Oliver Stone Says He Once Turned Down An Oppenheimer Film Project & Calls Christopher Nolan’s Film A “Classic”

JFK filmmaker Oliver Stone posted a series of tweets Tuesday praising Christopher Nolan’s latest film Oppenheimer during which he revealed he once turned down a project based around J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life because he couldn’t crack the narrative.

“Saturday, I sat through 3 hours of Oppenheimer, gripped by Chris Nolan’s narrative. His screenplay is layered & fascinating. Familiar with the book by Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin, I once turned the project down because I couldn’t find my way to its essence. Nolan has found it,” Stone tweeted.

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Stone continued to describe Nolan’s direction in Oppenheimer as “mind-boggling and eye-popping” before heaping praise on the film’s cast.

“Each actor is a surprise to me, especially Cillian Murphy, whose exaggerated eyes here feel normal playing a genius like Oppenheimer,” Stone wrote.

Stone concluded by describing Oppenheimer as a “classic” that he “never believed could be made in this climate.” However, the filmmaker did lay out two extended points of contention with the biopic that he said was addressed in his 2012 series, The Untold History of the United States.

“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,” Stone ended.

Nolan’s Oppenheimer reached a $405.6M global cume over the weekend. The international box office is now $231M after a $77.1M second weekend in 78 markets (-21%). The Cillian Murphy-starrer is now Nolan’s biggest movie ever in 30 markets and his highest non-superhero pic in 45. It is also the biggest Hollywood film of 2023 in Saudi Arabia and the No. 2 studio movie of the year in Georgia, Hungary, India, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Norway, Serbia, Sweden, and Turkey.

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