As the premiere date for Christopher Nolan‘s highly anticipated biopic thriller film, Oppenheimer nears, the director has revealed that the film has “zero” CGI shots. Staying committed to the practicality of the historical nuclear tale, Nolan expressed his disinterest in using CGI to create an atomic spectacle.
Taking on a realistic and major challenge of recreating the testing of an atomic bomb, Nolan spoke with Collider regarding the process. The film is an adapted story of 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, played by Cillian Murphy. Perhaps the scenes in question include the ones that showcase the devastating effects of an atomic blast and recreating what the test scientists performed on the field in the desert.
Nolan recreated the first-ever test explosion in New Mexico in 1945 without CGI, marking a monumental feat, considering the logistics and planning that went into it. Nolan’s team had to create 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 film features 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 alongside Murphy. Catch Oppenheimer in theaters on July 21.
In case you missed it, Simu Liu gives an update on Marvel’s Shang-Chi sequel.
