Oliver Stone: ‘Oppenheimer’ Is a ‘Classic’ Film ‘I Never Believed Could Be Made in This Climate’

Oliver Stone has joined Paul Schrader in praising Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” as an instant classic.

The “JFK” and “Natural Born Killers” director shared on Twitter that he finally saw the three-hour J. Robert Oppenheimer epic over the past weekend, saying he was “gripped by Chris Nolan’s narrative.” Stone also added that he was familiar with the source material, the nonfiction book “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, as he “once turned the project down because I couldn’t find my way to its essence. Nolan has found it.”

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Since “Oppenheimer” opened on July 21, the film has already grossed $405 million globally and it continues to sell out across IMAX venues, with viewers flocking to Nolan’s preferred 70mm IMAX experience.

Two weeks ago, fellow filmmaker Paul Schrader praised “Oppenheimer” as “the best, most important film of this century.”

Stone, meanwhile in a Twitter thread continued, “His direction is mind-boggling & eye-popping as he takes reams of incident and cycles it into an exciting torrent of action inside all the talk. Each actor is a surprise to me, especially Cillian Murphy, whose exaggerated eyes here feel normal playing a genius like #Oppenheimer.”

“Oppenheimer is a classic, which I never believed could be made in this climate. Bravo,” said Stone. But he also took issue with some of the film’s historical representation of the Japanese response, referencing the 2012 documentary series “The Untold History of the United States” he made with historian Peter Kuznick about the events that led to the Cold War, including why Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. See the full thread below.

Stone added, “Aside from the points mentioned in my previous post, the movie packs in the essence of the tragedy of #Oppenheimer, a man historically in the middle of an impossible situation, though one, as Nolan shows, partly of his own making.”

Oliver Stone’s most recent project was the 2022 documentary “Nuclear Now,” which examines a path to overcoming climate change through nuclear power rather than fossil fuels.

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