Universal’s three-minute “Shooting for IMAX” featurette focuses on the use of IMAX cameras to bring audiences the complete Oppenheimer experience. Very little new footage is revealed while writer/director Christopher Nolan, director of photography Hoyte Van Hoytema, and the film’s stars Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon, and Robert Downey Jr discuss the advantages of filming in IMAX and how immersive the viewing experience becomes when IMAX cameras are used.
“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 immersion that you can’t get from other formats,” explained Christopher Nolan.
Oppenheimer mixes black & white scenes with color, and because 65 millimeter black & white didn’t exist, it had to be specially engineered for this production. “We were able to test large format black & white, put it up on a giant IMAX screen and have a look at it, and the results were just magical and inspiring,” said Nolan.
“I don’t think Chris would be capable of doing something kind of the way everyone else does it. He kind of invented this idea of shooting in IMAX for feature film, and so you’re kind of on the cutting edge of this stuff every time you work with him,” offered Matt Damon.
Oscar-nominated director of photography Hoyte Van Hoytema (Nolan’s Dunkirk) added, “IMAX is a format of spectacle and it’s made for vistas and for the grandeur of it but I got very curious to discover this as an intimate format. The face is like a landscape. There’s a huge complexity and a huge depth to it. How can we get this camera closer to people? How can we get this medium to work also as a very intimate medium?”
The cast of Nolan’s epic drama includes Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, with Emily Blunt as his wife, biologist and botanist Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer. Oscar winner Matt Damon is 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.
Oscar nominee Florence Pugh is psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, Benny Safdie plays theoretical physicist Edward Teller, Michael Angarano plays Robert Serber, and Josh Hartnett plays pioneering American nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence.
Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Dane DeHaan, Dylan Arnold, David Krumholtz, Alden Ehrenreich, and Matthew Modine also star.
Oppenheimer is based on Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and is produced by Nolan, Emma Thomas, and Charles Roven.
Universal will launch Oppenheimer in theaters on July 21, 2023.
