Christopher Nolan Says James Remar Improvised Eerie ‘Oppenheimer’ Dialogue: It Was ‘Fantastically Exciting’ on Set
Samantha Bergeson
Christopher Nolan is revealing a layer to bomb epic “Oppenheimer” that was devised on set.
In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, the writer-director shared that actor James Remar improvised a line of dialogue when discussing which cities on which to drop the atomic bomb in Japan. Remar portrays U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who says the military should avoid ruining Kyoto because that is where he had his honeymoon.
“There’s a moment where James Remar…He kept talking to me about how he learned that Stimson and his wife had honeymooned in Kyoto,” Nolan said. “That was one of the reasons that Stimson took Kyoto off the list to be bombed. I had him crossing the city off the list because of its cultural significance, but I’m like, ‘Just add that.'”
Nolan continued, “It’s a fantastically exciting moment where no one in the room knows how to react.”
The “Tenet” director added that he encouraged supporting actors to ad-lib their lines on set, especially when it came to researched facts about their respective historical characters.
“Each actor was coming to the table with research about what their real-life counterpart had been,” Nolan said. “They had tons of homework to do. They had a great resource with ‘American Prometheus.’ They then did their own research and what it meant for me, which isn’t something I’d ever really been able to do in the past. So, for example, with the scene in the section classroom with all the scientists, we would be able to improvise the discussion. The script is there, but they could come into it with passion and knowledge based on all of their own learning.”
Nolan previously told Empire magazine that he wrote “Oppenheimer” in first-person from the point of view of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), which is something he had never done before when penning a film.
“We have to find a way into this guy’s head,” Nolan said of unpacking the character of Oppenheimer. “We’ve gotta see the world the way he sees it, we’ve gotta see the atoms moving, we’ve gotta see the way he’s imagining waves of energy, the quantum world. And then we have to see how that translates into the Trinity test. And we have to feel the danger, feel the threat of all this somehow.”
