WITH APOCALYPTIC ATOMIC-BOMB THRILLER OPPENHEIMER, CHRISTOPHER NOLAN BRINGS ONE OF HIS ENDURING OBSESSIONS TO THE SCREEN. WE MEET THE DIRECTOR IN LA TO TALK ABOUT GOING NUCLEAR

WORDS ALEX GODFREY

Bomb proof: Director Christopher Nolan on set.

It’s a family affair: Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt, centre) and children.

Testing times on the test site for Oppenheimer and his team.

WE SEE THE LOWER- FIFTH OF CHRISTOPHER NOLAN.

The shoes. A bit of trouser. A small section of Christopher Nolan on the move, glimpsed through the bottom of a windowed wall, the rest blocked out by frosted glass, obscuring him until he’s ready.

He stops to talk to someone, but even then, despite hearing his voice, we can’t make out the words. So here we sit, waiting for him in a small conference room, seeing and hearing bits of him, unable to piece it all together. It’s enigmatic. It’s cryptic. It’s — dare we say — cinematic. And very Christopher Nolan. He just can’t help himself.

Yes, for a man who likes his films to pose questions rather than provide answers, who constructs them like puzzles, this all makes sense. It’s early May in the Los Angeles post-production facility where his films are taken to the finish line. In rooms and offices there is evidence of an impressive career — framed newspaper cuttings about The Prestige, various awards, an Inception poster, a Batpod maquette, framed cells from the Dark Night trilogy, and film cans containing reels from his latest opus, Oppenheimer, a bit of which he’s just played for Empire in a screening room so loud it felt like an earthquake. As it should — this is a film about the man responsible for the development of the atomic bomb. The footage is, we tell Nolan as he finally appears, unnerving. “I think ‘unnerving’ is definitely a good word to describe it!” he laughs.

Oppenheimer is his 12th film. All want to screw with your mind a bit, get your pulse racing, leave you thinking, these sweeping epics exploring time, identity, physics, morality, memory. They are thrilling, world-building head-scratchers, the product of a man who, as a kid, fell in love with both Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey a few months apart and then taught himself how to make movies step by step, creatively, practically, technically.

Filmmaking has always obsessed him, and his new one has been doing so for longer than he can recall.

“I actually don’t remember when I first got hooked by the notion of, you know, they literally thought they might destroy the world,” he says casually of Oppenheimer, the true story named after the theoretical physicist who, racing against the Nazis in the early 1940s, spearheaded nuclear weaponry for America. There’s a reference to this in Nolan’s last film, 2020’s genre-busting, time-travel-ish thriller Tenet, in which arms dealer Priya (Dimple Kapadia) tells John David Washington’s CIA operative that as Oppenheimer’s team approached the first atomic test (1945’s Trinity test), he “became concerned that the detonation might produce a chain reaction, engulfing the world”.