‘Oppenheimer’: Read The Screenplay For Christopher Nolan’s Blockbuster Biographical Thriller
Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the year’s most talked-about scripts continues with Christopher Nolan’s epic biographical thriller Oppenheimer. Based on American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Nolan wrote the script about the titular complicated and brilliant physicist tasked with leading the Manhattan Project, the secret effort to create the atom bomb, and the moral and political struggles that followed.
Oppenheimer the man, as the film tells it, struggled with psychological issues in his youth and grew to become a peerless intellectual though not an entirely likable presence. After the war, he was a vocal opponent of nuclear armament and stripped of his security clearance during a 1954 hearing that focused on his maybe/maybe-not communist ties.
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The story plays out in an unusual first-person approach, with a moral conundrum gathering in Oppenheimer’s head as he begins to envision the dangers beyond a short-term use of a weapon that could — and did — spark an arms race and a new world order that changed us forever. The film presents the audience with philosophical quandaries aplenty.
Cillian Murphy stars as the eponymous theoretical physicist and has previously told Deadline that when Nolan first had him read the script in Dublin, he realized it was something special.
“The script was genuinely one of the best things I’d ever read,” Murphy said. “It was staggering kind of in its ambition and the scale, but also in how clearly [Nolan] had plotted through the story of Oppenheimer. He had written it in the first person which I had never encountered before so that was a new experience for me reading that.”
Murphy continued, “These are the biggest moral dilemmas possible, the biggest drama possible the stuff that all these characters are grappling with so you just have to dive in… But Chris having written it and adapted it from the book and having lived with it so long, he has such a wonderful understanding of the story and how he wants to tell the story and how the character should be portrayed.”
Oppenheimer also features a large and starry cast that includes Robert Downey Jr, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Jason Clarke, Kenneth Branagh and an unrecognizable Gary Oldman along with a host of others.
Universal released the movie in July, amid what would become a unique box office phenomenon known as “Barbenheimer.” Nolan’s movie has grossed $952 million globally and has been confirmed for a release in Japan during 2024, though an exact date has not been set.
Oppenheimer has 13 Critics Choice nominations and eight Golden Globe noms. It’s also among the elite group of 10 films chosen for the prestigious AFI Awards.
Producer Emma Thomas told Deadline, “Every film that you make sort of has its own challenges and I think that oftentimes when I read the scripts that Chris writes I’m sort of super nervous because I’m thinking about what on Earth this is going to be for the next couple of years, but also how on Earth are we going to do these things. With this script it was actually very different because I felt like we had a handle just with the experience we had had up until this point… It’s also huge issues, deep moral ambiguity, how do we put a movie out like that out in the summer and have people engage with it and make a film that can entertain whilst also allow people to be challenged by the ideas that are in it.”
Nolan himself last month received the Federation of American Scientists’ Public Service Award in recognition of his cultural contribution by bringing J. Robert Oppenheimer’s story to broader attention through cinema.
Accepting the honor, his speech addressed the dichotomy between the scientist and the artist, in terms of their relationship to, and dialogue with, society at large. As a filmmaker, he explained, you’re given a certain license to manufacture meaning by making a “dramatic choice.” This happened for him on Oppenheimer when grappling with the ending of his story, which depending on his framing, could lean either toward hope for the future of the world, or toward despair. Truthfully, Nolan suggested, the full story of nuclear power continues to be written, well beyond the years his film covers, as geopolitical power shifts and technology continues to evolve. But in any case, his choice was to lean toward despair, out of a desire to “put the audience in the mind of” Oppenheimer, a man haunted by the potential for his work to harm human beings.
Read the script below.
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