Is Christopher Nolan Our First Method Director?

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Attention all Christopher Nolan fans: his next film, Oppenheimer, is almost here. The upcoming historical drama tracks the creation and use of the atomic bomb—which was made by the scientist Robert Oppenheimer. Opening with a fiery blaze, the official trailer for Oppenheimer is full of Nolan-esque tension and spectacle. Clearly, we're in for a reckoning that will takes us back to one the most formative moments in history—when humanity was tested by greed, war, and catastrophic weaponry.

According to Nolan, the filmmaker wrote the entire script in first-person as Oppenheimer to really get into the mind of the destroyer of worlds. We're going to call it the first case of Method Directing. "There’s the idea of how we get in somebody’s head and see how they were visualizing this radical reinvention of physics," Nolan told Empire. "One of the things that cinema has struggled with historically is the representation of intelligence or genius. It very often fails to engage people." After sending visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson the script, he told him that, "We’ve gotta see the world the way he sees it, we’ve gotta see the atoms moving, we’ve gotta see the way he’s imagining waves of energy, the quantum world." Sounds a bit like we're going to shrink down to Ant-Man size and fight Kang.

Oppenheimer will mark Nolan's 12th film, where he's bringing yet another star-studded cast to the screen. The movie will star Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves Jr., as well as Gary Oldman and Kenneth Branagh in unknown roles. (Told you the cast was loaded.) Oppenheimer will be based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman's biography on the historical figure, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which follows him through his famous work on the Manhattan Project.

“I don’t know if we can be trusted with such a weapon,” Oppenheimer (Murphy) says in the trailer. Historically speaking, I think we all know the answer to that one—but Oppenheimer takes us through the scientist's mindset as he grapples with the beast he created.

Oppenheimer is "the most important person who ever lived," according to Nolan. He recently spoke in front of an audience at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, Variety reported, alongside the film's first full IMAX trailer. The Dunkirk director stated, "He made the world that we live in, and his story has to be seen to be believed." Oppenheimer will premiere in theaters this summer, on July 21, 2023.

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