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Christopher Nolan Tells Us How His ‘Oppenheimer’ Used Genre Expectations to Do Something Radical: Unusually for a big-budget Hollywood movie, the director wrote his screenplay on spec and shot just about everything he wrote.

Unusually for a big-budget Hollywood movie, the director wrote his screenplay on spec and shot just about everything he wrote.

Adapted from Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “American Prometheus,” the filmmaker found a conflicted hero in brilliant theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer, a Salieri antagonist in political operative Admiral Lewis Strauss, and a courtroom drama for each of them. He’s somebody who’s unbelievably insightful and intelligent in the world of physics, and I chose to present that journey as him dealing with almost a superpower he can’t control or is afraid of, seeing energy in dull matter. Groves just can’t believe the intellectual arrogance and the naivete, because from his point of view and coming from his world he just can’t believe somebody so smart would blunder into such a stupid set of obfuscations and lies of unnecessary complexity.

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