Christopher Nolan discusses how a character from a 16-year-old movie is a proto-Oppenheimer.
Speaking recently to The Atlantic, Oppenheimer director Nolan discussed similarities between Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer and Nikola Tesla as portrayed by David Bowie in Nolan’s 2006 movie The Prestige. Check out his remarks below:
Oh yeah, very much so. I don’t know if you know this, but Tesla was, somewhat controversially, credited with coming up with the concept of mutually assured destruction. When he died—by then having succumbed to a form of madness—government officials descended on the hotel room where he was staying and went through his papers. Please fact-check all of this, by the way. It’s been a long time since I looked at the material. As a filmmaker, you sort of glibly give all of these facts, because in Hollywood, it’s all a sales pitch. … It was rumored that he had scribbled down a design for a sort of death ray, and while I don’t think there was any hard science behind it, the concept was that this weapon would be so powerful that if both sides had it, it would end war.
That’s very similar to the conclusions that Oppenheimer came to. When people are that smart, they can find a way to make anything make sense. It seemed to me that he had a notion that until the bomb is used, people won’t really understand it. That’s a pretty extreme rationalization, and Oppenheimer’s story is full of those mental gymnastics. He was a very ethical person, but he also had a brilliantly abstracted philosophical way of looking at everything he was involved with, and that can lead you to pretty strange places.
More to come…
