Cillian Murphy, star of Oppenheimer’s film, reveals how long it took to shoot Christopher Nolan’s latest epic film. The Irish actor has previously worked with Nolan on several films. Though previously appearing in supporting roles, Murphy now takes on the biggest role of his career as the eminent theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who was instrumental in inventing the atomic bomb.
The film was also innovative with the development of the first black and white IMAX film and a recreation of the Trinity nuclear test without the use of CGI technology. With these various aspects and supported by the story that Nolan built, it is not surprising that the duration of Oppenheimer’s film reaches 3 hours. But interestingly, despite the fact that it is classified as a feature film, the shooting duration of this film was very short. As Cillian Murphy explains it during the interview below.
“We made this movie very quickly. In just 57 days we finished it. This speed is really extraordinary. Even though the set was huge, I felt like I was in an independent film production. There’s just Chris (Christopher Nolan) and the cameraman, always using a single camera, except when there’s a big scene that requires more cameras, and a boom mic operator, that’s all. There is no monitor screen or video village. Christopher Nolan is a very analog filmmaker,“ Cillian Murphy said.
This short length of filming demonstrates the efficiency and skill of the production team in creating masterpieces as grand as Oppenheimer’s. With a relatively short production time, Christopher Nolan managed to present extraordinary visual quality and beauty in this film, including the impressive use of IMAX technology in black and white format, which is rarely used.
Despite Oppenheimer’s grand setting and epic scale, Nolan has stuck to a simple, classic production approach, not relying too heavily on modern technology like monitors or video villages. This decision reflects Nolan’s distinctive style as a director who prefers to work in a hands-on, traditional way and experience every scene shot by the cameraman.
In this film, audiences are promised a unique and authentic cinematic experience, with Christopher Nolan’s signature touch as a director with a strong artistic vision. As a filmmaker who has produced such magnificent works as Inception and Interstellar, Nolan’s ambition to make this film his best work deserves to be greeted with optimism by movie connoisseurs. Of course, Oppenheimer has the potential to become one of the most unforgettable epic films in movie history.
