Cillian Murphy tells Oppenheimer fans not to hold their breath for any deleted scenes

Sorry, DVD hounds and atomic bomb obsessives: Don’t expect to get anything more out of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer when it finally makes the transition to home video. That’s per the film’s star, Cillian Murphy, who recently gave an interview in which he revealed, true to form, that Nolan’s film has basically no deleted scenes: If they shot it, it went up on the screen.

“There’s no deleted scenes in Chris Nolan movies,” Murphy recently told Collider, and he’d presumably know: Although Oppenheimer is his first starring role for the director, they’ve worked together regularly since Murphy played the villainous Scarecrow in 2005's Batman Begins. “That’s why there are no DVD extras on his movies, because the script is the movie. He knows exactly what’s going to end up—he’s not fiddling around with it trying to change the story. That is the movie.”

That might be a disappointment for anyone hoping to glean more about Nolan’s thoughts on J. Robert Oppenheimer—or just to get an alternate crack at sussing out some of the movie’s dialogue, which is supposed to sound like that, thank you very much. (Given how much the film cuts in and out of pivotal moments—most notably the two hearings that provide the film its spine—it’s also easy to imagine extra scenes not making the cut.) But it’s also par for the course, as Nolan has said on more than one occasion. As noted by Variety, Nolan made similar statements way back around the time of The Dark Knight Rises, explaining that, “I tend to try and weed things out on paper because it’s crazy expensive to shoot things that aren’t going to be in the film.” (Nolan remains one of the rare directors to eschew digital recording in favor of using film, which lends itself to such thriftiness.) “Pretty much with all my films, there are very few deleted scenes, which always disappoints the DVD crowd.”

Of course, Nolan has made his feelings on the primacy of the theatrical experience very clear in recent years, anyway; it’s one of the reasons Oppenheimer was made with Universal, after Warner Bros. royally pissed the star director off by pushing its lockdown-era film content, including his Tenet, straight to streaming. Not that Oppenheimer will necessarily need the after-market boost: Although it trails behind the plastic juggernaut that is Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, the film has still made more than $400 million at the box office.