Nolan Clarifies How ‘Oppenheimer’ Script is Written in “First Person”

There was mention a few weeks ago that Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” had a script completely written in the first-person.

It was confirmed by Nolan and his star Cillian Murphy during an interview with EW. Nolan has now further elaborated what he meant by that via Total Film:

I wrote the script in the first person, which I'd never done before. I don't know if anyone has ever done that, or if that's a thing people do or not… The film is objective and subjective. The colour scenes are subjective; the black-and-white scenes are objective. I wrote the colour scenes from the first person. So for an actor reading that, in some ways, I think it'd be quite daunting.

Murphy has mentioned that it’s the only script that he’s ever read that's been in the first person and it took him a bit of time to “figure it out.”

Then it became clear that you wanted it to be completely subjective, that everything was to be seen through the character's eyes as it were, and, again, yeah, that added massively to the terror.

Yeah, so “Oppenheimer” is told almost entirely from the point of view its main character, Robert J. Oppenheimer. There's probably no cutting between storylines.

Even if this has been done before, albeit, very rarely, this fascinates in that it somehow hints at how this epic 3-hour movie will be told. Murphy must probably be in every single scene for it to be that subjective.

Cillian Murphy will play the father of the hydrogen bomb J. Robert Oppenheimer. A man who, despite inventing the deadly weapon, wanted to place International controls on his dangerous invention, post-Hiroshima.

“Oppenheimer” is released on July 21.