20 facts you might not know about 'Oppenheimer'

The impetus for Oppenheimer as a project came from the extensive biography of the scientist American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. That book came out in 2005, and swiftly after that, attempts to adapt the book began. Directors, including Sam Mendes and Oliver Stone, were in the mix, but it took years before anybody got the ball rolling on an American Prometheus adaptation.

You can thank Robert Pattinson for helping to get the ball rolling for Nolan. While filming Tenet with Nolan, Pattinson gifted Nolan a book featuring speeches Oppenheimer had given. Oppenheimer’s inner turmoil related to his atomic work struck a chord with the director, who started to get his ideas together.

Ever since Insomnia, Warner Bros. had been the home studio for Nolan, including his three highly lucrative Batman films. However, Nolan was aggrieved by Warner Bros. deciding to simultaneously release movies on HBO Max and in theaters in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. A vocal advocate for movie theaters, Nolan decided to shop his Oppenheimer biopic elsewhere. In the end, Universal won the battle for the project.

This was Nolan’s first biopic, but he had kicked around an idea for an earlier one. He wrote a script for a film about Howard Hughes, but then The Aviator , eventually directed by Martin Scorsese, got going. Nolan said that experience helped him craft the script for Oppenheimer, though.

Nolan loves Cillian Murphy as an actor. Murphy also happens to reasonably resemble J. Robert Oppenheimer. As such, it is no surprise that Nolan called up Murphy to offer him the starring role in Oppenheimer. While an accomplished actor, Murphy is not the sort who gets to headline big-budget studio films. This marked the sixth collaboration between the actor and the director.

When you have a cache like Nolan, you can ask basically anybody to act in one of your films. You can also keep the casting process rather secretive. Not only did some big stars like Robert Downey Jr. and Emily Blunt take pay cuts for the movie, but some cast members auditioned not knowing what roles they were auditioning for.

Nolan and Damon had worked together in Interstellar, and the director wanted the actor to play General Leslie Groves. However, as per Entertainment Weekly, Damon and his wife had been negotiating some marital troubles, and in couples therapy, the actor told his wife that he would take a break from acting. There was one caveat, though: Damon would be allowed to work with Nolan if he was offered a role.

Like a lot of directors, Nolan has his favorites. Murphy stars in Oppenheimer, of course, and Kenneth Branagh popped up to play Niels Bohr. One person was missing, though. Oppenheimer marked the first Nolan film sans Michael Caine since the actor was cast as Alfred for Batman Begins.

There is a brief moment in Oppenheimer where the scientist, in the wake of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, has a vision of a woman disintegrating. For that part, Nolan cast his daughter, Flora.

Christopher Denham plays Klaus Fuchs, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and turned out to be a spy for the Soviets. The actor was probably well-prepared for the film. He had previously co-starred in the TV show Manhattan, a largely fictionalized dramatization of the Manhattan Project and the Trinity test.

Time marches on, even in towns like Los Alamos, New Mexico. Nolan hoped to use the actual town for exteriors, but these days, you can find a Starbucks on the main thoroughfare, not exactly a 1940s look. As such, Nolan had the exteriors built in Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. It took three months to build the set, which was used for six days of filming.

A key scene in Oppenheimer is when the Trinity nuclear test is held. Nolan didn’t want to use CGI to create the bomb explosion, so he decided to use real explosives. He used a mixture of propane, gasoline, magnesium, and aluminum for effect, but when some folks on the internet heard “real explosives,” they really leaped to conclusions. There were murmurs that Nolan had set off an actual atomic weapon for the scene, which was, you know, obviously untrue. When Nolan heard about the rumor, he called it both “flattering” and “scary” that some of his fans thought he would go that far (h/t The Hollywood Reporter).

Nolan shot much of Oppenheimer on IMAX format film and much of the movie in black-and-white. However, black-and-white IMAX film did not exist. As such, Kodak and FotoKem had to develop such film stock for Nolan to use while shooting Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer is noted for having quoted the Bhagavad Gita, a book of Hindu scripture, in saying, “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” The first time it is said in Oppenheimer, it’s during a sex scene between Oppenheimer and Jean Tatlock. This became a talking point for the Hindu Nationalists in India, who considered it an affront to their religion. However, others in India counterbalanced those assertions.

If you have read American Prometheus, you know how much accurate detail Nolan worked into Oppenheimer. However, he did allow for a few deviations from the accurate record. A couple of them revolve around Albert Einstein. Einstein and Oppenheimer did know one another and were friendly, but a couple of the conversations in the film were fictional. Oppenheimer also did not bring his worries about an unstoppable chain reaction to Einstein for him to check the math on it, but Arthur Compton, who actually did it, does not have the same cache as the most famous scientist ever.

Oppenheimer is packed to the brim with famous faces and real-life scientists and politicians, but in a movie as dense as this, having an audience surrogate character is beneficial, even if you have to create a fictional person to do so. Alden Ehrenreich, one of the aforementioned famous faces, plays the aide to Lewis Strauss, but he is not a real person. Perhaps owing to that fact, the character also is not given a name.

Sherwin had been working on a biopic of Oppenheimer for years before Bird joined the project. The author did live to see American Prometheus win a Pulitzer but not to see Oppenheimer come to full fruition. He was unfortunately ailing too much from cancer to even partake in negotiations for the book rights, leaving Bird to handle it alone with Nolan. Sherwin would die at the age of 84 in October 2021 before filming began.

These days, the highest-grossing films are almost entirely sequels, comic-book movies, and IP-driven projects. What chance did an R-rated biopic of a scientist have to find success at the box office? Apparently, quite a bit. Oppenheimer would end up grossing over $320 million domestically and over $940 million worldwide.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Oppenheimer is now the highest-grossing World War II movie ever, though it notably surpassed Dunkirk, also a Nolan movie. It is the highest-grossing biopic ever now, having passed Bohemian Rhapsody. While Oppenheimer doesn’t quite have the record on this front, its worldwide box office is the second-most ever for an R-rated film, behind only Joker.

With all that box office success, Oppenheimer still ended up something of a bridesmaid, at least domestically. Famously, Oppenheimer and Barbie were released on the same day, leading to the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, wherein filmgoers would do a double feature of the two movies. While Oppenheimer is an unequivocal success, Barbie proved the biggest success of the year. That means Oppenheimer set a record as the highest-grossing movie never to top the domestic box office. Although, it did top the worldwide box office in its sixth week of release, finally edging past Barbie.

Nolan's biopic of a scientist being a blockbuster? Surprising. "Oppenheimer" being an awards darling and an Oscars favorite? That makes more sense. "Oppenheimer" led all 2023 movies with 13 Academy Award nominations. It won seven. Downey Jr., Murphy, and Nolan all won, and the film took home Best Picture.