Christopher Nolan cut back on Oppenheimer’s filming days so they could afford to build Los Alamos
It was an undeniably impressive work of production design... until somebody builds a bigger fake town
Pretty much any insight into Christopher Nolan’s filmmaking process is interesting, partly because he makes fascinating movies and partly because he seems like a vaguely weird guy. Remember when there was a big pseudo-controversy around the idea that he supposedly didn’t allow anyone to sit down while on his sets, even though that was very easily proven false and a spokesperson pretty quickly denied that it was true? But we all were still ready to believe it, because it seemed true?
Well, in an appearance on the Team Deakins cinematography podcast (via Variety), Oppenheimer production designer Ruth De Jong dropped another funny Nolan anecdote—that also happens to reveal how far Nolan is willing to go to make sure his movies are made the right way. The sticking point for De Jong was building the movie’s version of the Los Alamos community where Oppenheimer and his team developed the atomic bomb, which De Jong figured would be “impossible.” Here’s how it turned out:
Chris said, “Forget the money. Let’s just design what we want.” So that’s what we did, and when construction first budgeted my town it was $20 million. Chris was like, “Yeah, no. Stop.”
Funny! “Do whatever you want, don’t worry about the money… Oh no, that’s too much money!” This was all in addition to shooting on location in places like Berkley and New Mexico that were crucial to the real story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, so De Jong said Nolan decided to cut the film’s shooting schedule by “at least 30 days,” meaning it went from around 85 to around 55, which freed up a bunch of money (Variety points out that Tenet shot for 96 days).
De Jong felt extra pressure to “deliver above and beyond” because of the sacrifices Nolan was willing to make, which evidently worked out well for everyone, and De Jong said that the only real concession that the production had to make was to film some Washington D.C. scenes at the set in New Mexico because Nolan couldn’t get permission to film in actual government buildings. (Which is wild, since the federal government comes across so well in Oppenheimer.)