Category
🎥
Court métrageTranscription
00:00 When I told one of my teenage sons what I was writing,
00:04 he actually said to me,
00:05 oh, well, is anyone concerned about that?
00:07 You know, do people think about nuclear weapons
00:09 in that way anymore?
00:10 Sadly, you know, a couple of years after that conversation,
00:14 neither he nor anyone else is asking that question anymore.
00:16 Unfortunately, it's now back in the world in an awful way.
00:21 - You are the man who gave them the power
00:23 to destroy themselves.
00:25 And the world is not prepared.
00:27 (dramatic music)
00:30 - Eight,
00:37 seven,
00:39 six,
00:41 five.
00:43 - I grew up in the 1980s in the United Kingdom
00:46 at a time of great fear of these weapons
00:49 and a lot of argument and concern about these weapons.
00:52 And then there's an ebb and a flow,
00:55 it recedes and comes back.
00:57 I think the only way we're going to be able
01:00 to survive this threat is to be mindful of it
01:04 and try and construct solutions
01:08 to how to manage this threat.
01:09 - We're in a race against the Nazis.
01:14 And I know what it means
01:17 if the Nazis have a bomb.
01:24 - My attempt in the film is to draw the audience
01:28 into the point of view and the experience
01:31 of the person who is at the center of creating the bomb.
01:34 I really wanted to show that entire experience
01:37 through his eyes and experience things
01:41 the way he experienced.
01:42 And so, for example, to learn that, you know,
01:46 Oppenheimer found out about the bombings
01:50 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the radio,
01:53 the same as the rest of America,
01:54 as if he had nothing to do with it.
01:56 That, to me, is an extraordinary thing.
01:58 This is an individual who his role in things
02:03 is very, very difficult, even for himself, to define.
02:08 And so he has to completely reconceive
02:11 his sense of responsibility and his role in things.
02:14 And I think it's something he struggled with
02:15 for the rest of his life after 1945.
02:19 (speaking in foreign language)
02:23 - I think admiration has to come first
02:38 with somebody you're interested in enough
02:42 to spend years, you know, figuring out
02:44 how to tell a story, as I have.
02:46 But more than anything else, I think fascination.
02:50 I think he's one of the most involving
02:53 and fascinating figures that I've come across.
02:56 These elements of himself and his psyche
02:58 ultimately change the world, define the world
03:03 we live in today and the world we will always live in.
03:05 I think his story is as dramatic as any story that I know.
03:10 And he's a very flawed, very human figure,
03:14 and very ambiguous, I think.
03:16 I was first struck by the drama of his story, the suspense.
03:21 The fact that he goes from,
03:25 as the title of the book I adapted,
03:27 it's called "American Prometheus, The Triumph of Tragedy."
03:30 And all really in ways that reflect
03:34 a lot of our modern concerns, a lot of our dilemmas
03:38 in terms of the relationship between scientists
03:42 and society as a whole, the responsibility
03:46 of people who invent technology,
03:49 and how their shifts in political thought over time
03:53 may or may not fall out of step with what's acceptable
03:58 in the society to which they belong.
04:00 And America has been seen over the years
04:02 to be very intolerant of those shifts,
04:05 of people who are out of step with those shifts.
04:06 And Oppenheimer is a very, very strong example.
04:10 His story is a very strong example
04:12 of the anti-communist fervor in the 1950s,
04:17 '40s and '50s, and McCarthyism in particular.
04:22 So really for me, the interest in the story
04:25 was the sheer drama of it.
04:29 I view the story as a thriller,
04:32 and there's a lot of fatalism involved.
04:34 There are a lot of things that happen early in his life
04:36 that become very, very important later in his life.
04:39 And as a dramatic storyteller,
04:40 those are the kind of stories that you're very drawn to.
04:44 - Let's go recruit some scientists.
04:46 - Build a town, build it fast.
04:51 If we don't let scientists bring their families,
04:53 we'll never get the best.
04:54 - Why would we go to the middle of nowhere
04:58 for who knows how long?
05:01 - Why?
05:04 Why?
05:05 How about because this is the most important thing
05:07 to ever happen in the history of the world?
05:10 - He was one of a group of leading physicists in the 1920s
05:15 who were following Einstein's theory of relativity
05:20 and seeing the implications of that and where it could go.
05:24 I was especially interested in his early life
05:27 in that when he was imagining these things,
05:31 when he was working with these other physicists
05:34 to revolutionize the way we think about the world,
05:38 other revolutions he was very aware of were going on,
05:41 political revolutions, artistic revolutions.
05:43 And so you look at the work of the cubists, Picasso,
05:47 the music of Stravinsky, communism in Russia,
05:52 all of these things,
05:53 all of these fundamental reframings in society
05:58 of how we look at different aspects of our existence.
06:01 And physics was in amongst those
06:04 probably the most radical of all of those.
06:06 - He knew the world would not be the same.
06:08 Few people laughed.
06:13 Few people cried.
06:17 Most people were silent.
06:19 - I think one of the paradoxes of the scientists
06:24 behind the Manhattan Project,
06:26 Oppenheimer at the center of that,
06:28 is they appear to have acted
06:34 with fervor in the heat of a desperate race
06:38 to beat the Nazis.
06:40 And yet, these are people of intellect
06:45 so far beyond the rest of us
06:47 who are able to foresee cause and effect,
06:51 consequences of actions,
06:52 are far beyond what the rest of us can see.
06:55 And that's one of the paradoxes,
06:57 and that's one of the fascinations I have,
06:58 particularly with post-1945 Oppenheimer.
07:03 Everything he says after 1945 about his involvement
07:08 in the creation of the atomic bomb,
07:09 in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
07:12 everything he says is extremely carefully worded.
07:15 He never apologizes.
07:17 He's very, very careful to never express
07:20 individual and specific shame
07:22 or a sense of apology for his involvement.
07:25 But every action he took post-1945,
07:29 to me, these are the actions of somebody
07:32 truly wracked by guilt.
07:33 And it's that disparity between
07:37 how he intellectualizes and how he presents himself
07:41 and then what he's doing, the actions he's taking,
07:44 that I think makes for great drama.
07:46 I'm drawn to protagonists like that in fiction,
07:50 who say one thing but do another.
07:52 And we spend a lot of time in a story
07:55 trying to identify the person,
07:58 or trying to figure out exactly who they are
08:00 and what makes them tick.
08:01 Because I think real human beings,
08:03 I think none of us are simple.
08:04 And I think none of us do things for simple reasons.
08:07 And often, we don't fully understand the reasons
08:10 for what we do.
08:11 We have mixed motivations.
08:13 We have layers of motivation.
08:15 (dramatic music)
08:18 - The world will remember this day.
08:23 - Certainly, Oppenheimer, as a film,
08:27 is an expression of faith on my part
08:29 that cinema can be anything.
08:31 Cinema has told these great stories many times in the past,
08:36 and I think will in the future as well.
08:39 It may have been a while since somebody did that,
08:41 but the tool of cinema, the medium,
08:44 how it can accommodate this type of story,
08:47 is very well established.
08:49 So I think, I'm certainly trying to work
08:51 in a great tradition.
08:52 It goes right back to "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Citizen Kane."
08:56 For me, cinema's not really about,
08:57 are you shooting people in a room talking,
09:00 or are you shooting cars running down a road
09:02 smashing into each other or whatever?
09:04 The energy of the drama comes from the narrative
09:08 and the narrative momentum.
09:09 And certainly for me, two of the genres
09:12 I find the most compelling from a suspense point of view.
09:16 One is the heist film.
09:17 And so for me, the whole Manhattan Project, to me,
09:19 seemed like the ultimate kind of heist movie,
09:22 where this team comes together,
09:24 all with different specialties,
09:26 focused on this goal to beat the Nazis,
09:28 to finish this thing in time.
09:30 And then the last section of "Oppenheimer's Life," to me,
09:34 is just the most suspenseful courtroom drama.
09:37 I love that genre.
09:39 I think it's one of the most tense genres.
09:41 You put people in that heightened situation,
09:44 and you're immediately sort of leaning forward
09:47 to wonder what's going to happen next
09:49 and how things are gonna play out.
09:52 I think anybody who's a fan of just a great story,
09:56 there's a lot for them in this film.
09:58 Truman needs to know what's next.
10:00 Two.
10:00 What's next?
10:01 One.
10:02 [gunshot]
10:04 (thunder rumbling)