Christopher Nolan is no stranger to making a long movie, so it's hardly surprising that his latest flick, Oppenheimer, is promising an epic runtime, given the nature of the runtime. The filmmaker confirms its his longest film yet in an interview in the new issue Total Film magazine which is out on newsstands on May 25.
"It's slightly longer than the longest we've done," he says. "It's kissing three hours." That makes it his longest feature yet, beating Interstellar's 2 hours and 49 minutes.
Elsewhere in the interview, Nolan touched on the upcoming historical drama's complicated lead character, suggesting he's "drawn to interesting protagonists – protagonists who have ambiguity to them."
He continued: "I think of any character I've dealt with, Oppenheimer is by far the most ambiguous and paradoxical. Which, given that I've made three Batman films, is saying a lot."
Starring the likes of Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, and Cillian Murphy as titular nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who's glimpsed from behind in the exclusive image above, Nolan's newest feature explores how the scientist set up the Manhattan Project during World War II, and subsequently created the atomic bomb.
Florence Pugh, Alden Ehrenreich, Jack Quaid, Matthew Modine, Jason Clarke, Rami Malek, Benny Safdie (as Hungarian physicist Edward Teller), Dane DeHaan, Louise Lombard, David Dastmalchian, Josh Hartnett, and Sir Kenneth Branagh (who worked with Nolan on both Dunkirk and Tenet) are also lined up to star.
"The script was so emotional, and it reads like a thriller," Emily Blunt, who plays Oppenheimer's biologist wife Katherine, recalled. "It's almost like he's Trojan-Horsed a biopic into a thriller. It's really pulse-racing, the whole thing. I was just completely arrested by the story, the portrait of this man, and, I guess, the trauma of a brain like that."
This is just a snippet of our interview in the new issue of Total Film magazine, which features Christopher Nolan's epic Oppenheimer on the cover. The magazine hits shelves this Thursday, May 25. Check out the covers below:
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