When Christopher Nolan set out to adapt American Prometheus, a sprawling biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, he got an early warning not to make it too wonky.
“Hollywood has struggled often with the portrayal of different forms of genius. It's a difficult thing to get the audience into this mindset,” says Nolan. “And so I think early on, one of my sons I was talking to about the film said, ‘You're not really going to try to explain quantum physics in this film, are you dad? Because that won't work.’ And I said, ‘No, point well taken.’”
Nolan is joined by Kai Bird, who won a Pulitzer for his work on American Prometheus, a project that took him and his co-author 25 years to complete. Nolan explains why, when negotiating with Universal, he felt confident insisting that Oppenheimer had to be a three-hour-long, R-rated depiction of “people talking in rooms,” as he puts it.
More: ‘Oppenheimer’ director Chistopher Nolan on ‘the danger of knowledge’
