Director Christopher Nolan has expressed in the past that he’s not keen on using CGI to create a studio film with big spectacle. During the press tour for “Oppenheimer” only seems to get more impressive from a pure filmmaking standpoint.
Nolan tried to avoid having his work totally unrealistic. He has been employing effects only where necessary to make things feel consistent with sequences.
With his latest blockbuster film, “Oppenheimer,” Nolan ended up tackling an enormous challenge on recreating the trinity test for an atomic bomb sequence. Speaking to Total Film, Nolan said in the interview that not only he has a focus on practicality of the film, but also it contains “zero” CGI shots.
During the interview, Nolan admitted that pulling off a realistic nuclear explosion proved to be more challenging than anything he had done before, “I think recreating the Trinity test (the first atomic bomb) without the use of computer graphics was a huge challenge to take on.”
He went on to explain about the hardship, “Andrew Jackson, my visual effects supervisor, I got him on board early on – was looking at how we could do a lot of the visual elements of the film practically, for representing quantum dynamics and quantum physics to the Trinity test itself, to recreating, with my team Los Alamos up on a mesa in New Mexico in extraordinary weather, a lot of which was needed for the film, in terms of the very harsh conditions out there- there were huge practical challenges.”
The film based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin, It tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, an American physicist who is known to be the father of the atomic bomb, who oversaw the Manhattan Project, which resulted in the creation of the first atomic bomb. Oppenheimer’s work changed humanity forever.
Over 130,000 people were killed in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
Marking a monumental feat, considering the logistics and plans that went into it. Nolan’s team had to create a brand new technology to both film the black-and-white sequences in IMAX and match the brilliance of the explosion to the real-life blast.
The films also combined with a dream cast that also includes Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh Jack Quaid, Benny Safdie, Rami Malek, Dane DeHaan, Josh Hartnett, Matthew Modine, Kenneth Branagh, David Krumholtz, Michael Angarano, and Alden Ehrenreich, that would be enough to make it one of the blockbusters to look out for.
Catch “Oppenheimer“ in theaters on July 21.