Florence Pugh says making Oppenheimer felt like being on set when movies were first invented

With its Best Picture nomination secured, it’s time for Oppenheimer to start campaigning for everyone’s most coveted tiny golden man—and that means getting the people who made the movie in front of as many people as possible so they can talk about how great the movie is and how much of a good job everybody did while they were making it (to be fair, the cast and crew didn’t really get a chance to do that when the movie came out because of the Hollywood strikes).

The stars of Oppenheimer—Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, and Florence Pugh—recently did that for a For Your Consideration panel hosted by Jamie Dornan, and among details like Jason Clarke weaponizing toxic male behavior during his interrogation scene with Emily Blunt (he moved his chair closer and closer to her and it legitimately make her angry), the gang also spent some time talking about how great and ego-free the set was. Pugh, who was only on set for two weeks, felt particularly strong about this, saying that filming Oppenheimer was as if she “won an award” and was able to go back and see what it was like seeing how movies were made when movies were first invented.

Her first scene was the party scene where her character, Jean Tatlock, is first introduced, and she said nobody felt like sitting down or going on their phone all day (not that they would’ve been allowed to anyway) because everybody in the room was the best at what they were doing so everyone was just excited to talk to everyone else about making movies. Pugh says she was so excited about being on such a knowledgable set that, when a camera broke during one of her sex scenes with Cillian Murphy, she decided to take the opportunity to strike up a conversation with the person fixing the camera.

The whole movie wasn’t shot on IMAX, but it does sound like it had an especially unusual setup, so Nolan had to bring in a specific person in order to repair whatever had gone wrong. And with her and Murphy sitting there naked (in a closed set and with their arms wrapped around themselves), Pugh figured “this is my moment to learn” and asked the repairperson what was happening. “You just make your moments,” she said during the panel, “I’m like, ‘what’s going on with the shutter here, buddy?’”

Throughout the panel, Pugh has nothing but glowingly positive things to say about Nolan and the kind of operation he runs, even framing it in a complimentary way when she says—in what is surely a totally hypothetical story—that Nolan would see through any attempt to lie to him about being late to set if you were (hypothetically) on “the loo” for a long time that morning because he would’ve already studied every actor’s call time and how the traffic looked on whatever route they needed to take in any given morning.

Assuming other actors have similarly positive first-time experience with Nolan, it’s no wonder so many of them want to keep working with him over and over.