Oppenheimer (w/ Grant Robin)

Eli (00:01.919)
Hello and welcome to the establishing shot a podcast where we do deep dives and two directors and their filmographies I am your host Eli Price and we are here on episode 96 of the podcast You may have noticed from the title, but we are in the middle of a little break period of our Spielberg series and

Yeah, there's been a movie that's been that i've been itching to cover and that um, you know, I I wrapped up the nolan series a long time ago with tenet um and and kind of wrapped that series up but Whenever new movies come out from directors that i've covered in the past. I like to cover those movies as well so since we're in a little break kind of in between the the 2000s and the 2010s of spillberg movies

I figured it would be a good time to, to, you know, take a little break and talk about, you know, the very light and fun subject of the atomic bomb. Uh, so we're talking about Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, uh, today, um, almost two years after it was released. So good, some good breathing room, you know, uh, after it releases to kind of take it in.

Grant Robin (01:06.958)
I'm

Eli (01:22.775)
let the cultural mania about it settle down a little bit. But yeah, I have a first time guest coming on. We've been talking about recording this for, I don't even, probably like a year. And so yeah, have Grant Roban joining me today. Grant, how you doing?

Grant Robin (01:43.114)
I am good, man. I'm looking forward to it. We've been trying to get on this pod for a while. So thanks for being flexible. And yeah, I'm excited to talk about this movie from one of my favorite directors and it was a really good movie. So I'm excited to dive into it.

Eli (01:51.553)
Yeah.

Eli (01:57.899)
Yeah. Yeah. And, I know, Grant, I know you were able to see it and were you able to see it? NIMAX, right? Yeah. So I'll be able to get your perspective on that. Cause I was not. So unfortunately, but yeah, before we get into all that grant, Grant is a good friend of mine. we go to church together and he actually,

Grant Robin (02:08.568)
I was.

Eli (02:27.722)
works at the church doing media and film and photography, but he also does a lot of that stuff kind of on the side, on his own time, kind of like a lot of side projects as often media and film and photography people do. but yeah, Grant does a lot of work with that. Also has done some like small

kind of productions with short films and whatnot. so yeah, Grant, I'd love for you to tell our audience a little bit just about yourself and just, you know, your experience and film and what that's been been like for you.

Grant Robin (03:11.118)
Um, yeah, I have always loved movies since I was a kid. Uh, if you ask six year old me, what do you want it to be when he grew up? He would have told you a movie director. Um, so that's always what I want it to be. My plan was to go to film school, but things kind of shifted. had gotten kind of discouraged from the idea of film school and stuff, but then just through a chain of events, I went to Bible college, ended up interning in our media department, got hired on in the media department on staff.

Eli (03:21.654)
Nice.

Grant Robin (03:41.078)
And then the crazy thing is that through that, I actually was able to pitch and these ideas for making short films, which is something that most churches don't do. But our pastor and my boss was so excited about that idea. And so in my time, in my nine years at the church, we've done about five short films ranging anywhere from eight minutes was the shortest one. The longest one was about 37 minutes.

Eli (03:56.746)
Mm-hmm.

Grant Robin (04:09.486)
So for those I was writer director editor, you know low-budget indie you're doing everything And those have just been the absolute, you know highlights of my career. I love doing that. I love making movies I love watching movies and so yeah, I've been full-time videographer and photographer for going on over nine years now and I love it. I love making movies. I love making films telling stories and yeah, that's kind of what I'm doing now

Eli (04:32.885)
Yeah.

Eli (04:39.572)
Yeah. Yeah. I would imagine though you're not in the basement of your university's theater editing the films on like actual film like Christopher Nolan was for following.

Grant Robin (04:53.632)
No, you know, I'm on a laptop.

Eli (04:55.894)
Yeah It's funny cuz Nolan, you know his first feature film following He made it like over it took him like a year him and his friends like they just kind of went and filmed segments of it on weekends basically and He he was like all the things he was the writer the director the cinematographer the editor He had a little bit of help

you know, obviously with some of that stuff, but with his friends, but yeah, just grinding, grinding to get out and yeah.

Grant Robin (05:33.644)
to grind, you you don't have a lot of money, you're just making it happen, being creative. And it's a lot of fun though, when you start working with a team, you start getting a crew and you know, it's so cool, like the first time that I ever wrote a script and then even just in the audition process, like having actors send in audition tapes and they're reading the words that I wrote and it was the first time that it ever happened.

And mind you, I was like 21 years old. I was a kid. Like I had never done anything before and they were crazy enough to trust me with this project. And I'm getting these actors who are professional adult actors sending in audition clips, reading words that I wrote. It was just the weirdest experience ever, but it was so cool just to see your vision like come to life. And yeah, it was such a fun process.

Eli (06:02.688)
Yeah.

Eli (06:22.57)
Yeah. Yeah. And I think too, something that, I remember learning in the Nolan series, covering him and like, you know, hearing, you know, you talk about kind of wearing a lot of the hats for, for the production. you kind of learn when you put yourself through, okay, I'm going to write a script. I'm going to edit. I'm going to do the lighting and the cinematography. I'm going to.

you know, direct actors on their, you know, what, where I need them to be and come up with composition and all that stuff. when you're doing all of it, when you are able to eventually like step into one singular role, you're able to really collaborate with all those other people even better because you've, you've done it before you've, you've gotten your hands dirty and all those different areas.

Grant Robin (07:21.72)
Yeah, it's so true. You're able to speak the language and yeah, it's nice going like starting from the bottom doing indie stuff. Obviously I've never done big stuff, but I'm sure when you get to a bigger level, keep your eyes out. The next Oppenheimer, no. I'm sure when you get to a bigger level and you can kind of stay more in your lane, it just makes it that much easier, but you're able to also understand, like you said, everybody else's roles.

Eli (07:30.614)
Yeah. Sure. Yet. Yet.

Eli (07:40.182)
You

Eli (07:49.076)
Right.

Grant Robin (07:50.606)
And I'm very thankful that I had people in my life and on those film sets who were able to kind of do that, which is, hey, I know that my role is assistant director, but I also have been on enough sets to know, here's what we should maybe think about doing with this. like, I know my role is lighting, but they would give me tips in certain areas. so I was able to, that I'm a little bit older and more experienced, I can do that on projects.

Eli (08:07.862)
Sure.

Eli (08:17.322)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I remember too, Christopher Nolan was doing, he was filming like training videos for companies. And so like, he basically learned how to light from just like set, you know, having like to work with not much at all for lighting and figure out how to light, light these people well for these like training videos that he was shooting. It's just like all the, all the ways you can learn like

Grant Robin (08:43.182)
Yeah, that's how you start.

Eli (08:47.158)
You know, is yeah, that's how you make the magic happen down the road. so you, heard it here first, grant roban, um, future, uh, Hollywood director, maybe, I don't know. I don't know what your goals are. Um, maybe not Hollywood, maybe. Um, I don't know. I don't know what your goals are, grant your big, your big goals for your future.

Grant Robin (09:02.318)
I don't know, we'll see.

Grant Robin (09:13.868)
I'd love to make a feature. I'd love to tell stories. I just want to tell stories.

Eli (09:18.25)
Yeah. Yeah. Have you done any like a documentary stuff? I mean, obviously like weddings is kind of like that, but.

Grant Robin (09:24.994)
Grant Robin (09:28.352)
Yeah, I've done many documentary stuff. Being in the church world, we do a lot of testimony videos, but through my years of doing testimony videos, there's been a couple of them where I went in wanting to make it more documentary style and less like church testimonial video, you know? So I've had a little bit of experience with that.

Eli (09:31.742)
Right. Yeah.

Eli (09:44.299)
Yeah, the recent one for Easter was very much like that. Like more, it felt more like a documentary than just like, you know, talking head telling you, yeah.

Grant Robin (09:51.895)
Yeah.

Grant Robin (10:00.268)
Yeah, that's my goal. A lot of church testimonial stuff is just somebody talking for four minutes and then you maybe put some slow motion B roll, a couple of pictures. But yeah. But that one I kind of wanted to get some other footage to kind of tell the story in a creative way. So I'm always trying to do that.

Eli (10:08.67)
Yeah, boring. Just kidding.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. One thing I know that you haven't done is carry around a huge IMAX film camera, which is what Christopher Nolan and his team enjoy doing for some reason. You know. Yeah. And.

Grant Robin (10:31.148)
I've not had the pleasure.

Grant Robin (10:39.266)
They make it hard on themselves, but it works.

Eli (10:44.862)
All that to segue into asking you about your first experience with our subject today, which is Christopher Nolan. Do you remember the first Christopher Nolan movie you saw?

Grant Robin (10:58.824)
I think the Dark Knight might have been my first experience. It's definitely the most memorable one.

Eli (11:04.36)
Even before... Before Batman Begins even?

Grant Robin (11:08.732)
I guess, I guess you're right.

Eli (11:11.072)
Some people do. Some people did see Dark Knight before Batman begins.

Grant Robin (11:15.054)
Yeah, it was so long ago. I just know that the Dark Knight was one of the most memorable movie experiences I've ever had to this day. I remember seeing it on a midnight, know, back when they had midnight features, I saw it midnight in IMAX. Like we were on like the third row. And so it was like just an absolutely incredible experience. It instantly became my favorite movie. To this day, it's still my favorite movie of all time. And then I think after that movie is whenever I really started being like, okay, who's this director? And then I went back and I watched

Eli (11:20.906)
Yeah.

Eli (11:25.397)
Uh-huh.

wow. Yeah.

Eli (11:43.338)
Yeah.

Grant Robin (11:44.514)
Memento I watched, I'm forgetting the name, but the one with Christian Bale. And I did watch Insomnia, Prestige, yes, like kind of going back and watching all the other movies that he had made up to that time and they were all so good. And he became my favorite director. He's still my favorite director to this day. I just love how creative he is. I love how he is original. He pushes the boundaries of how to film things and...

Eli (11:57.131)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli (12:02.709)
Yeah.

Eli (12:12.885)
Mm-hmm.

Grant Robin (12:13.826)
you know, always trying to use practical effects and not a lot of CGI. And he's just definitely one of the most creative directors we have out there right now.

Eli (12:22.036)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I remember, I'm pretty sure the first Nolan movie I saw was most likely Batman Begins. I remember I had like a little, I don't know how big it was, probably like 12, 15 inch TV in my room that I got the DVD of Batman Begins, because I didn't see it in theater, but I wanted to see it because it's Batman, you know, and I watched it in my room when I was in, I don't even know, I guess I was in high school at that point.

would yeah yeah I would have been would have been in high school so yeah but I remember seeing the prestige for the first time in college and that was like I always I always tell people I like to describe Christopher Nolan as like a like gateway drug into like being a cinephile yeah yeah cuz like

Grant Robin (12:52.494)
2006 I guess would have been Batman Begins

Grant Robin (13:16.918)
Yes, that's a good way to put it.

Eli (13:21.43)
I remember seeing the prestige and just like being blown away by it. it was, I remember that being kind of a turning point in like my college years of like being more interested in finding movies that were like exploring more ideas or doing like different things that I'd never seen before, not just like the typical like, you know, action flick that I would usually or usually go see or

Grant Robin (13:48.504)
Yeah.

Eli (13:51.435)
superhero movie or whatever But like something that's really like interesting and deep and original And yeah, I mean that's something he's always done and funny enough I think another way to describe Christopher Nolan is Is as today's see Steven Spielberg, you know, we're in the middle of the Spielberg episode and there's there's a lot they have in common their their household names like

People go see movies because their name is attached to it, not because of any other reason really. And they kind of do this, they both do this thing where they simultaneously like push the craft forward in ways, but also like hold on to the way, like things of the past in a way too. Like Nolan with like holding on to film like.

He wants to shoot on film. But he's like pushing that the way you shoot on film technologically forward at the same time. Yeah, new film, new like, I mean, for Dark Knight, they're like, that's where they started coming up with like rigs to be able to carry that IMAX camera around.

Grant Robin (14:59.852)
Yeah, they're having to reinvent new films just for new film snucks.

Eli (15:17.546)
It is cool to kind of like pause in the middle of the Spielberg episode and cover another Nolan film because they are similar in not necessarily like in the way their movies turn out, but just in their mindset within the industry, I think. And they're like, they're placing culture as like kind of like super, Nolan hasn't made nearly as many movies as Spielberg.

did or has, I don't know, maybe he'll keep making movies for hopefully for another several decades at least.

Grant Robin (15:57.656)
Yeah, I mean, he's gotten to that point as a director now where he just goes to the studio and just like, this is what I want to do. And they're like, all right, here's a couple hundred million dollars, you know? And every actor in the world is like, whatever, give me whatever role, know? Casey Affleck's like, put me in two scenes. That's great. I just want to be in your movie. You know, it's like every actor just wants to be in it. Yeah.

Eli (16:19.606)
Make me a creepy guy, you know?

Grant Robin (16:24.084)
Every actor wants to be in his movies now. mean, the one that they're working on right now, you know, there's all kind of A-list actors that are in that movie. So he's gotten to that point where he can just do whatever he wants. He's got a blank slate where he can just be as creative as possible. And that's an exciting point to get as a director, especially being able to watch him in our lifetime. You know, when he made Batman Begins, he was relatively unknown. He was just this young, creative.

Eli (16:32.747)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (16:51.285)
Yeah.

Grant Robin (16:53.26)
guy that they took a chance on, you know?

Eli (16:55.03)
Yeah. He had made one film that like made way more than it should have for a studio. And they were like, well, he made us money on this. Let's see what he can do with a franchise, you know, with that was insomnia, which is a great movie. And yeah, it's, it's, it's a great movie. That's like probably one of his lesser movies, which is saying something, you know? Yeah.

Grant Robin (17:19.948)
Right, most people probably haven't seen it.

Eli (17:24.704)
But yeah, Nolan is obviously a household name and when Oppenheimer, the hype leading up to Oppenheimer was just like huge. So yeah, let's just jump right into, you know, I like to go back and start at the beginning. We might maybe not start completely at the beginning, but take a step back to Tenet because I think

For Nolan, the kind of inception, if you will, making this movie happened during and after making Tenet. And I don't know if you remember, but in Tenet, there's a point where one of the future scientists in the movie that had like a key role in making the time inversion technology, he actually quotes the Bhagavad Gita

Line now and become death destroyer of worlds, which is something that Oppenheimer quote that Oppenheimer basically made famous and in popular culture and you know, he was saying it kind of as like Recognizing the implications of the technology and the potential for its misuse And Yeah, it's tenant so that that line is in tenant it tenant released

July 17th, a day after the first successful test of the atomic bomb at the Trinity site with, know, Oppentheimer and his team. yeah, it's so Tenet is all kind of wrapped up in that. then, yeah, it obviously going even further back, you know, is the actual event in 1945 in New Mexico.

You know, he had named the site Trinity after a John Donne poem quote that said, batter my heart, three-person God. You can kind of hear him say that, like mutter it in the movie. And you know, that poem in and of itself, if you go read it, is kind of like full of paradox, full of like contradiction. And so like even just in the name

Eli (19:51.575)
of this test site, he's naming it after a poem that he loved that is all about like a paradox and contradiction, which is all wrapped up in who he is, all wrapped up in like questions of the atomic bomb and in this movie obviously. yeah, on that day in New Mexico, the blast of light reached 10,000 feet and was equal to several suns at midday.

It's like could be seen over a hundred miles away and its heat could be felt at 20 miles. Just, and that's just the test in the middle of New Mexico. That's not even like when it was actually used. But Oppenheimer.

Grant Robin (20:39.598)
That's why Benny Safdie had to put all that to lather himself with sunscreen.

Eli (20:44.094)
Yeah, yeah. man. Oppenheimer later wrote, quote, a few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent, and went on to say, quote, I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu was trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and to impress him.

takes on his multi-armed form and says, now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. And what's interesting is I read in the Nolan variations, which is, yeah, it's a book right here over my shoulder if you're watching by Tom Shone. He was mentioning that the Sanskrit word that Oppenheimer uses that he translates as death.

is more usually rendered as time. So in the Penguin Classics translation of that Hindu scripture, the line is given as, I am all-powerful time, which destroys all things, which is pretty appropriate for Tennant. And I would say pretty appropriate for just all of Nolan's movies. All of his movies are so wrapped up in time.

Grant Robin (21:54.264)
Right.

Eli (22:04.766)
what time is and what time does and both like within the this the you know the story itself and also with like the way he structures his movies and so yeah very interesting and we'll probably get back to all that as we get dive deeper into the movie but yeah this really like his

kind of obsession with Oppenheimer was really sparked by a gift that he got from Robert Pattinson at the wrap party for Tenet. He gave him Nolan like an anthology of post-World War II speeches and lectures from Oppenheimer. And this is a quote that Oppenheimer was told Tom Schoen in that book, The Nolan Variations, about getting that gift. He said,

quote, it's eerie reading because they're wrangling with this thing they've unleashed. How's that going to be controlled? It's just this monstrous responsibility. Once that knowledge is out there in the world, what can you do? You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. It was a savvy, thoughtful wrap gift, actually, because like you, I've grown up in the post-nuclear age. We've grown up in the shadow of the ultimate destructive knowledge. There's very little you would miss if that technology disappeared.

It's like that Sophocles line they quote in Angel Heart, which is the only reason I know it. How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the man that's wise. To know something is to have power over it generally, but what if the reverse is true? If knowing something gives it power over you. And so this, that's Christopher Nolan kind of thinking about

you know, some things he read in those Oppenheimer speeches. And this is in 2020. This book was published in 2020. So this is before he's even read American Prometheus. This is before like he has plans to make this movie. And he's already like, I mean, that basically is like the whole point of the movie almost. In a quote he's thinking about back in...

Eli (24:22.518)
2020 at the latest which is when the book was published so probably sometime earlier than that maybe even But yeah He does read in early 2021 American Prometheus, it's a 700 page book from 2005 the biography of J Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin. Have you have you read this?

Grant Robin (24:53.108)
No, it seems like a very long and dense book.

Eli (24:53.77)
Yeah. I, I, after all this research and watching this movie and doing all this, I'm like, I think I want to read this. So I did check it out from an audio book form from the library on the little app they have where you can check out audio books. So we'll see if I dig into it starting soon. It's like 26 hours or something on audio book.

which I usually listen at like at least one and a half speed so you can shave some of that off.

Grant Robin (25:20.428)
Yeah.

Grant Robin (25:26.124)
Yeah, good luck. Let me know how it is. This movie is dense enough for me, so I think I'll take his word on the book.

Eli (25:29.566)
Yeah, seriously. Yeah. but yeah, I mean, he, he immediately starts writing the screenplay to adapt it. And in August of 2020, I mean, October of 2021, he announces the adaptation. and I'm sure that's when people start seeing the cast list coming out and all that. I kind of, vaguely remember that like the hype was starting already as soon as he like announced it and everything.

And I think that by the time he announced that he was doing it, I think he already had like Killian Murphy on board, if I remember right. Do you remember that?

Grant Robin (26:12.014)
I think he was one of the first ones that he locked in. I do remember when they announced it, one thing that Nolan loves to do is just take his shot at each different genres. Like, I'm going to make a war movie now, or I'm going to make a space movie now. so this being his first biopic, just character study movie was very intriguing when...

Eli (26:13.046)
Yeah.

Grant Robin (26:39.458)
when it was first released, think. And because the nature of the person that he was reviewing, I think it was very intriguing for a lot of people when he first released the concept of it.

Eli (26:50.356)
Yeah. Yeah. And he had way back, he had written this script for a Howard Hughes biopic. And then it got announced that Martin Scorsese was making the Aviator, which is a Howard Hughes biopic. And so he kind of just like shelved that. He was like, well, Martin Scorsese is making a Howard Hughes biopic. I guess this is never happening now. And so.

Grant Robin (27:18.126)
You

Eli (27:20.104)
So he's kind of had that on his shelf for a long time. And so this is finally him getting to make his like big important man in history sort of biopic that he's always wanted to make, you know? yeah, what's crazy is before this announcement was made, he had broken ties with Warner Brothers in September of that year.

He had worked with them since 2002 on Insomnia. How crazy is that? He's just been pumping stuff out with Warner Brothers for almost 20 years. then, yeah, they had announced plans that year to start doing simultaneous releases for theater and on the Mac streaming service, which it was HBO Max at the time still, I think. And yeah, he was like,

Nope, no thank you and they didn't seem to be backing down so, you know, yeah, he left.

Grant Robin (28:28.108)
Yeah, you got to love that about Nolan is like he's staying true to the fact that movies were meant to be in theaters and you know, we need more directors to stand true to that because if not, you're just going to have everybody just sending it straight to streaming and then theaters will die out. you you're going to spend all this money and you're going to film these on 70 millimeter, know, massive IMAX film cameras and then you're just going to

Eli (28:45.653)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (28:56.864)
Yeah.

Grant Robin (28:57.814)
watch it on your phone or you know, it's like, that's not how this movie was meant to be seen. so for him to take a stand like that, I hope more directors follow suit.

Eli (29:00.002)
huh.

Eli (29:07.626)
Yeah, and it seems like a lot are and it seems to like after the those few years kind of post pandemic it seems like a lot of studios have started like wising up and starting to Go back to the like at least three month window For theater to like streaming release So, yeah really I mean one of Warner Brothers probably biggest mistakes and

in recent years is, you know, making Christopher Nolan mad and walking. But yeah, he, signs with Universal, who is Steven Spielberg also is a studio of choice. And yeah, they agree to fully finance his new hundred million dollar Oppenheimer biopic. And so, yeah, I mean, that was probably the selling point. Hey, I want to make this movie. Here's what, here's what.

It's going to be, here's what I, the money I need for it. they're like, yep, we'll fully finance it if you'll come on board. And so he's a, he's a universal man now.

Grant Robin (30:13.591)
Yeah, they're smart.

And how crazy that the weekend that it comes out, you got Barbie, which is a Warner Brothers movie. And so he's going up against his old studio this big weekend, which ended up just being like this big cultural, know, Barbenheimer. It's just such an interesting, you they could have had both. They could have owned the whole weekend.

Eli (30:22.187)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (30:34.054)
Mm-hmm. They could have had both.

But, but you know, we probably wouldn't have had Bob Barb and how Heimer if they had both, cause they would have for sure. Almost, you know, I'm almost positive they would have, you know, that's just how the studios do things. And so, you know, that's another, another good thing that came out of it was we got Barb and Heimer, which I don't know if that'll ever be replicated again, the, the hype leading up to that and

Grant Robin (30:45.698)
Yeah, they probably would have staggered them.

Grant Robin (31:07.18)
Yeah, it was the nature of the difference in the dichotomy between the two movies matched with, you know, coming out of COVID. That was kind of our first big cinematic weekend that we had had since the COVID experience. And it was cool. We watched both of them in that, you know, back to back. And it was such a cool thing to be a part of. was the first time in years that you were going to the theater and being like,

Eli (31:12.629)
Yeah.

Grant Robin (31:35.629)
you got to see this or you're talking about things and the lobby is, you know, has all these promotional things and it was just such a fun experience.

Eli (31:37.333)
Yeah.

Yeah, there's a there was a cultural energy like around it that was really cool. And and yeah, I mean between like, you know, Barbie Barbie was like the the big one made more money probably just a more like watchable movie, I guess. And like just generally speaking.

Grant Robin (32:08.238)
more light-hearted.

Eli (32:09.544)
Yeah, easier to take in, more fun obviously. But I think what Oppenheimer did was it kind of, there used to be kind of the, you have to see this movie, like underlying have to, like it's an important movie, you should see this. And I think Oppenheimer brought that back and like it

Mean I think the money that it made speaks for itself that people did feel like they they needed to see it The Spielberg parallel would probably be like Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan, you know Those sorts of movies where people are like no you you have to see that you need to watch that movie And this was kind of a sim we hadn't really had that in a long time a movie come out where people are like you have to see this is important and like I said

It like an important movie to see.

Grant Robin (33:09.902)
Yeah, and it might've been, you know, you could probably say it was Nolan's, maybe his first movie that you kind of like, he had made great movies before, but none that had a story that was so sort of significant almost to just history and to where we are in the world and just the nature of the topic that it was about. it was one of those movies where it's like, this is important. You should see it. And not only you should see it, but they did a great job.

Eli (33:19.862)
Mm-hmm.

Grant Robin (33:38.818)
before it was released of really hyping up and getting people to understand how they filmed it and the importance of seeing it in a movie theater. You know, like they released lots of just behind the scenes stuff and they were really good with their marketing about saying, hey, this movie was filmed in an incredible way that you have to see on a big screen. And so it made people feel like, okay, well, I gotta go see it. You know, I gotta see it in a movie theater.

Eli (33:46.326)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (33:53.43)
Hmm.

Eli (34:05.962)
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. yeah, I mean, there's been more and more of that in recent years. Tom Cruise has been doing a little bit of that stuff with, you know, trying to get people back to movie theaters with Topka Maverick and the, you know, these last Mission Impossible movies. But yeah, I mean, we need more of that. Yeah. Yeah.

Grant Robin (34:30.68)
Yeah, Ryan Coogler with Sinners. I feel like they did a good job of making you feel like you had to see that in theaters.

Eli (34:36.66)
Yeah, and I mean, it's doing incredibly well in the box office and everything. For an original story genre horror movie, it's just, And that's an incredible movie. And we'll probably talk a little bit about that. I a of, I guess, similarity parallel thing.

talk about later with that movie but yeah jumping back into like the beginnings of this movie Kai Bird and and Sherwin were the authors were nervous about the adaptation you know it's a very dense book a lot of information Kai goes and meets with Nolan Nolan like explains everything to him and he he really comes out of that meeting with Nolan feeling like really good about it like he he felt very like assured that

It was in good hands, the script, he really appreciated. And he went back to Martin Sherwin to assure him like, I really think this is going to be good. This is going to be something that is respectful for our material and of the subject matter and everything. And Sherwin actually died.

two weeks after he kind of told him, assured him about it, which is unfortunate. He never really got to see the end product of it. But yeah, I thought this was kind of another good impetus for Nolan to feel like he needed to make this movie. Because he does talk about like, before I make a movie,

I have to like feel like I need, I need to make this like personally. and, Emma Thomas, who is his wife and also like forever producing partner. She's produced all his movies basically. she, she was talking about how him, they, they were both like at home in the early stages, kind of talking about how they were going to adapt it and all that. And, their son,

Grant Robin (36:44.3)
Yeah, producer.

Eli (36:59.86)
who was 16 at the time, of piped in and was like, I don't think people really care about nuclear weapons anymore. you know, he, you know, I feel like that was like another impetus of like, okay, I do need to make this movie to remind people of why it's important to care about these things. If there's a generation that does, you know, that thinks that people don't care about it. So,

Grant Robin (37:27.214)
Yeah.

Eli (37:27.7)
You know, yeah, he talked about like how the world kind of tunes in and out of that sort of subject matter, but the threat never goes away. The threat's always there. And so, yeah, this is, I think you'll find this like super fascinating. You might've already known this, but he wrote the script in first person POV from Oppenheimer's point of view.

very unusual to write a script that way. Did you know that?

Grant Robin (37:59.309)
Yeah.

Grant Robin (38:02.752)
I actually, yeah, was just, when I was preparing for the episode, I listened to an interview with Hoitavan Hoitema and he mentioned it and I had actually written it down in my notes because I thought it was really interesting, you know, because you never hear that happening. So.

Eli (38:09.653)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (38:14.123)
Yeah.

Yeah. And you can just, I mean, you can Google like Oppenheimer script and pull it up and read it. And I've skimmed through some of it and it is like, it is very interesting. Like even like the, the kind of like less like dialogue stuff and more like directing notes, even like kind of feels like it's, you know, kind of trying to get like at what he sees or what he's thinking. And it's all very like first person.

And yeah, he talked about his goal was to just open up this enigmatic character to try to like see the world through his eyes And I think the other big reason was he really didn't He wanted to avoid like the pitfall of most biopics which is to basically like boil everything about some person down into like one essence or one like

important moment in their life and he really wanted to like avoid doing that and this was one of the ways he like went about that was writing the script in this kind of POV sort of way and so it's it's almost like you know important for the way he wanted to tell the story but also like important for trying to avoid the bad ways he could tell the story like it was like a

Grant Robin (39:44.184)
Right.

Eli (39:45.175)
kind of like protective fence for himself, you know, which I find to be like pretty really interesting. But yeah, I mean, he talked about the general structure he wanted to to use it three parts. I'm going to I'll read the three parts and you tell me if like you, you kind of felt that in this read this past rewatch that you recently did. So the part

Grant Robin (39:48.45)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (40:14.836)
The first part is basically he starting with the hero's journey, kind of like watching him, you know, come up into his own. and then in the middle is kind of this heist, heist style race to the finish, which is like the Trinity, you know, the successful Trinity bomb explosion. And then the other, the, like the last third is basically like courtroom drama.

What do you think? Did he break it down correctly?

Grant Robin (40:46.39)
Yeah, yeah, it does. It does in a lot of ways, you know, feel like you feel those parts in the movie, you know, that the beginning is so dense, just with dialogue and science and explanation and your understanding who this character is and who all these other characters are and what their motivations are. And then the second that they go to Los Alamos, it just becomes like this tense, like exciting, like we're building towards something. And it's so thrilling. And then after that,

Eli (41:11.541)
Mm-hmm.

Grant Robin (41:15.606)
it kind of dips back down, you know, and then it now just becomes this, you know, courtroom drama and you're trying to figure out what's happening. And yeah, so I would say you definitely, that's definitely a very stark, like you feel that when you're watching the movie, those three different parts.

Eli (41:17.494)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (41:29.802)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think so too. He mentioned like, you know, other kind of genres would seep in like Western when they're out, you know, in Los Alamos and camping and all that stuff. then horror too, just, and I think on a lot of ways that the sound design is used and then the kind of like experimental visuals, kind of like.

the horror genre kind of seeps in a little bit here and there as well. There are a lot of people.

Grant Robin (42:03.234)
Yeah, especially the scene where he's given the speech, you know, and you've got those images flashing of, of, know, the woman and her face is peeling off and, know, you can see him kind of leaning into that horror a little bit.

Eli (42:06.56)
This beat you up.

Eli (42:13.045)
Right.

Eli (42:16.502)
Yeah. And I remember when this, when it first came out, everyone was like, this is Christopher Nolan's horror movie. so, I don't know. feel like that set like weird expectations up. for me, I remember thinking like, this is not at all a horror movie. Like it has like a few elements like that, but like, it doesn't, it doesn't feel or read like a horror movie at all.

Grant Robin (42:40.92)
Right.

Eli (42:45.928)
It's, you could say maybe thriller in the sense that like, I don't know, like there's a sort of suspense to it, but not really even that. so I don't know. feel like.

Grant Robin (42:56.418)
Yeah, thriller, probably it's more of a thriller with a scary, you know, implications, you know, of what's happening.

Eli (43:04.406)
Yeah, it's but yeah, and I don't know I walked away from the movie thinking like I don't really know why people were saying that other than like a couple of sequences that felt like Intense and like had some horror ish elements kind of like with the way he was haunted by You know what was done, but like I don't know. It's it's more of like a just a drama kind of exploring, you know

the moral implications of it all. yeah, his other goal with his writing was to not serve opinions or history lessons and to leave you with questions and not answers. And I think goal accomplished there. There is a bit of like, so in my research after this rewatch and then I watched like there on the Blu-ray disc, there's a documentary about Oppenheimer and

It kind of filled in some gaps of like stuff. wasn't like, didn't quite have a good grasp on like it talks a little bit in that documentary about like his relationship to Edward Teller and why there was tension there. And that kind of made some of the stuff in the movie make a little bit more sense to me. which you don't really like have to like have the full story to enjoy the movie and for it to work.

which I would say it did work for me, but like filling in some of those like gap, like he really, when he said like, I wasn't trying to serve history lesson, I'm like, well, I don't think you did. Cause there were things that like, I wasn't sure about, but I didn't necessarily like need for the movie to work, if that makes sense.

Grant Robin (44:49.996)
Yeah, I think one of the most stark examples of that is when the bomb actually gets dropped in Hiroshima, you don't see any of that. You just see his face as he hears about it. And so that's a very creative choice to say, hey, this is not a history movie. This is a character study.

Eli (45:09.002)
Yeah. Yeah. And, sticking with that POV, you know, it, it, that's actually how it happened. He really did. They didn't call him. He'd, and so like, you are getting a history lesson, but he's not like serving it up to you. Like, can you believe that they didn't call you just are in the moment, filling it with him. and so it just comes across very differently than like lesser directors would have, would have executed it. think.

Emma Thomas said that the script unlocked for him when he came up with the end lines, which we'll definitely talk about later on. it makes sense, like once you kind of know like, okay, this is where I'm heading, now you can kind of like lay all the rest of the dominoes in place to get there. But yeah, he got that script written. Hoyta van Hortema in one of interviews said that once

Once Nolan sends him a script, he knows that like it's pretty much done. Like he's thought it through. It's, it's finished. It's, it's what it's going to be. so, yeah, let's, let's talk a little bit about the crew. We'll kind of run through the, the list of the crew members. it's been a while since I've done some Christopher Nolan movies, but definitely some, recurring names here from

collaborations from the past. Obviously Emma Thomas is a producer with him along with Charles Rovin and Andy Thompson. I think both of whom had produced movies with him in the past as well. We already mentioned the authors of the book. Nolan, you know, obviously wrote the screenplay. And yeah, I just kind of mentioned Hoyte van Hoytema.

He's the the dp the cinematographer And this is his fourth film with nolan. So it feels like they've been working together for forever. So When I was like, yeah, this is just their fourth film together, which doesn't seem like a lot But it it sure seems like they've been Working forever together. I don't know.

Grant Robin (47:26.562)
Yeah, they've made magic, man. He's so good.

Eli (47:27.998)
Yeah. Yeah. And, this is fourth. What was the first one? It would have been, interstellar, think would have been their first movie together. and, yeah. So editor, this is his second time working with Jennifer lame. she edited tenant as well, which is a incredibly well edited movie.

Obviously, like it has to be or else it doesn't work at all. So you've done some film work and you can tell me if this is true, but I think that editors are like the unsung heroes of the movie industry because at the end of the day, the story is told in the edit.

Grant Robin (48:02.519)
You

Eli (48:25.748)
You can have all the shots just right and you can have all that just right. But if it's like not well edited, then it's not going to work. and so.

Grant Robin (48:35.886)
Especially in a Nolan movie like this. This is such a fast-paced movie that if the editing is not crisp, it doesn't work. You get lost, you get confused. she's having to cut on perfect timing. it's almost like a composer in a sense. It's almost music. You're flowing, you're feeling out the flow of the scenes and how to tell a story visually.

Eli (48:38.239)
Yeah, yeah.

Eli (48:47.2)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (48:52.875)
Yeah.

Grant Robin (49:05.378)
without having to be so overt with it by just simple little cutaways or whatever. So yeah, I think she was incredible with this one.

Eli (49:14.292)
Yeah, I mean, so like she, Nolan had called her up and was, he hadn't told her it was Oppenheimer yet, but he was said, he had told her like, it's going to be a movie with men in rooms talking. And she was like, I'm in, cause so that's kind of the sort of, that's the sort of movie she had edited before where these very like dialogue, heavy dramas, with people in rooms talking and,

Grant Robin (49:30.766)
Basically.

Eli (49:43.695)
You know, she had done some, Noah bomb back, editing for him and stuff like that. and yep, another masterpiece in my opinion. but, but yeah, so that's kind of what she was used to. And then, you know, Nolan hired her on for tenant, which is completely like. Vastly different from anything she had ever done before.

Grant Robin (49:52.066)
marriage story.

Eli (50:12.254)
And you almost wonder if he was like testing her, you know, because this movie is a room with people in rooms, a movie with people in rooms talking, very, it kind of flips that on end on its, you know, on its head and in a lot of ways.

Grant Robin (50:33.602)
It's very, very dense dialogue for sure.

Eli (50:36.554)
Yeah, I think this movie is incredibly well edited My only quibble would be that like there's times where like My brain is a little bit overwhelmed with the pace of some of the edits like whenever there's like very like quick flashes between like Different things which happens sometimes in this movie It's for my my

brain personally, I'm just kind of like, whoa, whoa. And I'm trying to like catch up, but there's more stuff happening. So I don't have time to like catch up.

Grant Robin (51:14.776)
Yeah, I felt that way about the dialogue as well. I felt like there were times, especially in the beginning where, you know, my first time seeing it, I was very getting very lost, very easily, because it was so quick. was like almost, it was like unnaturally quick. Like people don't talk like that in real life, but it was so fast just how they were kind of cutting back and forth, you know, with the different dialogue and everything. So yeah, I definitely felt that. That was...

Eli (51:18.452)
Sure, yeah.

Eli (51:26.838)
Thank you.

Eli (51:38.454)
Right then.

Grant Robin (51:43.304)
one of the things that I struggled with, especially on the first watch. Now it was a little bit better the second time with, you know, subtitles and all that stuff, but you can pause it and rewind it if you miss something. But seeing it in theaters, I missed a lot. A lot went over my head.

Eli (51:44.384)
Yeah.

Eli (51:52.116)
Yeah, sure.

Eli (51:58.475)
Yeah. And there's, it's like you were saying, it's very dense, like dialogue wise, but it's very dense visually too. Like, just thinking about like that, the kind of like first montage you go through where he's like, he's like learning things and he's teaching things and he's like looking at Picasso paintings and throwing, you know, glasses up against the corner of his wall. You're trying to like wrap your mind around like.

Okay, like what are all these visuals telling me about him, but they're like you're you're pumping through them So like you don't really have like time to meditate on those things or like let them sink in you're just like pumping through them and so I don't know like it's a it's only like a small quibble because I think it still works somehow, the magic of it, I guess It still works. But yeah, I do and and I want like I wonder if it

If it was like slower paced, it probably just wouldn't be as good. like, think that what we have is probably the best version of it, I guess. Like that's, don't know that it could have been done any differently for what he's trying to accomplish with it. So it's hard for me to like really fault the editing too much. It's just kind of, it is what it had to be. But yeah.

Grant Robin (53:23.33)
Yeah. Yeah. think the feeling that he wants you to feel in this movie is that he wants it to feel high-paced. know, he wants it to feel like, like we are moving towards something very important because we are, you know? And so that definitely comes across, I would say for my personal taste, I could have used a little bit of room to breathe and collect myself in a few of those moments. But the overall feeling of what he wants you to

Eli (53:31.072)
Yeah.

Eli (53:35.52)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (53:42.134)
Sure, Uh huh.

Grant Robin (53:50.56)
feel in those moments about what is happening and the importance of what is happening is definitely comes across.

Eli (53:55.627)
Yeah, yeah, they had asked her to an interview I had heard with Jennifer Lame and they were at, she was asked about like how is like editing with film versus digital. And she said, she was kind of like, know, editing on digital is kind of a pain because like it's, and this is another theory that you can.

tell me if I'm right about with editing. don't, I don't, I don't think if I'm right, you have really any experience editing with like film film. but, I have this theory that like turnover for editing takes longer for digital than film, which sounds counterintuitive except for the fact that you have so much more footage and so many more takes with digital than you would with film.

Grant Robin (54:34.35)
I do not.

Eli (54:53.59)
Because it doesn't cost as much to get more takes and get more footage as it does with film. So you have so much more footage to go through and to process with, you know, colorization and stuff. But also she said one of the reasons it's a pain is because you can get done like editing and coloring a sequence and then they say, I think we need to start, scrap it and start over on this and like.

That just doesn't happen as much on film. kind of like, you kind of try to do the work ahead of time of planning that so that you don't waste the film, you know? Whereas with digital, there's a lot of like, scrap it and start over after all the work you've already done. So it's probably a little bit different with like the small production stuff that you've done than like a big studio telling you, you know, to start over on something, but.

Grant Robin (55:29.859)
Yeah.

Eli (55:51.178)
I don't know, does that ring true to you that?

Grant Robin (55:53.452)
Yeah, yeah, can definitely, I definitely see that. I think another thing that I think of is oftentimes when you shoot digital, as far as the color, you shoot in what's called like a log profile, where all your colors are very flat. And that way you have more opportunity to manipulate the color in post. Whereas film, you don't do that. Film, it's baked in. So film, you try to get your color and everything as perfect as possible.

Eli (56:08.182)
Okay, yeah, yeah.

Eli (56:17.887)
Mm-hmm.

Grant Robin (56:23.342)
in the actual film. And so the editor has to do a little bit less when it comes to that sort of thing, because it's, like you said, you only have so much, it costs so much, and you don't have as much opportunity to manipulate it in the post production workflow. So you have to get it right on, you have to film it basically. You have to film it properly, like the colors as baked in as possible into the actual film.

Eli (56:30.582)
I'm gonna...

Eli (56:51.67)
Mm-hmm.

Grant Robin (56:51.862)
I could see that being an easier process for the editor at least.

Eli (56:55.882)
Yeah. I think it, yeah, I think too, like it ends up, you know, with, with this, like, so with the, editing and the film, like colorization, and then even like, w we're not going to get into special effects quite yet, but like with special effects being like in camera instead of like added in and post, like you would, the, kind of like modern take would be like, we'll just add it in later. we'll just do that later.

Well, when you do that, like you kind of push off the work and you end up making more work in the long run. And so films end up being more expensive. Whereas when you work like Nolan, like let's do everything in camera, let's prep. We need to know exactly what we want to see in camera. We need, you know, we're going to get everything right from the colorization of the film to, you know, the explosives that are going to go off on camera. You know, everything's going to be right. So about the time we're like in the editing room, we're just like piecing the

like piecing it together, not so much like trying to add in all the stuff we need. And you end up like, almost like you spend, you spend like the money that you would spend back here on the front end instead of on the back end. And you probably end up saving some money too, that you would have spent like trying to fix stuff over and over back here because you didn't take care of it on the front end. So I don't know, to me, to me, it's just like smart filmmaking.

I'll know one's part to do it all that way. Yeah.

Grant Robin (58:29.464)
Yeah, and it's fun. You're inventing things, you're coming up with solutions, you know, that's what he loves to do.

Eli (58:36.304)
huh. Yeah. I think that's an important point. So, two is like, yeah, it's also like really fun to like blow stuff up and camera for real. but yeah, another thing she did talk about with the editing was, that like for basically for all the abstract stuff that she's editing,

She spent a lot of time like really trying to get that stuff right because if you leave it up on screen for too long people start wondering like what is it that I'm looking at, you know that sort of thing where really like the goal of those abstract visuals aren't for you to think about like what is this thing I'm seeing but to like kind of like express a feeling express like a an emotion or like a

anxiety of vibration, you know, it's to express all of those things not so you can like think like, ooh, what is this? Like what are these like spinning lights that I'm seeing? What is that coming from? Which I didn't really think about watching it. But here when I heard her say that I was like, that's very true. If you leave it, you have to like figure out how long do I need to leave this up here before I like switch to something else so that people aren't like

dwelling on what they were trying trying to figure out what they were seeing you know I thought I was very like smart

Grant Robin (01:00:12.14)
Yeah, a lot of thought has to go into that, you know, cause again, it's a, it's a personal POV, you know, of a person and, and, they're not, they're just trying to get you to feel something and get a sense of what's in his head by cutting away to these visuals.

Eli (01:00:14.486)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:00:27.242)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Ludwig Goransson does the music. Great. like, we'll get, I'm going to save this until a little bit later. I'm not as big on the score as most people are. And this is maybe just on me because I feel like I'm in the minority on this.

Grant Robin (01:00:38.008)
fantastic school.

Eli (01:00:57.428)
I don't think a lot of people share the same opinion on it that I do. But I'm not going to talk about it now. We'll touch on it later. But yeah, it is a good score. I don't think it's a bad score by any means. But yeah, Gordon's does really well. This is his second movie with Nolan. And there's an argument to make.

Grant Robin (01:01:11.776)
I'm I'm ready for your hot tea.

Eli (01:01:26.078)
To be made that he's the the hottest composer in Hollywood right now The set after watching sinners. I'm like man. This guy is on on it. Yeah Let's roll through the rest of this crew and we'll end up talking about their work more later, but Production designer was Ruth de Jong

Grant Robin (01:01:33.058)
Yeah, man.

Grant Robin (01:01:37.666)
Yeah, he is, he's next level.

Eli (01:01:55.039)
She's done, she's done a lot of good stuff. She did the production design on Nope and Us, the Jordan Peele movies. If you've seen those great production design. Yeah. Yeah. Both of them have phenomenal production design. Us, the movie, like kind of rides on the production design in a lot of ways. The production design and the acting. So.

Grant Robin (01:02:06.156)
I saw Nope, I never saw us, but Nope was really good.

Eli (01:02:23.732)
And then she's done some like art direction work too on some Paul Thomas Anderson and Terrence Malick films. So yeah, a lot of great work that she's done. This is her first time working with Nolan though. So that's cool. Set decorator, Claire Kaufman. Kind of set decorator production design kind of work hand in hand. But yeah, these two guys are important for the movie. The visual effects supervisor was Andrew Jackson.

not the president but the the visual effects guy and then special effects kind of like so Visual effects Andrew Jackson was kind Andrew Jackson was probably like the head guy over all of it I think but also he focused in on like more of the the kind of abstract stuff and They brought in this guy Scott Fisher

Grant Robin (01:02:55.758)
I'm glad you clarified that.

Eli (01:03:20.48)
to supervise the special effects for a lot of like the in-camera stuff like on set. like think rain, explosions, that sort of stuff is kind of like, Andrew Jackson is kind of like still over that stuff, but Scott Fisher is the one kind of supervising a lot of that stuff on the set. Sound design by Richard King. He's done some work with Nolan in the past. I think he did like bat.

You know the Batman trilogy and that sort of thing. So good. So they have a working relationship Sound mixing by Willie D Burton, which I think the sound the sound design and sound mixing for this is like super important this movie There's a there's a ton being done with that. So well, we might Might get into that a little bit but um stunt coordinator in George Cottle

Grant Robin (01:04:04.365)
Yeah.

Eli (01:04:17.942)
costumes Ellen Mironik Makeup by Louisa Abel and the casting was done by John Papsadera who's done the casting for most of the Nolan movies so and Good casting it was indeed. Let's let's talk a little bit about this cast Obviously we have mr. Killian Murphy himself as J Robert Oppenheimer Oppie if you will

It feels weird to call him Oppy, but they do call him that more than Yeah Yeah, it feels like he's called Oppy more than Robert in the movie. I don't know But but yeah Nolan so he's he's gonna make this movie Nolan just calls him out of the blue and it's like hey This is this is it. This is your moment and you're gonna be my Oppenheimer and he was like he was like excited and he said he

Grant Robin (01:04:52.148)
Yeah, he's such an important figure to call him by a nickname.

Eli (01:05:17.908)
He like hung up and later on he was like, man, this is, this is a big deal. Kind of like, yeah, it kind of hit him the kind of weight of it. But yeah, he talks about like, he watched a lot of the, Oppy stuff online. And he talked about like, when you're watching like speeches and lectures and that sort of thing, it's kind of like this, this public performance. So it's very like, it's

Grant Robin (01:05:25.144)
big role.

Eli (01:05:45.461)
the performative Oppenheimer, but it's not necessarily like the real day-to-day Oppenheimer. And if you think about it, there's, truth to that. You know, we've, me and you, know of both like spoken on a stage, you know, before and you, it is a different you that's on stage. So then it's just like your day-to-day life, like, usually. so there's, there's something like performative about it, which it's not a bad thing. It's just like the nature of.

you know, speaking, in front of people. and so he really, like, he really had to use his imagination alongside, the script to try to like get into that mode of like, okay, one, like one of the things he was thinking was about, you know, the Oppenheimer's intellect and it being like not so much a gift as much as it is a burden and how that would affect him like day to day.

especially like what the weight of the moment he was in, you know, and I don't know, that makes sense to me, like trying to get it's, you he's trying to get into this guy's head. that's what, that's what he has to do, I guess.

Grant Robin (01:07:02.69)
Yeah, it's such a tough role to play because he's not, you like you think of like, you know, lot of like Leonardo DiCaprio's roles and a lot of times he's playing these big characters that have these big moments where he's yelling and stuff. That's not this role. This role is completely subtle and it's all about his face and his eyes and emotion that he's trying to convey. And man, he does just an absolutely incredible job.

Eli (01:07:22.07)
his eyes, yeah.

Eli (01:07:28.842)
Yeah. Top five, eye acting, you think? Probably all time, top five.

Grant Robin (01:07:35.84)
Yeah, to be able to convey all of that and especially, you know, seeing it on IMAX and just those portraits and those closeups that they cut to, he had a lot to do in this movie and man, he pulled through.

Eli (01:07:44.053)
Mmm.

Eli (01:07:51.509)
Yeah, yeah for sure. yeah nolan nolan kind of talked about He You know kilian had never had like a role quite this big before a lot of like big roles he's had obviously he's He's a you know, well-known actor and everything, but this is this is like big And one of his goals was to surround him with other great actors to kind of like push him forward in his craft and all that and I mean

It's a Nolan movie, so it's an ensemble cast, so obviously there's plenty of great actors surrounding him. I did note that there were five Oscar winners. He was acting against with, so you have Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, Kenneth Branagh, Gary Oldman, and Rami Malek. All Oscar winning at the time. Obviously now there's two more.

and Robert Downey Jr. and Killian Murphy himself, which we'll get to later. yeah, I mean.

Grant Robin (01:08:57.166)
Yeah, and this cast is just, it's an embarrassment of riches. mean, three of the people that you just mentioned have very minor characters. mean, Gary Oldman's in there for one scene, Affleck's in there for, you know, a couple of scenes. You know, Rami Malek is just, he's just chilling until the end. Yeah, it's like, okay, there's Rami Malek with a clipboard. I'm guessing he's going to be important at some point or else why would they have cast him, you know?

Eli (01:09:00.329)
It is.

Eli (01:09:11.124)
Malik is, he just, he just hops in and says straw sucks.

Eli (01:09:24.054)
Yeah, yeah, Kenneth Branagh has a few more moments than the other guys

Grant Robin (01:09:26.456)
So it's just, yeah, he's a little bit more involved, but yeah, it's an embarrassment of riches for sure. There's so many actors in here that you're like, man, like you have to be Chris Nolan for an actor that big to be like, sure, I'll play this small role.

Eli (01:09:42.123)
Yeah. Yeah. And, and like everyone that you talk like that you see in interviews and stuff, they just like are like, man, Killian just knocked this out of the park. It's just like incredible what he does. And it's because I think, I think what actors probably recognize even more than like, than we can is the difficulty of like maintaining the just like subtle, like

in the language and visual language of the movie this subtle like vibrating hum of this dude for three whole hours this like quiet scintillating like emotion and mystery i guess even with with like no big moments there's like no moment where he explodes or no moment where he like does anything like

big like you were talking about. I can't think of any moment where he does that.

Grant Robin (01:10:45.998)
No, it's all subtle. It's all facial expressions. And then, I mean, he's also playing a wide range of his experience. I mean, from a young up and comer who's passionate to someone who feels like he's about to change the world to someone who is burdened by the reality that he might have led to the destruction of the world. And it's so many different emotions that you're seeing in him. And it's...

Eli (01:10:56.406)
Yeah.

Grant Robin (01:11:13.994)
Yeah, the weight of what he's doing and what he feels like he might have done to the world is so apparent on his face and it's a hard thing to pull off.

Eli (01:11:23.572)
Yeah.

Eli (01:11:27.178)
Yeah, it's a incredible performance and I really like, man, I don't really have anything else to say about it, but yeah, we'll definitely talk about how he executes it as we go. yeah, just moving through more, moving along in the cast list, Emily Blunt plays Kitty Oppenheimer. She talks about being attracted to this kind of woman refusing to conform to gender expectations.

So you've got a little bit, a little bit of that in here. but yeah. And then she just talked about how like Nolan really like, let you explore the emotions of your character and like working with you in that way, which is always cool to hear. I feel like, I guess we can talk about her and Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock back to back. Florence Pugh was attracted to Tatlock. I guess, guess in a similar way, like.

a woman that is bold and always in control. She talked about, she kind of mentioned like even like when the nude parts, she's like in control, you know, which, you know, we'll probably like touch on that a little bit later of what we think about those parts. yeah, it's this weird thing. like, I mean,

It's funny, like we're in the middle of the Spielberg series because it seems like Christopher Nolan and Spielberg both have like trouble with like women and sexuality in movies. It's like not their strong suit by a long shot. and, and specifically with Nolan, it's like this like broken wife relationships thing that happens all through his movies.

Which is weird because he has like a long standing, relationship, great, seemingly great relationship with his wife, with kids, and they work together and they live together and they seem to like each other. And I don't know, maybe it's this like weird anxiety he has about like losing his wife or something.

Grant Robin (01:13:46.094)
Yeah, it's definitely something that people have brought up with his past movies is that he often fails to have that strong female character. And I feel like there's potential for Kitty in there, but she doesn't really get to shine too, too often. Yeah. And the nature of the character that he's outlining.

Eli (01:13:52.298)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:14:05.384)
Yeah, yeah, has like one moment really yeah

Grant Robin (01:14:15.084)
You know, he is a womanizer, you know, he that that was what he was known for. So I guess in some ways it's appropriate to this particular story. But yeah, I would love to see him, you know, try to change that in the future, maybe write in some strong female characters, maybe even have a female lead in one of his movies, you know.

Eli (01:14:17.43)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli (01:14:34.59)
Yeah, I would love to see that too. because like really like Up to this point and then still after it's kind of like a stain on his Career in a way like can he really do it? It's not like really that big of a deal. like he makes the movies that he makes You know, that's what he knows and what he does well and so there's a there's a certain degree to which like i'm kind of like I let

women make movies from a woman's perspective because hello, like they're the ones that have the perspective. So let's like let them make those movies and push push those Barbie is the perfect example. Let's have a woman make the Barbie movie from a woman's perspective. And surprise, surprise, it's you know, it was incredible. It was fantastic. And so, you know,

There's a degree to which when people bring that stuff up, I'm like, yeah, maybe he doesn't serve the female characters well, but he's not trying to tell those stories. maybe he just knows that they're not his stories to tell, in a way. So there's a degree to which I'm kind of like, I get it, but also like.

maybe that's just not the right criticism for this so I don't know

Anyway, yeah.

Grant Robin (01:16:08.44)
Yeah, I think it'd be hard as a male writer to write a script that has a female lead, you know? I definitely think he could do better in the future of having some stronger female characters in there that he can really highlight. So maybe that's a way to, an area to improve.

Eli (01:16:21.45)
I think so, yeah.

I I agree. I definitely agree with that sentiment. I would love to see that. But like, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's just one of those things where I'm like, it's hard. I would love to see it, but it's hard for me to really fault him a ton for knowing what he's good at and not stepping into stuff that he just doesn't know maybe how to speak to.

But yeah, so Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh are both really good in the movie. I think they really handle their characters well and their presence on screen is always felt and strong, which is good. But yeah, let's move to Matt Damon as Leslie Groves. Man, Damon is...

He's he's he feels a little different than than a lot of the other characters in this movie You know, he's he's a bigger personality he's kind of like He's both like the Kind of gravitas character that like lays down the law but also like pulls off like bits of like humorous lines and stuff, too So I liked Matt Damon in this movie

What did you think of Daemon?

Grant Robin (01:17:57.388)
I thought he was very important to the movie because, you know, so much of the movie was so serious and so tense that I think he brought some much needed sort of humor and just kind of like a different element. Like you said, he was a very different character than these other people. And I think he did incredible. think he was exactly what that role needed. And yeah, I think he was refreshing.

Eli (01:18:12.778)
Mm-hmm.

Grant Robin (01:18:26.264)
presence on the screen.

Eli (01:18:27.804)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and he I feel like he had kind of been in a lull for a while but like these he he's kind of had a run of like really good rolls in the past few years and going back to like Ford versus Ferrari which he's great in and The last duel which he's great in. I don't know if you've seen that but Really good in that very different

A different role for him there. air. Did you see air? yeah, he's great in it, you know? so yeah, I feel like he's, you know, leading up to this, he was kind of getting back in a groove and was able to like hit this role like in stride, you know, with his, with just the Matt Damon of, of it all, you I don't know. Yeah, he's just good. I don't think he's

Grant Robin (01:19:01.879)
I did see error.

Eli (01:19:26.966)
doing anything profound necessarily. He's just, like you said, of like gives you a little bit something different that that makes the movie move, move, you know, in a way. And I don't know, it takes a little bit of the heaviness off for a second. If there's any moments to breathe, it's it's kind of when he steps in and says something a little funny.

Grant Robin (01:19:51.214)
Yeah. Yeah, him and the Isidore Robbie character, I think those are the two characters that when they're on the screen, you can sort of breathe a little bit. They bring a little bit of a human element, a little bit of a humor element to what you're watching. So I think it's necessary. I think it balances the movie out.

Eli (01:19:56.843)
Hear ya.

Eli (01:20:14.346)
Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny because like, Groves is doing it in a different way too than, than Robbie is their, their characters, you know, David, speaking of Robbie, David Kreml, it's as Robbie is really good. he, he almost acts as like, moral conscience in a way to Oppenheimer. and also like there, there's kind of like that recurring thing where he's like getting him to eat.

That I'm like every time I think it happens at least twice and both times I'm like dude, that's That's a good friend right there. Like hey, don't forget to eat, you know, here's some oranges But yeah, he he was talking about really trying to bring like street or streetwise Brooklyn to his character which kind of comes across and Yeah, I didn't this is something that I didn't even realize until I was looking at

Grant Robin (01:20:53.886)
Yeah, here's some oranges.

Eli (01:21:13.92)
his filmography. Dude, did you grow up watching the Santa Claus with Tim Allen?

Grant Robin (01:21:22.542)
I think I've seen one of them. I don't know how many of them I've seen.

Eli (01:21:24.104)
Okay Well, he's the character bernard. He's like the head elf and the santa claus movie Is this guy david krummeltz that is like wait, that's bernard and when you when I realized it I was like because I grew up watching that movie like every christmas almost just about my family really liked that one and Yeah, so like I can like visualize him as bernard in my head.

But yeah, I just thought that was funny. Like didn't even hit me that this guy was Bernard of my childhood. I guess we should probably talk about Robert Delany Jr. as Louis Strauss or straw. What does he say? Straws is how he pronounced it. Straws. Man, what'd you think of old RDJ in this movie?

Grant Robin (01:22:12.206)
Sure. Straws, Lewis Straw.

Grant Robin (01:22:24.75)
I'm a little I'm torn on his character. So I feel like I feel like he's incredible. I feel like he does a great job I just when when watching the movie, especially the first time I just felt like this his scenes I didn't care about as much, you know, it was just it was like a completely different storyline that was happening simultaneously with this main storyline and I just felt like for me

Eli (01:22:25.45)
Is he?

Okay.

Yeah, sure.

Eli (01:22:43.156)
Yeah, yeah.

Eli (01:22:50.272)
Mm-hmm.

Grant Robin (01:22:54.24)
It was just very confusing and especially like that third hour, it really gets slow. And I just wondered like how much of his character and maybe you can, you know, help me understand, but I wondered how much of his character was really necessary to the story. Like, I feel like they could have had that sort of courtroom element with the kangaroo trial that was happening.

Eli (01:22:56.512)
Yeah.

Eli (01:23:01.11)
Mm-hmm.

Grant Robin (01:23:18.806)
You know, and I know he was essential in setting all that up and it gave us a good little twist at the end. But I think I think Downey did a great job. just his that particular storyline. just watching it. I just didn't, you know, care as much as like the other parts of it, you know.

Eli (01:23:37.557)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I honestly, like my first, like when I watched the movie for the first time that was in, that was in like, one of the things I noted was like, is the, is all the Strauss stuff really like necessary for this movie? Is it like, what is it for? even like this, this second watch through, I was really like trying to tune into those and I was kind of like,

I was a little bit more on board. was like, okay, you've got like, there's, you're kind of like juxtaposing what's going on here with like the Oppenheimer POV. And I can kind of see like some of the use in that. And I think let's put a pin in that because there's like, I have some, was doing like.

Listen to a lot of different takes and stuff. And I think there's one that I think is like really like profound and, and the way it looks at that. so like, let's put a pin in it. Cause definitely like that's something that we're going to hit on. cause we ha I mean, we, you have to, but yeah, his character. I'm still not like the biggest on, but the acting is like you said, great. Like he's able to really like.

take the take the lid off the bottle and like just explode there at the end, which you've got to love. And he really do. He has to like walk this line of like when you first meet him, he seems like this nice guy that's like cares about the scientists and then like he has to make that switch to antagonist at some point. And that's a fine balance to carry that he does well. And

It's almost this, I don't know if you've seen, have you ever seen the movie Amadeus, which is about Mozart? It's a great movie. I think you would like it. It's kind of one of the biopics. think it, I want to say it came out like 1989 or maybe 84, 1984, sometime in the 80s. But it kind of like,

Eli (01:25:57.751)
flipped the bio, it kind of came up with a new way of doing a biopic. And it probably wasn't the first thing to do this, but it was maybe one of the more popular ones that did it was telling a popular, like a, story of a great man through the eyes of his antagonist, through the eyes of his enemy. So Sally Erie, who was Mozart's like, kind of like rival composer at the time,

It's kind of told through his perspective in a lot of ways, that movie. And so you get a little bit of that. It's like the black and white sections are kind of like the saliery portion of this movie, kind of like seeing it through the eyes of the antagonist. And when you watch it for the first time, you don't know that that's what you're getting.

This is much further down on the list, but it's kind of like the black and white of it all kind of is like a sleight of hand in a way, because what do you generally think of when you think black and white? You think like, this is more historical. This is more like trustworthy. But like really what Nolan's doing is he's using it as the opposite. He's using it to like give you that feeling.

But really, when you're watching the black and white portions, you're watching the least trustworthy parts of the movie because it's through this dude that has this distorted perspective of someone that's just totally in his mind, totally made up, not even close to being a reality. Oppenheimer spends so little time thinking about Strauss, and Strauss is so wrapped up in thinking about Oppenheimer.

Grant Robin (01:27:50.915)
Yeah.

Eli (01:27:51.233)
So I thought that was a cool like trick that Nolan does with, with, with the kind of black and white versus color stuff. So.

Grant Robin (01:27:57.123)
Yeah.

Grant Robin (01:28:02.478)
Yeah, I think it would have been a very easy role to overact. And I don't feel like he did. I feel like he towed that line and he did it in a tasteful way. I think that's the kind of role that somebody could have easily overacted in.

Eli (01:28:06.634)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (01:28:12.501)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:28:16.756)
Yeah Yeah, and he said too like one of the funny things is like he said they were doing my makeup and they kind of shaved my Hairline back a little bit and he was like I looked in the mirror and I saw like my dad and you know, his dad was big in Hollywood and I haven't seen the documentary he did he like helped make about his dad is called senior a couple probably a few years ago it came out, but I haven't seen that but

But yeah, I reminded of his dad and then he, that some interview, he talked about how at one point, like Nolan handed him like a piece of equipment and was like, here, hold this. I'm going to, need to go do this and I'll be right back. And he said, like, that just doesn't happen in like Marvel movie sets. Like he was, he said, but it was cool because it gave me like flashbacks of my childhood, like being on movie sets and like holding stuff for people. And, um, you know, he just.

appreciated that Nolan didn't like hold him up as like, Robert Downey Jr's on set. Everybody, you know, he's like, no, you're just, we're, together on this, like, hold this for me real quick. so I thought that was cool. Like a cool little anecdote. Yeah. And he loved it. he also said at some point that it's the best movie he's been in, which I find hard to, to argue with looking at his filmography. So.

Grant Robin (01:29:30.84)
How dare you make me hold this?

Eli (01:29:44.82)
Hahaha

Grant Robin (01:29:44.876)
Yeah, I mean, I can't argue with that.

Eli (01:29:48.745)
It depends on your, how much you love Infinity War and Endgame, I guess. But I would put this movie above those personally.

Grant Robin (01:29:57.262)
I mean.

Grant Robin (01:30:00.686)
Doolittle, you know, I I don't know, it's pretty good.

Eli (01:30:02.038)
Do the, I mean, do a little, come on. The judge. Hey. Yeah. Um, man, uh, one of the things I've noted was that Oppenheimer exists in kind of like this world of rock star scientists. And so like, it kind of makes sense to have a rock star cast of scientists to, to portray that you've got Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence.

Grant Robin (01:30:05.87)
Iron Man 3? mean come on man, he's been in some bangers.

Grant Robin (01:30:26.669)
Yep.

Eli (01:30:30.986)
I think the interesting thing about him, like the way he has to play that character is, and he talks about it in the interviews is like, he kind of has to be everything that Oppenheimer is not. He's just very different. Not, you know, just in personality, but also like he's the experiment guy and Oppenheimer is the theory guy. So they're just like on opposite ends in every way, which is.

You know makes it interesting Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, I think he does really good with this role

Grant Robin (01:31:11.032)
Yeah, another one that brings a little bit of comedic humor at times.

Eli (01:31:14.57)
Yeah. But also like he's, he's kind of like a secondary antagonist too. and like he's, he's kind of disruptive in some of the meetings. He kind of like, you know, he's, he has the whole like, I'm sorry, whenever he's like trying to shake his hand after he just like trashed them right in front of him, at the, in the hearing, which, which I.

Grant Robin (01:31:20.888)
Right.

Eli (01:31:44.369)
one of the things that's not in the movie that I was like, man, that should have been in the movie. but I guess it just didn't work with what they were trying to do was, one of the guys in the documentary had said that when that happened, he, he stuck out his hand and said, you know, I'm sorry, right after having like trashed him and said he didn't trust them to do whatever. And, Oppenheimer, this guy said that Oppenheimer said,

After what you just said, I don't know what that means. him saying, I'm sorry, you know, or something like, man, that should have been in the movie. but yeah, Jason Clark as Roger Robb, man, that dude, he was good. I was, yeah, I was angry at that guy, but I think I was supposed to be, you know,

Grant Robin (01:32:22.84)
You

Grant Robin (01:32:34.552)
That's another role that could have easily been overacted, you know? Yeah, that's the point.

Eli (01:32:42.757)
How about Casey Affleck as Boris Posh? Like you start to get creeped out by that guy before you even see him and then all of a sudden it's Casey Affleck and you're like, oh wow. Okay. You know, Rami Malik, it's funny. Rami Malik is kind of like, I don't have anything to say about him. He just shows up and says a few lines and I'm like, okay, yep. There's Rami Malik.

Grant Robin (01:32:47.054)
Because why not?

Grant Robin (01:33:09.314)
Very important lines, but yeah, he's there.

Eli (01:33:10.346)
He said his lines, you know. Kenneth Branagh, you know, he's just being, I think he was just happy to be there.

yeah, how about this is probably like the biggest like to me This is the biggest like small like not small but short performance in the sense that like He's in one like short scene and that's it is gary oldman as harry truman. Man oldman knocks it out of the park. I think with that like with the few minutes he has on screen I think he's like maybe per capita

other than Killian Murphy like is the best best in the movie one of the best in the movie for sure I think yeah I hated Harry Truman after his scene you know

Grant Robin (01:34:01.176)
Yeah, he's good.

Grant Robin (01:34:06.254)
Poor Harry Truman. Now everybody hates him.

Eli (01:34:08.032)
Like, yeah. But I mean, so that's the other thing. Like when I watched that scene, I was thinking like, you know, this is probably just like contrived for the movie or whatever. But it turns out like it's, it's very, that's one of the like parts that's very true to history. Like he, you know, he told one of his staffers after Oppenheimer had walked out like,

I don't ever want to see that cryberry be scientists again. Like he actually said that, you know, he, he was, he was offended that Oppenheimer told him that he had blood on his hands, which he actually said to him, because he's, know, he's the one that made the decision at the end of the day to drop the bombs and, know, how dare Oppenheimer say I have blood on my hands when I'm the one that made the decision. so I mean,

It seems like Harry Truman really was that that way. I don't know

Grant Robin (01:35:13.358)
It was very interesting just seeing this man who has wrestled so much with the weight of what he has created and then to see someone on the other side of it who wasn't a part of the creation, who was more so just like, hey, we need a bomb. Give me this bomb so that I can end this war or whatever. And it's almost like when you're in that sort of presidential role, you have to kind of.

Eli (01:35:32.96)
Uh-huh.

Grant Robin (01:35:41.39)
turn off that switch in your brain where you're not thinking about the humanity of what the devastation you're causing, because you're just trying to see things in a bigger perspective of like, I need to do this chess move so that this happens. And so to see that next to this person who's in the weeds of like, can't believe this is happening, I feel so guilty with such a

Eli (01:35:53.024)
Yeah.

Grant Robin (01:36:10.955)
sort of stark, you know comparison

Eli (01:36:14.43)
Yeah, yeah, and it's the power structure too. And I think that's the big thing that will kind of maybe be one of the last things we wrap up with is just talking about like these creative minds having to work within these power structures and the different goals that you maybe people have for the same thing.

Maybe the scientists versus the political people, like people in power. So yeah, all that is very rich and interesting. Let me just spout off the rest of this cast. Tom Conte as Albert Einstein, great. I think he does fine as Albert Einstein.

It's hard to do Albert Einstein. But that's fine. Dylan Arnold as Frank Oppenheimer. He's just there a little bit. That's fine. I did like Alden Ehrenreich as the senator aide for in the black and white portion kind of like the, you know, bouncing off of old RDJ. I thought he did really well in that role kind of being like

Grant Robin (01:37:29.866)
yeah, yeah.

Eli (01:37:41.729)
I don't know, a bit of a moral compass there in that black and white portion in a way. David Das Malchen just doing his typical creepy guy stuff with William Borden. James, there's a few more names. Matthew Modine, I thought he pops up a few times as he's kind of like the gray-haired guy.

That is at Los Alamos and then he's on the team and then he's one of the guys that gives like a good testimony for Oppenheimer. Like to that guy. He just like gave off this air of likeability, I guess. Yeah, Jefferson Hall plays Chevalier, the kind of guy that.

ends up getting him in trouble by mentioning like the leaking the findings to Russia. A few other people that are in this movie, Alex Wolf, who I've seen in some stuff. I didn't even remember him being in it, but he's in it. Josh Peck plays Kenneth Bainbridge. Josh from Jake. Yeah.

Grant Robin (01:38:44.237)
Mm-hmm.

Grant Robin (01:38:59.778)
My guy Josh Peck from Drake and Josh. He had such an important part too. I'm like, is Josh Peck from Drake and Josh in charge of, you know, this such an important part of the movie? It was so weird to see.

Eli (01:39:13.354)
Yeah. Was he the the button guy? Yeah.

Grant Robin (01:39:17.826)
Yeah, he was the one that was like, hey, if this, you know, whatever drops below a certain, whatever, you have to press the button. I'm like, my gosh.

Eli (01:39:20.5)
Yeah, yeah Yep, uh-huh and you just sitting there with his hand over Like I would be so worried that I would accidentally press it when I didn't need to Yeah A few others Gustav Skarsgard plays Hans Bethe Son of I think son of Stalin Skarsgard. So that's cool

Grant Robin (01:39:27.798)
Yeah.

Grant Robin (01:39:32.298)
I know. He did well though. He did well in his role.

Eli (01:39:50.229)
And then Jack Quaid, Richard Feynman, also son of Dennis Quaid, I think. yeah, some kind of sons of great actors there. And then this is a fun fact. Flora Nolan is Christopher Nolan's daughter. She's the girl with the peeling face. yeah, that's his daughter. So that might cue into how Nolan is thinking about this movie and the horror of it all.

Grant Robin (01:40:10.958)
That's pretty morbid

Eli (01:40:19.318)
It's like Yeah Yes, it was really that I couldn't have done that but yeah when you Yeah, when you when you know that fact it makes it kind of a little bit heavier that visual but yeah That's the cast and crew We've talked a lot of production stuff already, but there's some more cool stuff we can talk about for sure

Grant Robin (01:40:20.044)
Yeah, that's intense.

Grant Robin (01:40:27.608)
Yeah, that's hard to see your daughter.

Eli (01:40:48.852)
You know, location wise, they couldn't really shoot at Los Alamos. Nolan talked about it being too modernized. Like you can get like, yeah, this building that would be good to get, but then like in the frame is like a Starbucks too. And so it's like, it doesn't really work. so they find this place, ghost ranch, and I don't know how to say this, a beque you New Mexico. it's along the same mountain ranges, Los Alamos.

three hour drive from Albuquerque. So it has the same feel as Los Alamos and they basically like build from the ground up that Los Alamos set. They kind of build a and know, Hoyta and Nolan are able to like look at the model, kind of say, we can take this stuff out, we can add some stuff here.

and kind of play around with that. And then they build it. And, it's really like, in reality, if you see like a sky shot of it, it's not very big. It's not like expansive, like the actual Los Alamos was. Cause I mean, you have a whole town. but the way that Nolan and Hoyta like catch all the different angles that they can and put like the perspective and all that, that they use with the composition of it, it makes it look pretty expansive. so.

That's always cool to see but yeah, they they did film at Oppenheimer's actual Los Alamos house So that that is the only that I think that's the only thing that they filmed at the actual Los Alamos location So really like powerful, you know when you watch the behind the scenes you can kind of feel the weight that the crew and cast feel about Filming like on that location. There's this

being in the space kind of pulls out like the weight and responsibility of it all. Something that you lose like, you know, when you're doing working in front of a green screen or like on fake sets that like when you actually go on location, like makes it, you just feel it, you know. Yeah, they shot at Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. They actually, you know, all that stuff is shot actually at Princeton. And then they, you know, they have

Eli (01:43:12.266)
they have a lot of like, you know.

set stuff that they do. It's in California, the little hearing room is this little space they found in Alhambra, California. Narrow space. It's funny hearing the cast talked about it because they were like, it's small. We were in there for weeks. It was hot and claustrophobic. You had like a big IMAX camera in there and then like up to 15 people crammed into this little space all the time.

And I think maybe that adds a little bit to the tension of it all too. cause obviously like thematically and narratively, there's a lot of tension in those scenes, but probably there's, there's also like just tension from the actual work of filming it in that small space too.

Grant Robin (01:44:06.348)
Yeah, and it's such an uninspiring space too. It's like, you know, like in the interview I was listening to with Hoitsevon Hoitseman, it's like, how do you make something like that look cinematic? And, you know, he was basically just like, you just focus on the faces, you know, like it's all about the performance and the dialogue. And that's what you're trying to draw the attention to.

Eli (01:44:09.236)
Yeah.

Eli (01:44:16.96)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:44:20.49)
Yep.

Eli (01:44:24.852)
Mm-hmm. Yeah for sure Another fun fact some of the modern Los Alamos staff were extras in some of the scenes, so that's There's like a there's like a interview with Nolan the direct the current director of Los Alamos a couple of scientists and And Kai Bird there's like a

Interview with all of a panel interview with all of them that you can watch. It's on YouTube, but it's also on like the blu-ray disc and Yeah, the the director of Los Alamos was talking about like a bunch of his staff was on vacation and they were on the set You know as extras. I thought that was funny Yeah, that's a cool vacation go be in the Oppenheimer Yeah

Grant Robin (01:45:16.622)
Why not?

Eli (01:45:21.28)
But yeah, you know, as far as like onset stuff, you know, it's kind of like the typical stuff you hear about Nolan. Like he's very like approachable. you know, he's, Robert Downey Jr. Talked about like, there's, there's not really like hit, go hit your mark or like, it's very like unrigorous. They, kind of fill out the space together. It's very collaborative. and he's kind of just always been that way from.

from what I could tell doing the series on him is just, yeah, he kind of like, there's a bit of like mystery and like, know, Christopher Nolan feels important just because of who he is and the movies he's made, but like actually on set, he's like very like approachable and on a, you know, not self-important or anything like that, which is always good to hear, you know.

Grant Robin (01:46:17.474)
Yeah. Absolutely.

Eli (01:46:20.634)
and they also talked about, that they're, you know, they're watching the dailies every day on film together. And that's like very collaborative and engaging. it's, they talked about how, like, when you watch dailies on like digitally shot big productions, a lot of times, like everyone's just kind of watching them on random screens and

You know, people are on their phones, but like when you sit down in a film room and watch dailies on film, everyone's like, there's no phones out. Everyone's engaged. There's one screen. Everyone's like engaged in it at the same time. And so like, it just builds natural like collaboration. I thought that was really cool. I had never thought about that, but yeah.

Grant Robin (01:46:45.026)
Mm-hmm.

Grant Robin (01:46:56.876)
Yep.

Grant Robin (01:47:04.076)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you're getting to kind of feel it out together and kind of feels more real when you're being able to watch it together.

Eli (01:47:15.092)
Yeah. All right. This is your time to shine. Camera stuff. Nolan films on the... So I don't know what a lot of this stuff means. 15 perf, 70 millimeter IMAX film. He sees that as being as close as we can be to how the eye sees. I don't know.

Grant Robin (01:47:18.534)
gosh.

Grant Robin (01:47:36.706)
Yeah, I I've never filmed on film, but from what I understand, that's just the size of the actual film itself. And typical is 35 millimeters, like typical film. So that's like, obviously like double the size. So you're just getting that much quality and it's a lot more vertical than how you see movies. And for a portrait movie like this, that's why it really worked because you're filling the screen, you know, with

Eli (01:47:47.754)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:47:59.658)
Mm-hmm.

Grant Robin (01:48:06.69)
the verticality of the person's face and it gets right up close and personal. This movie's not really about landscapes, know, it's about people, it's about closeups. Even the Trinity project, you know, it's very vertical, you know, and so for him to shoot it in that way I think made a lot of sense for the story.

Eli (01:48:17.515)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:48:26.932)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And, and the other part that goes along with that is just like the, the, like the lenses and the camera itself. So the, they shot, a lot of the closeups and according, this was according to like, one of the camera guys that they were interviewing in the, in the behind the scenes, he was talking about, closeups and close to minimum focus. And he said,

This is something he said that I have no idea what it means, but maybe you do. That the lenses go to T1.9 and sum to 2. Do you know what that means?

Grant Robin (01:49:03.212)
Yeah, that's your aperture. Yeah. That's like how wide the lens, like the inside of the lens is. It can be wide or it can be like small. And...

Eli (01:49:06.272)
Okay.

Eli (01:49:15.222)
Okay, so what is T1.9? What would that be, big or small? Okay.

Grant Robin (01:49:19.628)
That's small. So the smaller it is, the thinner your plane of focus is. And so the more like depth of field you have, like right now, how my background's very blurry, I'm at like F 2.8, which they use T stops instead of F stops in like cinema lenses. So that's what that means is like, he's getting it as like, sorry, I said it opposite, as wide open as possible. So the smaller the number, the wider, I said that opposite, sorry.

Eli (01:49:25.044)
Okay.

Eli (01:49:29.622)
Right.

Eli (01:49:33.173)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:49:42.614)
in.

Okay.

Okay.

Grant Robin (01:49:49.678)
So he had it wide open to where it's very shallow depth of field and you're getting right up close to the person's face.

Eli (01:49:54.44)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, and from what I understand, like, just large formats have less depth of field in general already. And so that, I guess that just adds to it. I mean, you just think about, the way they filmed this, too, just the proximity of this huge camera to these people's faces. Well, specifically, Killian Murphy's face, like...

You watch some of the behind the scenes and I mean like they have the lens like less than a foot away from his face, you know.

Grant Robin (01:50:29.762)
and he's having to stare like right into it and give us performance.

Eli (01:50:31.88)
Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's incredible, both like from behind the camera and from him in front of the camera, you know, at the same time, for sure. they're not, they're not using zooms. they're, the camera is right there. There's no zoom lenses in a Christopher Nolan film. which is actually, something that like,

Grant Robin (01:50:49.346)
Yes.

Eli (01:50:58.334)
And all the directors, so I've covered Wes Anderson, Christopher Nolan, and still making my way through Spielberg. And I think that's something common between them is they don't, like Wes Anderson will use zoom stuff in like kind of comical ways sometimes, but in general, they don't, they, instead of like zooming with a lens, they just put the camera closer, all those directors.

Grant Robin (01:51:23.64)
Yeah, I mean, that's even like, even on, you know, in what I do, like we're using a lot of fixed lenses. Unless you just, you're doing more like documentary style where it's run and gun, I just need to pop in and pop out. Or if it is comedy, like a lot of times you'll see it more so in those regards. But yeah, for movies like this, you're trying to use your fixed lenses as much as possible.

Eli (01:51:30.655)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:51:35.061)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:51:47.285)
Right. Which makes sense. You don't want to be like having focus go out when you're shooting on film, you know? Yeah. The camera itself too is just like big and loud. Like Tom Conti, the guy that played Einstein talked about like it sounded to him like a tractor when it would start up. It was rolling. It's like, what is that?

Grant Robin (01:51:57.955)
Right.

Eli (01:52:16.254)
Yeah. And they shoot a lot of the dialogue on those, with those IMAX cameras. and Christopher Nolan does not do, ADR, which is, know, it for, if you are not familiar with what that is, it's basically like rerecording the, the vocals in post and adding it back in matching it up with,

Grant Robin (01:52:32.29)
Yeah.

Grant Robin (01:52:37.474)
Yeah, I wonder how they were able to get the sound out.

Eli (01:52:41.77)
I don't know. guess it just has a lot to do with the sound mixing and stuff. And it's, it's probably one of the reasons Christopher Nolan gets grief for not being able to hear dialogue in his movies is because he just refuses to do ADR. He feels like you lose the performance when you do that. And so he just doesn't do it. When they do, I was just going to say when

Grant Robin (01:53:01.294)
Yeah, he... Sorry, I was just gonna say...

Eli (01:53:06.326)
I was gonna say whenever we just did a whole like no you go no you go Whenever you do like Like heavier dialogue scenes, so there are a few scenes where like it's just super super heavy in dialogue They shoot with a much quieter 5 perf camera system system 65 camera, so they do Shoot some scenes like not on the the big 70 millimeter 15 perf

IMAX film. Probably a lot of that is like in that tiny room when like the interrogation is really getting heavy. I would imagine a lot of that's probably shot on that quieter camera.

Grant Robin (01:53:52.024)
Yeah, I think maybe the outdoor stuff you could probably get away with it, especially if you have like a longer lens where you can be a little bit further back from the characters maybe. I would assume is maybe some way that they were able to get around it.

Eli (01:54:01.003)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:54:04.468)
Yeah, yeah for sure. The other thing about the camera too that I had mentioned talking about like centers. know, Kugler had talked to Nolan a little bit about shooting on IMAX, you know, for centers. one of the things they talked about that Kugler, you know, really like

when he got on set and was like shooting on that film was he realized like when you shoot on film, you automatically like magnify the responsibility of your cast and crew. when, cause when the film starts rolling, everyone's like, everyone is locked in. know like the film is rolling. I have to get this right. I have to do my job well. Cause it's not like digital where you just like

popping in and out SD cards or whatever they have them saved on. It's serious. So there's just this weight of responsibility that everyone feels when the film starts rolling. And Kugler talked about that being true. He was blown away by how things changed when he was shooting with the film for centers. And it seems like

you know, it's kind of the same thing on Nolan sets. you just, everyone just takes it a lot more seriously, which is something I hadn't really thought about, but like makes total sense, you know?

Grant Robin (01:55:43.832)
Yeah, it just requires you to put that much more intentionality into the pre-production and the planning of it all. So that way when it's time to go, it's time to go, you know?

Eli (01:55:55.287)
The other thing we haven't talked about as far as film goes is they made a film that didn't exist before for this movie. They called up Kodak and they were like, hey, can you make some 65 millimeter black and white film for us? It just, that wasn't a thing. And yeah.

Grant Robin (01:56:11.416)
Yeah, apparently it was really difficult as well to figure out like how to do it properly for what they were needing.

Eli (01:56:17.524)
Yeah, because I mean, it's big. It's a big format for that. And it looks incredible. I'll say that. Those black and white sequences look so good.

Grant Robin (01:56:30.658)
Yeah, and it completely changes how you have to light things and, you know, even like the color of everything, like in order for it to show up the proper shades of gray that you want it to be, like takes a lot of practice and like dialing it in before you get to the shoot days.

Eli (01:56:33.472)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:56:46.686)
Yeah, and I'm sure it seems to me like it you just get such a different feel out of having like the black and white film than if you were to like digitally pull the color out, you know, of color film. yeah. One of the interesting things was to me was like how they decided to like create this experimental quantum world in camera. So like

Pretty pretty like all the effects you see are like stuff they filmed in camera None of it is like digitally Created and put in in post. It's all stuff that they film. So I talked about Andrew old Andrew Jackson the VFX supervisor Kind of oversaw all of this and they really were just kind of playing with a lot of stuff. They got this special probe lens from

Panavision that you could like submerge in water or get like extreme close-ups and did you see did you happen to see any like images of that lens? It yeah

Grant Robin (01:57:55.434)
No, I mean, I've used probe lenses in the past. I didn't see any from that specific one, but yeah, they're super cool. The kind of stuff that you can do with them are cool.

Eli (01:58:01.534)
Yeah. They look, yeah, it reminded me of like the way like a microscope or telescope looks, because the lens is like skinny and long, sort of, at least the one that they were using.

Grant Robin (01:58:16.93)
Yeah, I used it on a project one time when we were doing broken glass type stuff and we wanted to get really close in on it. But yeah, it's cool. The kind of stuff you can do with it is really cool.

Eli (01:58:25.642)
Yeah.

Eli (01:58:30.27)
Yeah. And so, mean, they use that. They do some traditional in-camera effects with cloud tanks and water and macro lenses, high-speed camera technology stuff. They do a lot of traditional methods with stuff like that. But they also just come up with really cool ways to capture this stuff in camera. At one point, they're showing they've made this little metal

like magnet bowl that has like all these metal balls like spinning or like they activate it and they just, the metal ball spin around in it kind of like randomly kind of representing like the chaos of the quantum world. And I guess they use that probe camera like that probe lens to like get in close to those and catch like the, the light reflecting off the metal balls and the random movement of it all. Like in some of those sequences where you're seeing all that happening is like

probably from that. Just like really, really creative stuff. One of the things I thought was cool was the visual you get where it's like facing down, the camera's facing down on Killian Murphy in bed and there's this like atom like light kind of spinning in front of his face. it was, you know, a talking head of Killian Murphy talking about it. He was like, most people are

Grant Robin (01:59:30.978)
Yeah, so cool.

Eli (01:59:58.507)
Like probably see that and they're like, they just added that in and CGI and post and he's like no there was really a light spinning right in front of my face and then it shows like the you know, cuts to showing how they were filming it and there's just this like little device that's like spinning this light around in a random like like random pattern Right there in front of his face in front of the camera in the foreground. So Yeah

Grant Robin (02:00:25.484)
I love that man. That's one thing I love about Nolan is like when you watch his movies, you just know that like, all right, that's like real. He's making that happen somehow and it's so creative.

Eli (02:00:34.72)
Yeah.

It's incredible. it really is. we definitely have to talk about the explosion, the Trinity explosion. first of all, like incredible sequence. It's like basically 30 minutes of like blood pumping, anticipation. what's most impressive to me about that whole sequence is like, we know what the results are. Like it's.

Grant Robin (02:00:59.576)
No.

Eli (02:01:05.844)
It's a historical event. Like we know it's going to go off successfully, but you're still like, feel so anxious the whole way, even up to like the moment that like countdown hit zero. Like you feel anxious of like, is it really going to happen? and that's impressive to me, like to pull that off, you know.

Grant Robin (02:01:24.514)
Yeah, that's acting, that's the score, that's the way it's cut. The score is so intense, it's keeping you on the edge of your seat. Yeah, that whole sequence is so thrilling. It's just, yeah, it's so incredible.

Eli (02:01:28.394)
Yeah, it's the, all of it. Yeah.

Eli (02:01:39.69)
Yeah, the, so the score there is actually is so it's this like big dilemma that he had, that Gordon's and had, cause he had this idea to like build the tempo, like over time with these, with the violins, for that sequence. and it is like this kind of like a building tempo, getting faster and faster. And, he was thinking they were going to have to like record it in sections of like.

record four measures, then up the tempo record those four measures and like kind of piece it all together. But they ended up doing, was given like headphones to all the orchestra and they had a click, like the click would go in their heads when they were supposed to like start changing tempo. And so like all the, you know, all the musicians are like, they ended up being able to record it straight through.

with all the musicians slowly building the tempo together. But also with that too, yes, the click comes on, but there's also a little bit of randomness and chaos to the way that everyone catches up with that tempo. And so just the nature of the way they recorded it straight through, even though it's not perfect, it actually is like,

perfect for like the feeling that you're supposed to get of like that building and that chaos of it all. So I thought that was really cool to see and hear him talk about. But yeah, the explosion itself is, know, Nolan talked about how he's done a big bomb before in Dark Knight Rises, but that was CGI. And he said, the reason it worked there is because

It was far away and you were supposed to feel safe So you can do it in CGI because you're you're not supposed to feel like you're in danger He said but for this one, like you're supposed to feel Like you're in danger. It's supposed to be dangerous. And so he was like, there's no way I was ever gonna do it in CGI It needed to be real shot in camera so that you could feel like the danger of it all And yeah, that's what they did. They did a ton of experiments to get it, right

Grant Robin (02:03:56.515)
Yeah.

Eli (02:04:02.496)
for the mushroom, they had like about 60 gallons of gasoline with high explosives that detonated at the top. And then in the middle, there was this about two, two tenths of a second later, there was this, aluminum powder that ignited that gave like the bright flash. And then a half a second after that, they detonated the mortar at the bottom, which was like, you know, gasoline and black powder and all that to push like the mushroom cloud up. And so, yeah, it's just like.

It's just a lot of experiments to get like, guess, like the timing of it all down to get the look to be exactly right. But yeah, it looks incredible. and it had to be rec replicable too, so that they could get, you know, all the shots they needed. cause you know, they don't have five IMAX cameras sitting around. So

Grant Robin (02:04:41.037)
Yeah.

Grant Robin (02:04:47.692)
Right. Yeah, that.

Grant Robin (02:04:53.27)
Right. Yeah, man, that moment when it goes off and the score cuts out and you're just left seeing, yeah, you're left seeing all the different reactions, which is true to real life. know, like it would have, there would have been a delay of like, okay, it goes off before it actually hits you, you know? you're this, yeah. Yeah, such an incredible moment. You're tense. You're like, ugh.

Eli (02:05:00.148)
Oof. Talk about sound design.

Eli (02:05:12.086)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, you see the light before the sound.

Grant Robin (02:05:22.19)
Yeah, it was such a cool scene.

Eli (02:05:22.538)
Yeah. And you can hear it even stays with like the kind of like PO, the Oppenheimer POV with the sound design. Cause you kind of like hear his breath to like the heavy breathing of anticipation. It's man. that was, that was like the moment to me, the first time I watched it, that was like, this is

This is just incredible. Like the sound design, the way it cuts out was just perfect. I don't know. It's just really, really well done. yeah.

Trinity. Yeah, I mean what's crazy too about like while we're on the subject of the the Trinity sequence and all the lead-up to that is there's still an hour of movie after that and Any other I feel like most other directors would like that would be the climactic sequence like towards the end But no one is not interested in that being like he

It's like he knows you this is gonna be exciting and kind of fun just like it was for those scientists that were like pulling it off but you can't you can't let that be like You can't leave on a high from that because of what it is You need to allow for the time after it for it to seep in

Grant Robin (02:06:54.147)
Yeah.

Eli (02:07:00.298)
both the characters and for like the audience members too of like you shouldn't leave feeling excited and and like pumped from this exciting thrilling sequence you just watched so there's a lot of like you know just wisdom in the fact that yeah maybe the movie does slow down a lot after that and it's a it's a very different after that and maybe that turns some people off but that's what it should be you know it

You shouldn't be leaving like pumped up and excited that the bomb went off. You know?

Grant Robin (02:07:36.534)
Yeah, it's not a movie about the Trinity test. It's a movie about Oppenheimer and how he had to deal with that and the emotion after it is just as important as the stuff that happens before it. Whenever we get to see him wrestle with the reality that, okay, now it worked, but then now they're driving away with this bomb and you have no control over what they're gonna do with it.

Eli (02:07:39.848)
Yeah, about Oppenheimer.

Eli (02:07:56.468)
Thank

Grant Robin (02:08:03.53)
and living with the reality that they're going to drop this on so many people and so many innocent people are going to die. yeah, that whole part is just as important.

Eli (02:08:11.339)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, and it yeah, just really really incredible the the way that was all handled Yeah, even like just kind of moving along in like production stuff, you know the Trinity site, know there I mean they built the 102 foot Trinity Tower replica like they they just they did all of it the One funny thing the the whole like

Making of documentary ends with the story of the Oval Office set and how like five days before shooting they lost their location they were supposed to shoot at for the Oval Office sequence. And so they were like, they basically were like told Ruth DeJong like, hey, we've got to build this set. And she was like, I have five days. I can't build this set in five days. And so they,

found this old oval office set from some other production that was like all beaten up and stuff that they had to like doctor up and, they had like people working 24 hours a day in shifts and they like, they shot it and it was like, nothing had ever happened. They, it's just like the magic of movies, you know, incredible. Yeah. the, I think too, wrapping up all that stuff, the

Grant Robin (02:09:28.812)
Make it happen.

Eli (02:09:36.98)
The makeup and costuming is really good. It's it's not over the top. It's not like You know, the costume lady was talking about like you have thousands of costumes for extras and stuff for this but nothing is like in this movie is a super flashy or like distracting as far as like the makeup and costuming goes and The make it being that Louisa Abel pulls off for like the old them in like

their older kind of prosthetics is really, really good. Yeah, Hoyta Van Hoytema was like going on about how like incredible it is that they're shooting in this like, you know, in IMAX film and the makeup looks so good in it is impressive. yeah, really, really impressive work done.

Grant Robin (02:10:28.376)
Yeah, absolutely. It was incredible.

Eli (02:10:32.65)
yeah, the, the score is something that like, have mixed feelings about, to me at times it can feel like the score is trying to make every single moment of the whole movie feel like it's like the climax of the movie, in a way, and it's, I don't know to me, my, like,

I guess hot take on the score is that it's a little bit oppressive. It's a little bit like it, it, it's trying to take over a little bit too much and seems where it doesn't need to. when it's really cooking and when it's really like, so like the, sequence where they're like recruit recruiting all the scientists and stuff him and, and grows going around, like the scores like pumping and that. And I'm like, yeah, that's where the score needs to be pumping.

the lead up to the Trinity test like yeah, it needs to be pumping there but there's like other sequences where the the music's just like pumping and oppressive and in your face and I'm like I feel like this is not the moment for that and so that's like my like quibble with the the score for this is it it feels a bit much to me at times when it works it when it's working for me it's like top-notch but then there's other moments where I'm like

Grant Robin (02:11:40.558)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:11:57.959)
like it needed to take a step back a little bit. But yeah, I don't know. I think I'm in the minority there. I think most people really love the score, so I don't know.

Grant Robin (02:12:12.108)
Yeah, think it was, I think the score was brilliant. I definitely see what you're saying as far as like there are, there are definitely moments where it's on like a 10 and you know, the scene is not necessarily a 10. But it does a great job of bringing so much, like so much of the movie's tension comes from the score, which is important for what Nolan is trying to communicate. And you know, like just those

Eli (02:12:20.456)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Grant Robin (02:12:41.496)
big sweeping sounds that are coming in, even at the end. There's just so many moments where it just makes you feel the weight of what's happening, I feel like.

Eli (02:12:45.781)
Uh-huh.

Eli (02:12:57.834)
Yeah, it's, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, I don't want to be like, I don't want people to come at me. Cause I think the score is really good. but yeah, I, I don't remember. I'm trying to remember, look up while I'm, speaking. I'm trying to remember what, other scores were, nominated along with it, but I remember liking and other ones more.

But yeah, I don't remember what the other ones were. So, um, and I don't, I don't have enough time to vamp with talking to look it up. So it looks like you're looking it up for me. Um, we talked a little bit about editing. We've talked a good bit about the editing earlier. The other interesting, you can just pipe in whenever you find it. The other interesting thing about like the film processing is just like,

Grant Robin (02:13:37.294)
I'll look it up. You go for it. Yeah.

Eli (02:13:55.38)
You know, switching the coloring process between black and white and color film. they had to figure out how to do that well. And, the other like super interesting thing to me was like, they, they had brought a lady in from Paris that like hand cuts the film to put it all together, like with scissors. I didn't know that was a thing, but it's yeah, it's like intense and it's there's like

over 3,000 shots in this movie and there's this lady like cutting the film and like pasting it together. It's like this whole process of like getting the final film ready in the reel to be projected. Yeah, pretty intense.

Grant Robin (02:14:40.918)
I've got the nominees if you want them.

Eli (02:14:42.356)
Yeah, yeah, hit me up with those.

Grant Robin (02:14:44.526)
So it was American fiction, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Poor Things.

Eli (02:14:46.932)
Uh-huh.

Sure.

That was it. That was the one. Killers of the Flower Moon score by Robbie Robertson from the band. Incredible score. Oh man. I love that score. Oh, you've got to see it. It's after this rewatch, I moved Oppenheimer right up under it in my 2023 movie rankings. So I like...

Grant Robin (02:14:59.799)
Robbie Robertson.

Grant Robin (02:15:05.334)
I still haven't seen that movie. I need to watch it.

Grant Robin (02:15:19.629)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:15:21.12)
Colors of the Flower Moon a bit more I think than Oppenheimer, but just just a tinge more but But yeah that score in that movie. I thought was incredible Yeah, so yeah this movie releases July 21st 2023 Opens at number two in the box office At 82 million dollars its opening weekend on a hundred million dollar budget. So

almost making back your money domestic that first opening weekend. Um, and it's the biggest biopic opening ever save American sniper, which made I think a hundred million. It's opening weekend. Um, yeah. Um, obviously Barbie was number one. Barbie made 162 million opening weekend. Um, crazy. Uh, but yeah, it went on Oppenheimer. Barbie went on to make it 1.4 billion.

Grant Robin (02:16:04.108)
Also a great movie.

Eli (02:16:19.156)
Worldwide which is crazy But yeah Oppenheimer 975 point eight million dollars worldwide box office really

Grant Robin (02:16:29.678)
I mean, it's honestly very impressive for a three hour biopic about just nonstop dialogue. You know, like that's actually pretty impressive that it even competed with Barbie.

Eli (02:16:33.32)
easy

Eli (02:16:38.23)
Three, yeah. Yeah, three hour biopic about one of the most devastating developments in human history in the middle of summer. Just unheard of for a movie like that to make 82 million on its first weekend, much less nearly a billion dollars in the box office worldwide.

Grant Robin (02:16:52.664)
Yeah.

Grant Robin (02:17:04.066)
Yeah, I think part of that is just cause it's Nolan. And I think at this point, people are like, people like me are like, I'm going to go see whatever movie he makes, you know? But then also it did, it did have the whole Barmanheimer phenomenon, which I think probably, yeah, the hype probably helped it as well. So it had a lot of things going for it, but that's definitely impressive for the type of movie it was.

Eli (02:17:07.284)
Yeah, sure.

Eli (02:17:12.726)
Yeah.

Eli (02:17:18.08)
The hype. Yeah.

Eli (02:17:25.952)
Yeah. and I think Bar, I think it and Barbie kind of helped each other too. they kind of fed into each other, you know, it wasn't like, you know, I think Hollywood also often thinks about it as like this zero sum game, but I think this showed that it, doesn't have to be like they can feed into each other and actually like, they probably made, made each other bigger than they would have been otherwise. reception for the movie,

Really, I mean Everyone seemed to really go for it Even like some of the harsher critics. I was looking at like still gave it like a seven out of ten, you know That are harder to those critics that are harder to please, you know Still are positive on this one. It has a 90 meta score with 69 reviews 93 tomato meter, which I was surprised it wasn't higher honestly

Um, I would have expected like a 98, you know, tomato meter. wouldn't expect 7 % of people to give this a rotten. I wouldn't be, I wouldn't have been surprised if it was a 100 % tomato meter, to be honest. Um, just, but just the way that that system works, you know, it's either rotten or ripe. So I just have a hard time believing there's 7 % of the critics.

Grant Robin (02:18:36.013)
Right.

Grant Robin (02:18:46.883)
Right.

Grant Robin (02:18:50.338)
Yeah.

Eli (02:18:54.834)
saw this movie and they're like rotten. Like, maybe you didn't like it that much, but it's rotten.

Grant Robin (02:18:59.106)
Maybe. Yeah.

I'm sure there's a couple of, I'm sure there's a number of critics out there that are gonna go rotten just because they say, this movie's good, but it's not worth 100, so let me give it a rotten, you know? I don't know how that works. Because I definitely don't, I don't think the movie's a 10 out of 10, but.

Eli (02:19:14.91)
Yeah, maybe maybe that's true. Yeah, maybe that's true, but I feel like that Feel like that's not that sure. Yeah, I yeah But yeah, I don't know that feels like you're losing your integrity as a critic if that's the way you're making your decisions But maybe they are out there. I don't know the 91 % audience on Rotten Tomatoes 4.2 on letterbox anything that's like

4.0 and higher on Letterboxd is like it it's hard it's hard to find movies that are 4.0 or above that are bad on Letterboxd. You're just not gonna find it. Yeah awards it had 13 Oscar nominations it didn't win six of them those six that it didn't win were makeup and hair styling, sound,

Emily Blunt for supporting actress, adapted screenplay, production, design, and costumes, which it could have, honestly, it could have won any of those and I wouldn't be surprised. It won seven. It won for editing, cinematography, the score for supporting actor in Robert Downey Jr., Killian Murphy for lead actor, directing for Christopher Nolan, and best picture. Finally, the best picture.

Grant Robin (02:20:40.448)
Finally, he finally gets his direct.

Eli (02:20:43.446)
Yeah, finally gets his directing and his best picture. And honestly, like this wasn't my favorite film of that year. Well, I already mentioned, I like Killua, so the Flower Moon, which was also direct nominated a little bit more. It wasn't my favorite movie of that year, but like even though it wasn't my favorite, I still would have wanted it to win.

Grant Robin (02:21:13.175)
Yeah.

Eli (02:21:13.846)
as a long time Christopher Nolan fan, he's kind of the one that really got me more into movies and in cinema and you know, I just it was just his time, you know and Oftentimes i'm kind of against that sentiment with the academy Like you don't give people awards just because like they're due an award but this was a little different because like This was deserving of it. Also like he is

Grant Robin (02:21:42.827)
It was.

Eli (02:21:43.412)
He is due an award, but it also like deserves to be awarded. So yeah.

Grant Robin (02:21:48.716)
Yeah, it truly is a masterpiece. It's not my personal favorite of Nolan's, you know? But it really is an incredibly made movie. And so I had no problems with it. Now, granted, I didn't see all the movies that year. I didn't see Killers of the Flower Moon. But from the ones that I did see, it felt deserving. Yeah. And like you said, there comes a time with some directors where you're like, all right, it's time. This is his time.

Eli (02:21:55.52)
Yeah, mine either. Yeah.

Eli (02:22:18.186)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Let's dig into a little bit of like the themes and characters and stuff a little bit before. We've done some of this already, but maybe get a little bit deeper into it before we wrap things up. I've mentioned some of my quibbles already with score and we've talked about the Strauss stuff. Is it necessary?

Grant Robin (02:22:18.254)
for sure.

Eli (02:22:46.58)
You know, there's things that like you could say like are kind of the historical accuracy thing. I'm not really that worried about, you know, the, know like that Oppenheimer did not take the math to Einstein. It was a different scientists, but like it makes sense to use Einstein for that, for the sake of the movie. I'm not that worried about that sort of thing. for a movie like this, the other quibble I would have would be like,

the weird nude stuff, like it doesn't, I'm just not sure it was necessary. One take I heard about like the part in the hearing where it's like in the middle of the hearing is like, it's supposed to be this like kitty is seeing, it's like a vision of like what kitty is most afraid of that like.

Now that this is being publicly like put in record, now everyone is picturing him in doing this, you know, and the humiliation of that, which I guess I could see that, but, I don't know. I also, it is, is, yeah, sure. Yeah. And it, you know, it's not like.

Grant Robin (02:23:59.918)
It's definitely uncharacteristic of Nolan. And it's definitely not necessary. I think you could get all those same points across without actual nudity.

Eli (02:24:12.712)
It's not excessive, like you can blink and miss it sort of in a way for, well, not all of it, like that, that, yeah, that particular one. But, yeah. and I have heard like the weirdness of the, what I wrote down as the Sanskrit sex scene compared to the weirdness of this sex scene that we covered in, Spielberg's Munich.

Grant Robin (02:24:20.248)
Well, yeah, I mean, some of it is an entire scene. They're having important conversation.

Eli (02:24:42.454)
Which is not like it doesn't have graphic nudity in it, but in that sex scene, but it is weird He's having like flashbacks to People being killed, you know the terrorists killing the hostages in Munich as he's like having said it's weird it is weird and I've heard this this scene kind of compared to that and like the weirdness of it and like What is what what is going on here? What?

Grant Robin (02:25:09.634)
Yeah.

Eli (02:25:10.068)
Why is this the choice you're making with this? I don't know. don't know. That one was weird to me. But yeah, so I don't know. It has quibbles. I put down the question, can a movie be a masterpiece even if it has some obvious flaws? I think so.

Grant Robin (02:25:12.174)
These people have some weird turn-offs.

Grant Robin (02:25:34.156)
Yeah, I think I can say on one hand that I think the movie is a masterpiece and on the other hand I can say it might not even be my top five Nolan movie. But that's just a personal thing. But it really is an incredibly made movie.

Eli (02:25:42.262)
It's not perfect yet. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

I think it's...

Yeah, I think you could argue like it's his greatest achievement, even if you don't think it's his best movie. those are kind of two different things, you know, a lot of Nolan distinctives in this, it's very different than anything he's made. but it has like, it still has like a Nolan stamp on it. Like it's so wrapped up in time. Nolan's always like interested in time as both like a metaphysical concept.

Grant Robin (02:25:56.525)
Yeah.

Right. For sure.

Grant Robin (02:26:19.926)
Yeah, multiple storylines cutting back and forth.

Eli (02:26:21.812)
Yeah. Yeah. The filmmaking construct of using time and it even kind of harkens back to memento a little bit, you know, cause you've had the two different storylines that kind of like me at the end in a way. you know, the tropes of like the, like you said, the multiple timelines cross cutting, you've got the torture genius trope that he uses the, and also we talked about the women sidelined by their torches gene torture genius men.

The concepts of science and struggling with the the you know, the weight of You know the science or whatever Yeah, that's all through his movies the practical effects the extreme close-ups characters as moral puzzles You know All the Nolan trips are there if you look for them it just It just looks and feel it just is different than anything. He's made

by nature of the type of movie it is. yeah, what were the most like intriguing images or sequences to you in the movie? Like things that stood out. I mean, we talked about the Trinity sequence, but like maybe smaller stuff like images that you noticed that like had you thinking afterwards, what was going on there, that sort of thing. Did you have anything as far as that goes?

Grant Robin (02:27:48.824)
Yeah, I mean, I think all of the practical effects like the science effects, I think were very striking. But to me, I think what I remember most about this movie is honestly, it's gonna be like those closeups of Killian Murphy. it starts and ends with those closeups. And I think that that is the image that kind of gets burned in your head in this movie is of a man that is so...

Eli (02:27:59.125)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:28:05.556)
Yeah. Yeah.

Grant Robin (02:28:18.062)
tortured by this thing that he created and how up close and personal they get with that. I think those moments are so effective that I think those are the images that I'm gonna remember the most from this movie.

Eli (02:28:30.132)
Yeah.

Eli (02:28:34.196)
Yeah, I mean those are like the defining images I think is is just like His reaction to everything and his I mean you you think about his eyes In the first half of the movie. They're kind of like there's like this turning point at the trinity test I think for him morally but also like that's portrayed through his eyes like there's this kind of

I don't know, excitement and hunger in his eyes, all the way leading up to that. And then after where it turns to guilt-ridden, tortured eyes, tormented, anxious, unsure, there's just this turn in his face on either side of that Trinity test sequence.

Grant Robin (02:29:32.45)
Yeah, I think the scene where, you know, they just had this big accomplishment when the test is successful and then they're driving away with these bombs that he's created and it's now completely out of his hands. You know, they're not gonna ask him, they're not gonna ask him for permission. They're not gonna say, it's just like, all right, cool. We're done with you now. Thank you. And that's such a powerful moment.

Eli (02:29:43.338)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:29:49.482)
Yeah. Yeah, that's a very striking. Yeah.

Mm-mm.

Eli (02:29:58.699)
Yeah. Which he, yeah, which I think of it, it's so powerful because like, he said that he's literally said like, it's not up to us what they do with it. Like in the, in kind of like the leading up to them finishing it. but just the image of like him and Taylor standing there watching the trucks drive away with the bombs, like the reality of it sets in.

And so like, yes, he knew that was coming and he like admitted it and said it as if like, it's it's a factor in reality, out loud, like watching that image of that, super striking and like very different than just knowing it's going to happen. yeah. Yeah.

Grant Robin (02:30:49.868)
Yeah, that moment hit me because I just was like, can't imagine that feeling. Like now this is entirely out of my hands, how they use it, you know?

Eli (00:02.076)
Yeah, one of the, you know, the images that stuck out to me even after my first recording was the image of the apple, you know, with the poison dripping out of it. And it's kind of like this image of the original sin. and I had, I was kind of thinking about how in that instance, early on in his kind of career, he was able to like, stop it from its destructive power. You know, he was.

He wrestled with it and regretted, you he's laying in bed, you know, anxious and sweating and runs there in the morning and is able to stop it. It's destructive power. before, you know, it, it takes someone's life, but then, you know, now you have later in the movie there's, and there's flashbacks to that Apple kind of another parts of the movie, but now you have this kind of like cats out of the bag, you know, genies out of the bottle.

Grant Robin (00:35.63)
Mm.

Grant Robin (00:55.598)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:01.362)
thing with the atom bombs and he's powerless to do anything about it this time. And so it's kind of like this, our tendencies to, you know, as human beings to kind of like act out of our instincts, which he, seems like he kind of does in that moment. He was humiliated. He just kind of like on an instinct and whim puts the poison in the apple.

Grant Robin (01:06.19)
Right.

Eli (01:31.524)
And like, it's, it's almost like maybe a similar thing with the, with making that atomic bomb, like he's caught up in, you know, you know, and we can kind of talk about like the, why did they do it? You know, they didn't want it to be dropped. Well, like it's calm. It's more calm. I guess like in hindsight, it's easier to say that than like in the moment where you're a scientist and

Grant Robin (01:46.104)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:00.016)
You know, there's these, there's this brand new thing that you get to like experiment with and figure out and discover. on the one hand, and then on the other hand, like you're a Jewish man who we know felt very strongly about the war was sending money to the Spanish front, to, fight against Hitler, you know, have, you know, wanted to end the war, wanted to stop the Nazis.

and felt like this might be the the quickest path to stopping to stopping them and so it's kind of this like I'll know like now but now like he gets caught up in all of that just like he did in a very much smaller way with the apple but still like the metaphor is still there, you know

Grant Robin (02:52.546)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:56.821)
and he's done it once, that original sin has been planted, and now he's done it again, but this time there's no stopping it. So that was, I don't know, that was one of the things that I kind of stood out to me.

Grant Robin (03:13.985)
Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't think about that as a comparison, but that makes a lot of sense.

Eli (03:19.385)
It's just one of those things where in this movie there's so many images. Like I bet if I watched it again tonight, which I'm not going to do because it's already late and the movie's three hours long. But if I watched it again, I would probably catch on latch onto a different image. And that conveys like maybe a similar meaning, but in a different way, you know, cause it's just so jam packed with all these visuals.

Grant Robin (03:24.267)
Yeah.

Grant Robin (03:42.7)
Right.

Eli (03:46.128)
this visual language and it's like cycling through them so quickly that like there's it kind of benefits you know multiple viewings in that way but

Grant Robin (03:58.328)
Yeah. Yeah, most Nolan movies, the first time I watched them, I don't fully catch everything. And then the second time I watched them, I'm like, this is so good.

Eli (04:07.633)
Yeah. yeah, absolutely. The other thing that we haven't really touched on is like the whole Prometheus thing, American Prometheus, you know, the name of the book, it's mentioned in the story. Well, the thing that I had, I knew about Prometheus, but hadn't really, I looked up like the general like myth of Prometheus after watching.

cause and you know, everything that I read, remembered like, yeah, I knew that, but it's just like, I don't have the Prometheus story stored in my mind. So I needed to be reminded sort of thing. but obviously like Prometheus gave fire to humanity. and so you have that giving fire to humankind thing with Oppenheimer and the bomb.

But also the other side of that is you have this whole last hour of him putting himself through this trial that he didn't have to go through. It was really like at the end of the day, his choice, which is something you can miss like in the like, you know, the quick dialogue and quick editing of it all that he actually had a choice of whether he went through that or not, which is why like, you know, Kitty asked him why he put himself through all that.

No one's going to forgive him. And he's kind of says, we'll see or whatever. but the other thing about Prometheus is his punishment for giving fire to humanity was that he was chained to a rock with an eagle tearing his liver out every day. And each day it would grow back and the eagle would tear his liver out again. and that was his punishment. so the typical way it's he's thought of as the American Prometheus is through.

that he gave fire to humanity, that he gave the atomic bomb to the human race. But the side that we don't think about is that he put himself through this punishment. know, he felt that like Prometheus, he needed to be punished. In a sense, maybe is why he did it. It was his way of, I don't know, this maybe weird way of like, I don't know, some sort of like, this is the only way that I can like,

Eli (06:32.977)
feel like I'm punished for what I did or I don't know it's it's interesting to think about the kind of other side of the Prometheus story for Oppenheimer is basically that last hour you know of the movie.

Grant Robin (06:48.459)
Yeah. West wrestling with the weight of, of what he had given to the world and maybe feeling a lot of guilt towards that and feeling like he deserved to be punished in some way.

Eli (07:02.031)
Yeah. Obviously, there's a lot of themes we can talk about with this movie. There's the question of just because something can be done, should it be done? It was interesting hearing Nolan talk about how he's talked to AI developers. And he said that they feel like they're having an Oppenheimer moment. They're thinking about all these questions of what can we do and what should we do with it?

That was interesting to hear him talk about how they view this moment in AI history as that moment, which is crazy to think about.

Grant Robin (07:43.565)
Yeah, in a lot of ways it is. We're in the Trinity test right now where it's all fun and games, but you know.

Eli (07:49.042)
Yeah, we don't know where it's headed. Yeah. And we're, we're talking about the consequences, but are we talking about it enough? It's like, I don't know. one of the, one of the things about the way the movie structured that I, the pace of it, works narratively, I is because you're asking the questions, why aren't they talking about the consequences of this beforehand? And for what?

from what we know, there were some talks, just like there are some talks of the AI consequent, potential AI consequences today, but really like they didn't really sit down and deliberate on it until afterwards, very truly. And the pace of the movie, leading up to the Trinity test and the bombs being dropped really portrays how no one's slowing down to think about it enough.

Grant Robin (08:45.005)
Well, and similarly to this atomic bomb scenario is like when it comes to AI, it's like, we're not alone in this, right? So like we may as a country say, hey, we're gonna slow down on this, we're gonna put regulations, but that doesn't mean the countries on the other side of the world are gonna do the same thing. And so you don't really have the luxury of doing that because if you do that, then you're gonna become way behind.

So you just have to keep going and just hope that everybody does good by it, you know?

Eli (09:19.727)
Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's hard. And, you know, there's, there's the question, like a little bit different than the bomb, but like with the, this nuclear bomb, like I, it seems like Oppenheimer really did believe that until this was used, then like, there was kind of this thought of like, you know, the, the whole like nuclear deterrence like point of view.

It seemed like Oppenheimer really did have, he really did feel like people need to see this so that they, he felt like it might end all war. If people saw what this new weapon could do and it wouldn't, I don't know, there's a sense in which like, well, it hasn't ended all war. Like we've still had plenty of war and destruction. But the, on the other hand, like

We used it and it hasn't been used since also. it's kind of like this weird so far that's the big caveat, right? So far it hasn't been used again. and you know, but the knowledge is out there that of how to make it, you know, it's, it's, out there. You just need the materials and the scientists and engineers to put it together. and that's the.

That's the horror of it all, I guess.

Grant Robin (10:52.961)
Yeah, and that's the message of the movie is like making sure we all know the reality of like the severity of this and making sure people are smart with that, you know?

Eli (11:04.559)
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that kind of like start wrapping up, we can talk a little bit about like the fission versus fusion of it all. because this is something that's like introduced at the very beginning of the movie, the, the color portions are, are labeled, fission and the black and white portions are labeled fusion. And so I did, I spent some time like thinking about like why that is, what that means.

and kind of like seeing what other people like some other takes on that, where one of the best pieces I read that's like not even that long of a read. It's a fairly short read. It was by, Alyssa Wilkinson, in the inbox of public online publication, her review her of the movie. it was really good. so a lot of this, these takes kind of like our,

kind of going off of like her take on this whole thing, but fission versus fusion. So Oppenheimer's bomb was a fission bomb. it's the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fission bombs. They were splitting atoms. the splitting of those atoms leveled cities, basically. It was big enough to do that. It's a weapon of mass destruction. That's what we call it.

Well, there's also all this stuff going on with Edward Teller and the, you know, the AEC trying to figure out, we going to develop hydrogen bombs? Well, the hydrogen bomb is a fusion bomb. And instead of it splitting atoms, it combines atoms with such force that it creates an explosion. And this is one of the things they talked about. They, they showed a graphic of graphics helped me.

visualize like differences. and so a fusion hydrogen bomb would be like a thousand times as powerful as the atomic bomb that we dropped was. So it showed a visual of like this tiny mushroom cloud versus this like humongous mushroom cloud. and it's like Oppenheimer's whole thing was like, what would we even use that against? Like there's not any

Grant Robin (13:15.213)
Mm-hmm.

Grant Robin (13:30.285)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (13:31.57)
There's not any way you can do that. And he, he, at one point labeled it not a weapon of mass destruction, but a weapon of mass genocide. and, and so basically you have these two parts of the movie, the color and black and white labeled fission and fusion. Oppenheimer, the Oppenheimer portion is the fission portion. It's Oppenheimer himself is kind of this split man. He wants to make the bomb to end the war.

But also he's thinking, maybe we shouldn't use the bomb. It's this paradox of, you know, it's goes back to light, you know, his little, you know, what is light? it a wave or is it a particle? It's both. Well, it can't be both, but it is. it's this paradox. it's, and there's this vision in Oppenheimer himself, this splitting of what he thinks. And that's part of why he's so unknowable and such a mystery is it's hard to like.

Grant Robin (14:06.349)
Mm-hmm.

Grant Robin (14:20.717)
you

Eli (14:31.941)
figure out who he was probably because like he had a hard time figuring out how he felt about it, you know? And so it's this whole vision of the section of the movie is just this paradox of a split man. Whereas the fusion section of the movie centers on Strauss, who is this man who is not split at all. He's actually willing to swallow up

Grant Robin (14:40.695)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (15:01.315)
other people and whatever he needs to, to gain more power. and so it's this, and this is the, the take that makes me feel like, okay, maybe that there's more to this Strauss portion of the movie than like, I've given it credit for, of like this juxtaposition of the fission versus the fusion. The fission is bad. You know, it levels a city.

And, like the few, like Strauss wanted to develop the hydrogen bomb. He wanted to gain as much power as he possibly could to use whatever force necessary. Um, and no matter what the great cost may be, as long as it served his country and ultimately himself. Um, and so I think at the end of the, this is a quote from Wilkinson in that, that Vox review. said, uh,

talking about Nolan, she said, quote, he focuses his lens on power, the kind that splits atoms produce the kind that countries willed, the kind that men crave, unquote. But in the, in, and she kind of talks about how in the end the bomb wasn't about the bomb, but it was about power. And how like, you see, you see with Oppenheimer specifically, but with all the scientists in general, when they start questioning

things, that's when they lose their power and are swept aside. They're really just tools for the people that are in greater power. and so, you know, her whole take is that the movie is just about the power structures and how, you know, the people, people with, you know, good intentions get swept into these evil power structures and then are swept aside.

Grant Robin (16:35.627)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (16:55.951)
When the power structures get what they want to gain more power. and then they're left like Oppenheimer alone, like tormented, you know. and I thought that was a really good, interesting take of like that whole fission versus fusion thing. and how, you know, the whole fusion portion of the movie is just about Strauss and his distorted view on reality and.

Grant Robin (17:09.517)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (17:26.545)
You know, his willingness to gain whatever power, you know, by doing whatever it mean, whatever he needed to do to gain more power, he was willing to do it. Um, and. You know, I think we can see how horrible that can be with just what our politics look like today with everyone's grasping at more and more power. um, it, it, don't really care what, what it takes to get there.

Grant Robin (17:37.197)
Mm-hmm.

Grant Robin (17:56.277)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (17:57.01)
or who's like left by the wayside and they're awake as long as they're getting more power. And so, yeah, I think there is a big sense in which this is, there's, really there's just multitudes of things you can contemplate that just being one of them about this movie, you know? And I think it's an interesting one. I don't know.

Grant Robin (18:22.669)
It's a lot of depth into it. definitely, yeah, I think I missed the whole fission fusion thing on the first time I watched it. just kind of like, yeah, it just kind of went past me. But yeah, I love that paradox. yeah, I think that's super interesting.

Eli (18:29.637)
Yeah. Well, it's just right there at the very beginning. Yeah.

Eli (18:41.199)
Yeah, just to wrap it up, you know, the ending of this movie, you have, you know, the whole like redo of the, Oppenheimer Einstein conversation, which I, I found to be like very, profound and interesting, this watch through and, you know, just, you know, the whole like one day they're going to feed you salmon and potato salad and

they're gonna pat you on the back and it's but it's gonna be for them and not for you and just how like Even like great men are like kind of forgotten to time And like they're just stepping stones for whatever's next That's that's a whole nother like theme you could like contemplate on but then just like the last line that Oppenheimer says about you know, igniting the atmosphere and

setting the destruction of the world. And he says, you I believe that's what we've done, you know. and I have this, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then just his face, you know, his tormented face, and all the visuals of like the ripples of atmosphere disintegrating and ripples in water and yeah. Yeah. very good.

Grant Robin (19:44.205)
Yeah, that was such a powerful line to end on.

Grant Robin (19:59.88)
shot of the earth just being burned.

Eli (20:06.391)
incredible stuff. I have this quote from the Nolan variations and this is about Tenet, the movie Tenet, because that book released before any of the Oppenheimer stuff out. So Tenet was the last movie it kind of talked about in that book. But I think it's the way it kind of wraps up this quote is very relevant for thinking about the way this movie ends and any of Nolan movies really. But he says,

quote, the fight amid the ruins of Staus 12, which is like the whole big action sequence at the end of tenant with leaning buildings thrusting upward, their upper stories, reassembling themselves are brought to a climax with a pair of explosions, one going off one inverted the ground lifting and flattening the mushroom cloud, pluming inward the shockwave contracting to a sudden flash of light Oppenheimer secret wish granted.

This is how the world ends not with a bang but a whimper says someone quoting from T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men as is often the case with Nolan's endings. It is the resonances that fill the scenes that follow the echo not the thunderclap that proved the most intriguing unquote And so with that, you know, he's just saying like with Nolan's movies, it's never like

The the lightning of what happens on screen that like that proves to be the most interesting thing about the movie. It's what you're left with. It's that thunderclap of You know wrestling with everything that you've taken in through the movie. That's What nolan wants that's what he? That's his goal, you know He loves a puzzle and you know, there's there's been some

Grant Robin (21:52.727)
Yeah.

Eli (22:00.599)
like funny takes on the movie as like parallels to Nolan like you know he's a great he's a man with great influence in his sphere just like Oppenheimer and there's this funny take about the movie being about Nolan unleashing the superhero blockbuster age which is a funny take you know probably not really really like at all true but a funny take but at the end of the day it's less that Nolan sees himself and more that he just loves a good puzzle.

and you see that with like all of his movies really the the characters kind of act as this lens through which he can like put a moral puzzle into and you know Oppenheimer is unknowable and enigmatic and he's kind of this lens through which we can look At the world where we are how we fit into it and just ask questions about what to do with all of that and there's

There's obviously like no way we can really figure out.

who Oppenheimer was or what he really thought or, you know, why he did the things he did. It's our impulse to try. We can't, we know we can't figure out, but I think what I love about Nolan is that he knows that our impulse to try to figure it out is a correct impulse. It's vital to dig into the sins of our fathers to see if those impulses lie within us and to do everything we can to

Grant Robin (23:32.106)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (23:34.962)
figure out how to purge those impulses from ourselves. And, you know, that's, think, ultimately like Nolan's ultimate goal through his filmography. just like I said, it's most important here, I think, with this movie is that he wants you to contemplate the puzzle of it all and figure out where you lie in that story.

Grant Robin (23:39.309)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (24:05.165)
and what you need to do to prevent it from getting worse. Yeah, and I think that's where we're left with with Oppenheimer.

Grant Robin (24:11.565)
Mm-hmm.

Grant Robin (24:17.933)
Yep.

Eli (24:19.153)
Any final thoughts from you after that?

Grant Robin (24:25.645)
It's the deep stuff, bro. No, I mean, that's all really good.

Eli (24:31.601)
Well, on a lighter note, what's your very subjective rating of the movie? That doesn't really matter, but we like to rate movies anyway.

Grant Robin (24:45.805)
Objective rating I probably I mean I feel like a maybe like a 8.5 Maybe I think that's probably what I would give it

Eli (24:53.157)
Yeah, I think that's fair. had it, that's probably where I probably lie. I don't usually give half points if I do a 10 point scale. When I saw it, the first time I saw it, I usually, I just go by letterboxed and it does like five stars. And so on letterboxed, I gave it a four star.

Originally this second watch through, gave it a four and a half star, which equates to nine. So I'm kind of, I kind of am in that like 8.5 ish, like, you know, but I do think even though I don't didn't give it five stars, I do think it's a bit of a masterpiece and just like what it accomplishes and what it is. And, yeah.

Grant Robin (25:29.079)
Yeah.

Grant Robin (25:42.99)
Yeah, I wouldn't say it's like the most fun watch, you know? It takes a lot of brain power to watch this movie. It takes a lot of paying attention. And so, yeah, but I think it's incredibly well written and you know, the music, the cinematography, everything's so good. yeah, I think an 8.5 to nine, I think is fair.

Eli (25:47.633)
Cool or no?

Eli (25:52.091)
Yeah.

Eli (26:09.861)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Where does it lie for you in like Nolan's filmography? Have you seen all of his films?

Grant Robin (26:19.219)
I have not seen all of them and some of them I need to see again. Like Tenet and Dunkirk, I saw both of those, but I need to see them again because I just saw them once in theaters and I want to rewatch them. But I mean, definitely Dark Knight is number one for me. I think Inception is probably number two. I really like Interstellar.

Eli (26:28.721)
Mm.

Eli (26:37.072)
Okay.

Eli (26:43.097)
love it. Interstellar is my number one.

Grant Robin (26:45.741)
Yeah, so I would probably put Oppenheimer maybe like, honestly like fifth, because the prestige is really good too. If I'm just talking about my personal, like what movies would I want to watch? Yeah, it's probably about fifth on the list of Nolan films.

Eli (27:05.497)
No, that makes sense. So I have Interstellar and Dunkirk to me are five star movies. I don't think Interstellar is perfect, but I just love it. It's like, love everything about it. Dunkirk to me feels like, I don't think there is such a thing as a perfect movie, but like Dunkirk feels like just about as close as you can get to me.

Grant Robin (27:20.299)
Yeah, it's a great movie.

Eli (27:35.438)
It's just, it's just like a, a well, well like made clock that functions exactly how it's supposed to function. You know, to me it's, you know, so yeah. I need to give you my Blu ray so you can watch it on. On Blu ray. but yeah, I would put Oppenheimer anywhere from like.

Grant Robin (27:43.159)
Mm-hmm.

Grant Robin (27:49.165)
Yeah, I need to go back and watch it.

Grant Robin (27:57.3)
yeah.

Eli (28:04.773)
Just depending on the day it could be anywhere from like third to seventh really for me All of all of the movies three to seven. I have nine stars So that that would be like the prestige inception memento dark knight and opinheimer Right now i'm struggling with whether to put it Four anywhere between fourth and six with it The prestige is like special to me because it was like

Like in my college years, was like the movie I would say was my favorite movie, sort of thing. And I've come to grown to like Interstellar and Dunkirk more, but prestige still kind of holds a special spot. So I don't know that I can put it above the prestige, but I could see myself putting putting Oppenheimer like above inception and Memento and Dark Knight, just because I think it's an incredible achievement, you know.

Grant Robin (28:39.885)
Mm-hmm.

Grant Robin (29:01.932)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (29:04.017)
But yeah, I think that's where I kind of sit with it. And I did move it up with this watch to my number six film of 2023. So, know, it moved up the ranks a little bit. Yeah. My number six of 2023, which you saw Past Lives, didn't you? Didn't you watch Past Lives? Yeah, that was my favorite movie of 2023.

Grant Robin (29:18.189)
As it wins best picture

Grant Robin (29:28.767)
I did, yeah, I love that movie. I loved that movie.

Eli (29:33.617)
Yeah, but yeah, I think that's it. Grant, where can people kind of follow you to see any sort of work you're doing or that sort of thing? What's the best pace for people to find that sort of stuff?

Grant Robin (29:51.182)
I am notorious for being terrible at social media, but if I were to post something it would be on Instagram at Grant Roban. I sometimes I'll post about projects that we're doing. Yeah, and then I have a website if you want to see my cinematography, grant-roban.com. I have some of my, you know, movies and stuff on there. But yeah.

Eli (29:55.825)
That's fine.

Eli (30:09.222)
Yeah.

Eli (30:14.725)
Yeah. Yeah. And I'll make sure to link those in the episode description so people can find it. But yeah, I think that's really all we have for this week. Next week, I'll probably run an old movie draft or something. I'm actually thinking about, I kind of have a backlog of old movie drafts that don't have their own episode. They were kind of like included in past episodes. And I have one that I think is desert.

uh, movies that maybe would pair okay with this one, since a lot of it is in a desert. Um, so I might run that one next week. So we'll, we'll see what I ended up putting out, um, TBD on that. Um, but the week after that, I'll be kind of doing a Spielberg intermission, um, kind of in the middle of his, after his 2000, 90s and 2000s mid career.

Grant Robin (30:49.856)
Yeah.

Eli (31:09.829)
I'll kind of do a look back on that and talk about my favorite stuff from those two decades. And then I'll do a bit of a look forward at the last stretch of his career from the 2010s to today. So that's what's coming up next week. But yeah, that's all we have. Grant, it was a good time. It was a deep conversation time. And yeah, it was fun. Thanks for coming on.

Grant Robin (31:39.883)
Yeah, thanks for having me, man. I enjoyed it.

Eli (31:41.605)
Yep. Yep. And hopefully we'll be able to get you on again soon, sometime, maybe start a little earlier. So we're not finishing so late. Grant, a peek behind, Grant's curtain is he went to see Thunderbolts and then the movie, what, like just stopped or something halfway through.

Grant Robin (31:50.829)
Hey bro, I'm game.

Grant Robin (32:00.949)
Yeah, it just crashed, like it just went to black and they had to like back it up and I was like, come on guys. But Thunderbolts was great, so.

Eli (32:03.829)
Ugh, it's the worst. Yeah. So we had to get started. Yeah, we had to get started later, but I'm hopefully, I'll hopefully be able to see Thunderbolt soon. So I'm looking forward to it. should be fun. Sweet. Well, that's all for this week. I've been Eli Price for Grant Roban. You've been listening to the Establishing Shot. We will see you next time.

Grant Robin (32:17.229)
That's a lot of fun.