‘Oppenheimer’ featurette: Shooting for IMAX with Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan has long been a proponent of shooting extended sequences of his films using IMAX cameras and his upcoming Oppenheimer is no different.

In a new featurette released today, the Oscar-nominated director says, “Oppenheimer’s story is one of the biggest stories imaginable. Our film tries to take you into his experience, and IMAX for me, is a portal into a level of emotion you can’t get from other formats.”

Oppenheimer is filmed in a combination of IMAX 65mm and 65mm large-format film photography including, for the first time ever, sections in IMAX black and white analogue photography, by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (Dunkirk). 

The film stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt as his wife, biologist and botanist Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer. Oscar winner Matt Damon portrays General Leslie Groves Jr., director of the Manhattan Project, and Robert Downey, Jr. plays Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Academy Award nominee Florence Pugh plays psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, Benny Safdie as theoretical physicist Edward Teller, Michael Angarano as Robert Serber and Josh Hartnett as pioneering American nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence.

The cast also includes Dane DeHaan, Dylan Arnold, David Krumholtz, Alden Ehrenreich and Matthew Modine (The Dark Knight Rises) plus Oscar winners Rami Malek and Kenneth Branagh.

The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. The film is produced by Emma Thomas, Atlas Entertainment’s Charles Roven and Christopher Nolan. 

A box office monster of a director, Nolan’s films, including Tenet, Dunkirk, Interstellar, Inception and The Dark Knight trilogy, have earned more than $5 billion at the global box office and have been awarded 11 Oscars and 36 nominations, including two Best Picture nominations. 

Universal Pictures will release Oppenheimer only in theaters on July 21. Here is the featurette.