Christopher Nolan is a five-time Oscar-nominated director known for mind-bending sci-fi epics like Inception, Interstellar, and Tenet. Next up, he is directing the biographical drama Oppenheimer, based on the life of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb.
The films stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who ran the Manhattan Project that led to the creation of the atomic bomb during World War II. The film has been described as an “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.”
In a recent podcast discussion with From Tailors with Love, the film’s Emmy-winning costume designer Ellen Mirojnick, who has previously worked on Chaplin, Behind the Candelabra, The Greateast Showman, and Bridgerton, sat down to discuss the film, and she revealed:
“Oppenheimer covers 45 years and quite a lot in the Los Alamos time and Oppenheimer’s life, from beginning to end.”
Oppenheimer was the head of the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, developing the atomic bomb with a team working that began with a few hundred in 1943 and grew to over 6,000 in 1945, when the first bomb was detonated on July 16 of that year. As for the 45-year span of the film, Oppenheimer was born in 1904 in NYC and died in 1967 at the age of 62 from throat cancer, so it’s now confirmed Nolan’s scope extends beyond just the formation of the atomic bomb.
Speaking to Nolan’s process, she went on to say:
“[Chris] requires you to do the highest level of work you can possibly eke out. You have to understand his vision, be able to absolutely enable his vision and that is every single piece of clothing. He knows every single piece of clothing before it goes on set, before the actor moves. He is the initiator of the entire feel. He is the initiator of everything and everything goes through him before you ever see it on film.”
She added:
“Everybody has to be ready to work on the floor immediately in the morning and [Nolan] will do whatever he wants to do with them. There are very, very specific things about Chris when he says, ‘I don’t want it to be stylish. I don’t it to be stylized. I don’t want to feel like, okay, now we are going into this period, now we are going into that period. Find a way to be able to merge in a way that is easy to just be wherever it needs to be in the storytelling.’ And once you understand that it can go any place, my brain shifted in a way to kind of keep that always at the forefront. You can’t do it for every single scene, but you try to for every scene or passage of time or decade. [In all these] specific sections, figure out a way to be able to merge everything and flip-flop it inside and out, and that way it’ll give him what he needs in the cutting room to be able to tell the story he is then wanting to create as an end result.”
It’s no surprise that Nolan is very specific in his vision. His films are incredibly detailed and visually complex. I am a huge fan and I can’t wait to see this next movie.
Oppenheimer opens in theaters on July 21, 2023.
via: The Film Stage