For example, there was a moment where James Remar, who played [Henry L. Stimson, Truman’s secretary of war], kept talking to me about how he found out that Stimson and his wife had honeymooned in Kyoto. And that’s one of the reasons why Stimson took Kyoto off the list to bomb.
I had him crossing the city off the list because of its cultural significance, but I’m like, just add that. It was an amazingly exciting moment where no one in the room knew how to react.
How do you shoot with a giant cast and so many locations?
Anytime you get to so many locations, so many different actors, it’s always going to be a puzzle. I did insist on scheduling it around Cillian’s haircut. [Laughs] Because I am very allergic to wigs in movies. I really like that the movie doesn’t have any obvious artifice when it comes to the way the characters present themselves.
One of the main moments that really hooked me in the story, which I referred to in my last film, “Tenet” [2020]is it the idea that when scientists do their calculations, they can’t completely eliminate the possibility that they can burn the environment and destroy the world. And they went ahead and pressed that button. But my feeling is, what if you can be in that room? What could that be?
How do they feel about that? You could minimize that and say they thought it was a slim possibility. But having had many giant explosions on film sets myself, where safety is the absolute most important thing, the tension around ignitions is incredible. It’s very difficult for the special effects people to gauge to us exactly how it’s going to sound, exactly what it’s going to look like. So as that countdown comes, it’s an incredible tense, and extrapolating that to the Manhattan Project, to the Trinity test, I can’t imagine. I’m excited to try to give the audience a sense of that, to live in that room.
In this case, it worked and the world was saved. Who made that calculation?
It came from Teller. One of the few things I changed was that it wasn’t Einstein that Oppenheimer went to consult on this, it was Arthur Compton who directed an outpost of the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago. But I transferred that to Einstein.
