Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer released on July 21 and has since received both critical acclaim as well as box office success. In an interview with The New York Times, Christopher has now revealed that there was a line that was tweaked in last minute by an actor and it also made it into the final cut of the film, which shocked everyone on set.
The scene arrives in a key moment when Cillian Murphy, who plays Oppenheimer, is in the crucial meeting with the U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson and other government officials, where they decide which city to drop the atomic bombs in Japan. In the scene that follows, Henry says that they should avoid bombing in Kyoto because it is the place where he and his wife had their honeymoon.
In an interview with The New York Times, Christopher Nolan said, “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. 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.’ It’s a fantastically exciting moment where no one in the room knows how to react.”
He had earlier also added in the interview that each actor was encouraged to research about their real-life counterpart. “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… The script is there, but they could come into it with passion and knowledge based on all of their own learning.”
Nolan’s Oppenheimer is based on the book, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 biography of the theoretical physicist written by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin. The biopic, set during World War II, follows Oppenheimer, known as the Father of the Atomic Bomb, during a period in history when he feared that testing the atomic bomb would ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world. It also shows how his rivalry with Lewis Strauss framed his life and career.