Director Christopher Nolan: ‘Oppenheimer is absolutely a cautionary tale’

Christopher Nolan enters the dining room in a dark sports jacket and blue button-down shirt, far exceeding the dress requirements at Little Dom’s, a local favourite in Los Angeles’s hip Los Feliz neighbourhood. This is perhaps not too surprising from a man who directs his films wearing a waistcoat and blazer, a high sartorial standard that seems almost countercultural in ultra-casual Hollywood. 

I’m feeling better about my decision to go slightly formal. With Nolan’s arrival, there are now exactly two men in the restaurant wearing jackets — a number that will not change throughout our meal. 

He slides into the corner booth next to me and we start talking about life in LA, where he has lived with his family (he and wife Emma Thomas have four children) for more than 20 years. “It’s not a city that you immediately warm to,” says the London-born Nolan, who is fond of his adopted home. “It takes time to appreciate it.” 

When we meet, his latest film, Oppenheimer, is due to be released in a little over three weeks. “I need to try to be a little healthier here — I’ve got premieres to go to and I’ve got to fit into a suit,” he says, as we scan the menu.

As it turns out, Nolan’s premiere plans have been derailed by the Hollywood strikes. The cast walked out during the film’s London premiere, and its New York premiere was cancelled. Strike rules prevent members of Oppenheimer’s all-star cast — which includes Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr and Florence Pugh — from promoting the film. 

Fortunately, though, Oppenheimer has already been generating plenty of free buzz for weeks, thanks to the online “Barbenheimer” phenomenon. The release of Barbie on the same date as Nolan’s three-hour film about the “father of the atomic bomb” has led to the creation of some brilliantly ridiculous viral memes — and invaluable social media-fuelled chatter. 

Oppenheimer changed the world in the most important way that it has been changed

As we order drinks — a pot of Earl Grey for Nolan, iced tea for me — I am itching to talk about Oppenheimer, which is Nolan’s 12th feature. The film centres on the American physicist J Robert Oppenheimer’s leadership of the Los Alamos Laboratory, which developed the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I saw it at a small screening a day earlier and could not stop thinking about it, I tell him. “It seems to be having that effect on people,” he says. “[Success] is always going to be up to the audience, but after talking to people who have seen it, it seems to be working the way we’ve intended.” 

As the drinks arrive, I ask if he can pinpoint why the movie has stirred such strong reactions. “The film shows you everything from Oppenheimer’s point of view, so you’re in his head,” Nolan says. “There’s no way round the unease that his story leaves us with.”

Our server appears and asks if we’re ready to order. Nolan had made a tentative plan to order the roast salmon, but wants to know if the kitchen is still making breakfast. It is. “That changes things,” he says. “I would love to have the hanger steak and eggs. I like the steak medium-rare, eggs over easy.” 

I step in and order the salmon, with a salad to start. “Wow, too good,” he comments, then makes an addition. “Can I get a side order of bacon with that as well?” Turning to me, he adds with a laugh: “I suppose the FT’s paying, right?” 

Since the 2000 release of Memento, his breakout feature, the 52-year-old Nolan has proved himself to be one of the most original and successful filmmakers in Hollywood. His plots are rarely straightforward — much of the action in Memento occurs in reverse, while 2010’s Inception takes place in multiple layers of dreaming minds — yet he still brings the box office. Nolan’s cerebral blockbusters have grossed about $5bn and won 11 Academy Awards. 

The sci-fi epic Interstellar and war drama Dunkirk racked up audience numbers comparable to some superhero movies, a genre Nolan has also conquered. His Batman trilogy, starring Christian Bale in the batsuit, was a box office smash that earned him the freedom to make big movies on his own terms.

Nolan’s American mother was a teacher and his British father was a creative director in London’s advertising industry. He and his two brothers were raised in north London’s Highgate, but the family travelled frequently between the UK and his mother’s hometown of Evanston, Illinois, where he spent long hours in local cinemas watching Raiders of the Lost Ark and other summer movies. Nolan went to Haileybury boarding school, outside London.

His future career began to take shape while he was studying English literature at University College London, where he was able to borrow some old 16mm film equipment from the basement of the university’s Bloomsbury Theatre. He and Thomas, his future wife and collaborator — Nolan calls her the “best producer in Hollywood” — were soon “making short films, either on our own or with friends”, Nolan recalls. “We just glued together.” 

Our orders placed, we pick up the Oppenheimer discussion. Despite the heavy subject matter, the film races along like a thriller, I say. 

“I viewed it as the ultimate kind of heist movie,” he says. “You put the team together, and then you really try to get the audience invested in whether they can pull it off.” 

The ringleader of the heist, of course, is Oppenheimer, played by Murphy, who has worked with Nolan on five other films. Nolan’s hope is that the audience will “get lost in the creativity of the project” as Oppenheimer races to build a bomb before the Nazis. Then, once the bombs are dropped, Nolan tries to quickly shift the tone of the film “from the highest triumphalism, the highest high, to the lowest low in the shortest amount of screen time possible”. 

As he began to promote the film this spring, Nolan sparked some debate with his assertion that Oppenheimer was the “most important man who ever lived”. 

“It got an interesting response,” he says, including from a science writer who told him it was impossible to take seriously a claim that used unquantifiable superlatives such as “the most”. 

“And I said, ‘Well, in the Hollywood world, we’re very happy to do that,’” Nolan laughs. “That’s pretty much what we do.” 

The way tech companies transcend geographical boundaries, often in aggressive ways, makes it very difficult to regulate [AI] on a sovereign nation basis

Turning serious, he adds: “The way to refute that statement is, ‘OK then, who else?’ And you can’t [refute it] because Oppenheimer changed the world in the most important way that it has been changed. He gave us the power to destroy ourselves.” 

In addition to directing the film, Nolan also wrote the screenplay, which he based on the Pulitzer-winning, 700-page Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin. He went to unusual lengths to ensure the audience sees the events through his protagonist’s eyes, writing Oppenheimer’s scenes, including stage directions and character descriptions, in the first person, a technique that he says had a “really magical effect” on the performances.

Our food arrives, and I am immediately gripped by an awful case of order envy. Nolan’s steak appears to be cooked perfectly, and a stream of bright orange yolk is pouring out of his eggs. Another plate arrives piled high with crispy bacon. Apparently, his healthy-eating pledge will have to wait. 

My salmon, served with grilled fennel bulb, is lovely, but Nolan’s meal is sinful, practically pornographic. My food could have been ordered by a man who just received a stern warning from his cardiologist.

As we tuck in, I note that Nolan’s drama will arrive in theatres amid warnings from tech executives that artificial intelligence poses an extinction risk on a par with that posed by nuclear warfare and pandemics. Nolan says he has spoken to AI experts who have told him that this is their own “Oppenheimer moment”. 

“I’m telling the Oppenheimer story because I think it’s an important story, but also because it’s absolutely a cautionary tale,” he says.

Nolan sees parallels between the early nuclear age and the dawn of the AI era. Oppenheimer’s calls for international nuclear arms control faced stiff resistance from the US and other nations, which feared losing sovereignty. With AI, Nolan says, there are similar questions.

“The way tech companies transcend geographical boundaries, often in very aggressive ways, makes it very difficult to regulate [AI] on a sovereign nation basis,” he says. “So far, the tech regulatory issues have been about copyrights, privacy or fomenting of disinformation in elections. But with AI, [regulation] comes back to the fore. Clearly this is something that needs to be regulated.” 

The discussion of existential threats seems like a natural moment to ask about the state of Hollywood, where the old-line studios were starting to look weak even before the strikes. They sank billions into the “streaming wars” with Netflix, leaving them with huge losses and piles of debt. Many believe there will have to be some kind of shakeout — which could even lead to a tech company owning one of the classic Hollywood studios.

Nolan was among the harshest critics of the studios’ growth-at-all-costs streaming strategies. In 2021, he ended a two-decade relationship with Warner Bros, then owned by AT&T, after his film Tenet was released on the HBO Max streaming service on the same day that it debuted in cinemas.

The industry has been tying itself into knots, all in the pursuit of what Kendall Roy would refer to as a ‘tech valuation’

His protest was cheered on by many actors and fellow directors, but some in the C-suite at the time saw him as unwilling to accept the inevitable changes rippling across the industry. 

“I’m often accused of magical thinking, with people saying it’s nostalgia and that I just want things to be the way they were,” he says. 

But he believes it was in fact the studios that were engaged in magical thinking, illustrating his point with a reference to the HBO series Succession, where a plotline had the young media executive Kendall Roy trying to bid up the value of his father’s old-media assets. 

“The industry has been tying itself into knots, all in the pursuit of what Kendall Roy would refer to as a ‘tech valuation’,” he says. “He says he can get a tech valuation for what is clearly an analogue idea. That’s what streaming is — it’s just a different button on the remote.” 

Now that investors have grown sick of subsidising lossmaking streaming services, studios are rediscovering the joys of the cash that comes from a box office hit — a turnaround that Nolan is happy to see. Still, he believes hard times lie ahead.

“This last period — call it five or six years — was the only time since I’ve been in Hollywood that the profit motive disappeared,” he says. “Now [the streaming services] are having to actually make money, and that involves doing a lot of things that were uncool just a few years before. It’s going to be a very rough transition.” 

He sees another shift coming for the streaming services: they are going to have to change how they pay writers and actors. It is an argument that is being echoed today on the picket lines outside the Hollywood studios.

“This is such a key moment now for labour,” he says. “[The studios and tech companies] were using streaming as a loophole to essentially not pay residuals and not pay the true cost of production . . . And now they’re going to have to. It’s essential.” 

Another worry in Hollywood is that the superhero movies that have pushed box office receipts to record heights for more than 15 years — and delivered huge paydays to talent — are losing steam, with audiences starting to suffer from franchise fatigue.

 “I think people’s concerns are well founded to a degree — it’s like a dependence on potatoes as the only crop,” Nolan says. “If all the studios’ resources are going into one genre, then you don’t want to hit one of those cycles where they’re out of step with what people want.”

Would he make another superhero film himself? “No, I won’t,” he says. “I said what I had to say.” 

That will disappoint any fans — or executives at Warner — who had held out hopes that Nolan might make another Batman film, even after his breakup with the studio. But David Zaslav, whose company Discovery bought Warner Bros from AT&T in 2022, wants to see Nolan making movies on the Warner lot again.

I ask Nolan if he has heard from Zaslav. “I know David well, yeah,” he says. “I’ve had a lot of great conversations with David.”

But Nolan emphasises that he has never had an exclusive deal with Warner or any other studio, instead making films on a “project by project” basis. He also notes that he has a strong relationship with Donna Langley, a fellow Brit and chair of NBCUniversal Studio, which is handling marketing and distribution for Oppenheimer and doing “an excellent job” at it.

Our plates are cleared and we decide to skip dessert, but Nolan orders more Earl Grey. I ask for an espresso. 

I mention the Barbie memes that are encouraging fans to see both that film and Oppenheimer on opening weekend. Even Tom Cruise, whose new Mission Impossible film is in cinemas, has jumped on the Barbenheimer bandwagon. 

Nolan doesn’t bite, allowing only that a crowded summer movie market is good for the cinema industry, even if it is daunting for individual filmmakers like himself. Does the anticipation of opening night still give him a knot in the stomach? “It never gets any easier,” he says.

As we begin to wrap up, I ask if he’s decided on his next film. “I’ve never been any good at that,” he says. “The only way I know how to work is to sort of burrow in on one project very obsessively.”

Nolan says he won’t be able to think about what’s next until after he sees the reaction to Oppenheimer. “The thing I’ve learnt over the years is that the audience finishes the film,” he says. “Once this film is out there in theatres — once the audience has told me what the film is — then that will free me up to look for the next thing.”

Christopher Grimes is the FT’s LA bureau chief 

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