Intimacy and Magnitude

Filmmaker Christopher Nolan on why Oppenheimer's impact goes far beyond its 13 Oscar nominations

- By Jeffrey Kluger

DIRECTORS CHRISTOPHER NOLAN AND ALFRED Hitchcock do not have a whole lot in common-very different styles, very different eras, very different tales. All the same, during the five months in early 2022 when Nolan was shooting his blockbuster Oppenheimer, he found that Hitchcock's work bubbled to mind more than once-specifically the iconic scene in Psycho in which Anthony Perkins stabs an unsuspecting Janet Leigh as she showers.

The scene is savage, but after the mayhem is over, all turns orderly. Perkins washes down the shower, swaddles up the body, and places it in the trunk of a car which he tries to sink in a swamp. Halfway down, however, the car stops, its rear end poking above the water.

"[Perkins] looks worried," Nolan says during a conversation in New York City in early January. "And suddenly you're worried as well. How did that go from someone being massacred to me being worried that the guy covering up the murder is going to get caught?"

The answer is in what Nolan calls "cinema's magical point of view," the camera's ability to immerse the audience so deeply in the experiences of the people on the screen that we feel what they're feeling-root for what they're doing-even if we don't want to. A lot of that was necessary in Oppenheimer, Nolan's film of the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who led the Manhattan Project-the government program that developed the atom bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Oppenheimer's work, unlike the murder in Psycho, claimed 200,000 lives, not just one. And Oppenheimer's really happened: those cities were incinerated; those 200,000 lives were lost.