I think Oppenheimer is the biggest film I’ve ever made,” Christopher Nolan says without a hint of irony. It’s a striking claim from someone who has directed some of the most gargantuan blockbusters of the past 15 years – but it’s not inaccurate. At the heart of the biographical drama, which stars Cillian Murphy as the man who masterminded the birth of the atomic bomb, lies a truth of planetary scale. When the weapon was first tested – an event now known by its codename, Trinity – there was a chance that it might wipe out all of human existence. A prospect such as that would probably deter most people from proceeding, but not Oppenheimer; he pushed the button anyway.
“The film I wanted to make couldn’t have been done smaller,” Nolan says of the $100m (£77.7m) film one day after its world premiere in Paris. “It’s not about money, it’s not about budget – the magnitude of the story is what attracted me to it. The fact that Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists couldn’t completely eliminate the possibility that they might set fire to the atmosphere and destroy the entire world, but still triggered the test – the idea of someone taking that risk on behalf of all of us and all our descendants. There’s nothing bigger than that.”
