blast turned desert sand to glass.
• It was a scientific achievement that instantly changed the world forever.
Created in the hopes of putting an end to all war, it would reshape the future of all humanity from that moment forward.
