Christopher Nolan talks about the difficulty of getting the audience into the mind of J. Robert Oppenheimer:
“There’s the idea of how we get in somebody’s head and see how they were visualising this radical reinvention of physics. One of the things that cinema has struggled with historically is the representation of intelligence or genius. It very often fails to engage people.
The first person I showed the script to when it was finished after Emma [Thomas] read it was Andrew Jackson, the visual effects supervisor.
I said to him, ‘We have to find a way into this guy’s head. We’ve gotta see the world the way he sees it, we’ve gotta see the atoms moving, we’ve gotta see the way he’s imagining waves of energy, the quantum world. And then we have to see how that translates into the Trinity test. And we have to feel the danger, feel the threat of all this somehow.’ My challenge to him was, ‘Let’s do all these things, but without any computer graphics.’”
(via @empiremagazine)