'Like it or not, we live in Oppenheimer's world,' says director Christopher Nolan

Transcript

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest, Christopher Nolan, wrote and directed the new film "Oppenheimer," one of the most popular and talked-about films of the summer. Christopher Nolan also made the World War II film "Dunkirk," as well as the films "Tenet," the "Batman" trilogy, "Inception," "Insomnia" and "Memento." Globally, his films have made more than $5 billion at the box office. "Oppenheimer" is a biopic about the man who was called the father of the atom bomb, Robert Oppenheimer.

He was a theoretical physicist and directed Los Alamos, the secret project in New Mexico where research was conducted to create the first atom bomb and where that first bomb was designed and tested. When it was detonated, we crossed the threshold into a new world in which humans could destroy humankind. The bomb was intended to end World War II. By the time it was tested, Germany had surrendered, but Japan had not. The U.S. dropped atom bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. That ended the war, but it's estimated that as many as 200,000 people were killed.

Oppenheimer became an advocate of arms control after the war and opposed military plans for massive strategic bombing with nuclear weapons, which he considered genocidal. He also opposed the creation of the even deadlier hydrogen bomb. In 1954, during the height of the anti-communist era, he was accused of being a risk to national security because of his alleged earlier ties to the Communist Party. He protested at a hearing that culminated in being stripped of his security clearance. Last December, that decision was revoked by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.

Christopher Nolan, welcome back to FRESH AIR. It's a pleasure to have you back on the show.

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: Thank you.

GROSS: Before we talk about your films and hear a scene from "Oppenheimer," let's talk about the writers and actors strikes, which have shut down new TV and film productions. You are very successful. I doubt you have to worry about better contracts. What does the strike mean to you as a director working with actors?

NOLAN: Well, I think as any working member of our business feels, it's a very important time in the relationship between labor and management. These things happen from time to time. Every few decades, there's a crisis like this. But it's an important moment in our business where the way in which myself as a writer and a member of the Writers Guild and my friends and colleagues who are actors who are out right now - the ways in which we're compensated have to be updated to reflect the current world. And it's unfortunately requiring, you know, strike action to do that. And so, you know, my thoughts are very much with the working members of our business, not just writers and actors but also the other crew members who are out of work until this gets resolved. So I'm very hopeful that it's going to get resolved as quickly as possible.

GROSS: So you are in the Writers Guild, and the guild is on strike. Is it OK for you to be here? - because I know the writers and actors have been told, like, don't promote your movies during the strike. But you're also the director of the film, and you might be contractually obligated to promote it. So that's put you in an awkward spot.

NOLAN: Like a lot of people in our business, I mean, I'm in a very awkward position in a lot of different ways. You know, as a director and as a producer on "Oppenheimer," I'm contractually obliged to promote the film. But I also feel that where it's possible for me to be out there having a voice as a guild member, as a Writers Guild member, I think that's important because I think it could be difficult to get our point of view across. You know, this is a moment in which companies have, to a certain degree, taken advantage of technological shifts that - our contracts need to be updated to reflect that. It applies to theatrical film, which is the area I work in, but it applies even more so, I think, to television in the streaming era. And these things need to be taken care of.

GROSS: Well, let's move on to "Oppenheimer." And I'd like to start this part of our conversation with a scene from the film. So let me introduce the scene. So "Oppenheimer" is speaking with General Leslie Groves, who headed the Manhattan Project, which Los Alamos was part of. And Groves is asking Oppenheimer about the possibility that the atom bomb test could set off a chain reaction that would set fire to the atmosphere and destroy Earth, a possibility that Groves heard one of the top nuclear physicists, Enrico Fermi, refer to. So Oppenheimer is played by Cillian Murphy and Groves by Matt Damon. Groves speaks first.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "OPPENHEIMER")

MATT DAMON: (As Leslie Groves) What did Fermi mean by atmospheric ignition?

CILLIAN MURPHY: (As J. Robert Oppenheimer) Well, we had a moment where it looked like the chain reaction from an atomic device might never stop setting fire to the atmosphere.

DAMON: (As Leslie Groves) What was Fermi still taking side bets on?

MURPHY: (As J. Robert Oppenheimer) Call it gallows humor.

DAMON: (As Leslie Groves) Are we saying there's a chance that when we push that button, we destroy the world?

MURPHY: (As J. Robert Oppenheimer) Nothing in our research for over three years supports that conclusion, except it's the most remote possibility.

DAMON: (As Leslie Groves) How remote?

MURPHY: (As J. Robert Oppenheimer) Chances are near zero.

DAMON: (As Leslie Groves) Near zero.

MURPHY: (As J. Robert Oppenheimer) What do you want from theory alone?

DAMON: (As Leslie Groves) Zero would be nice.

GROSS: OK. That's a scene from "Oppenheimer," and my guest is the writer and director of the film, Christopher Nolan. That's such a frightening idea. And I know that the scientists were really convinced that there wasn't going to be this atmospheric ignition where the whole atmosphere would catch on fire and destroy Earth. But you're not - I guess you never really know, based on theoretical physics, what's going to happen when you blow up an atom bomb. So what was it like for you to think about that as you were making the movie?

NOLAN: I think for me, that knowledge that, leading up to the Trinity test, the leading scientists led by Oppenheimer - they could not completely eliminate the possibility of this chain reaction. That was one of the things that really got me interested in Oppenheimer's story and making a film from it because it's simply the most high-stakes, dramatic situation that you could conceive of. It beats anything in fiction. I had actually put a reference to it in my previous film, "Tenet," in dialogue. I used it as analogy for the science fiction situation at the heart of that film. But we referred to that moment.

And then after finishing that film, it was actually one of the stars of "Tenet," Rob Pattinson - he gave me a book of Oppenheimer's speeches, post-World War II speeches in which you see him trying to reckon with and you're reading about the great minds of the time trying to reckon with the consequences of this thing that they've unleashed on the world. But that initial notion, that fact that I learned of that they couldn't, using theory alone, completely eliminate the possibility of global destruction based on triggering the first atomic test - I just wanted to be in that room. I wanted to take the audience into that room for the moment where they would push that button.

GROSS: So much work went into making the first atom bomb, and so many theoretical physicists were involved - all the calculations. And then you have the reality of it exploding. So the bomb worked. All their work paid off. It was a success. And in the film, all the scientists are gathered, and they're applauding. That's before it was actually used for real. Knowing what you know now, how did it feel to watch their enthusiasm, their applause, to film that?

NOLAN: It felt very exciting. I felt lost in the excitement of it. And that was really the idea. I mean, at the heart of the film, there's a pivot, and it's really the pivot between the successful Trinity test and then the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the actual use of the weapon. And so for me, the focus of the film - it needed to be this build towards the most incredible excitement and tension around that test of whether or not they could pull off this extraordinary feat that they had been drawn into trying to accomplish based on this desperate race against the Nazis to be the first power to harness control or power of atomic weapons. And, you know, the Germans had split the atom. The Nazis had the best physicists or some of the best physicists in the world at their disposal, and they were trying as hard as they could to make the first atomic bomb.

And so Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists who were called upon by their country - they had no choice. And there's this moment, of course, where they're pushing for years, spending billions of dollars. They've built this whole community out in the middle of nowhere devoted to this one thing of making this chain reaction happen, making this atomic blast work. And it all boils down to that moment of the Trinity test. And they pull it off, and there's such joy and excitement around that. And I wanted the audience to be caught up in that. I wanted to be caught up in that. But then, you know, you come to film the scenes where we're looking from Oppenheimer's point of view. We're experiencing the news of the bombings coming through - unbelievably awful and changed the world forever. Whether we like it or not, we live in Oppenheimer's world, and we always will.

GROSS: You know, one of the things I thought about watching them with basically, like, sunglasses and a little bit of distance from the bomb - I was wondering, did they not understand radiation sickness and how they'd be exposed to radiation and how all the people, you know, in the periphery of where Los Alamos was would be exposed to radiation, too? And they were never informed. Those residents were never informed of what was happening. And I read that some people thought it was actually the end of the world when they saw the mushroom cloud.

NOLAN: Yeah. I mean, obviously, they weren't able to inform anyone of what was going on. And...

GROSS: It was too secretive. There was too much at stake.

NOLAN: It was too secretive, and the stakes were too high. They had informed - I believe they'd informed the governor of the state about the possible need for emergency evacuation, but they hadn't been able to, in any way, explain why. So it was obviously this great mystery around the project. And in terms of what they knew and didn't know about radiation and about fallout, it's pretty extraordinary to look at some of the statements made in the years after that by brilliant Teller. I mean, there's a chilling piece of footage you can find online where he sort of talks about how you could very efficiently dig the Panama Canal with hydrogen bombs. You know, and that's a proposed use of nuclear energy bombs.

GROSS: It's brilliant. You could build - you could dig the canal.

NOLAN: Yeah, you'd literally...

GROSS: And then you'd never...

NOLAN: ...Dig a canal.

GROSS: ...Be able to go there again, ever.

NOLAN: OK. Well, and this is the thing - is they knew the theory, and they knew the possibilities, to some degree. But as with so much in science, the real knowledge comes from experimentation. This is the nature of science - is, you know, it moves forward, continually correcting itself. Science is not a process whereby you are able to sit down and perfectly map everything out in theoretical terms and then that just becomes the future. It has to interact with the real world. And to a certain extent, our film is about the consequences of that.

GROSS: By the way, did you see that new study that hasn't yet been peer-reviewed but it has been published that says that the radiation from that Trinity test bomb spread through, I think, 46 states and parts of Canada and Mexico? I mean, that is quite a span of radiation.

NOLAN: It is. I mean, when you then look at the hydrogen bomb, which is, you know, a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb and the number of tests that they then started doing in Nevada and elsewhere in Bikini Atoll and you start looking at how many of these things have been detonated over the years, it's - yeah, it's pretty horrifying. And it's about an incomplete understanding. And what's really frightening about it is it's going on today. I mean, this is the thing - is there are technological innovations being unleashed on the world. I mean, the one that I've spent a lot of time talking about on this, you know, press tour for "Oppenheimer" is artificial intelligence because it's something that's very much of this moment. And a lot of the researchers in AI talk about this as their Oppenheimer moment, and they're looking at historians sort of saying, OK, what are the responsibilities of a researcher or a scientist bringing something into the world that may have unintended consequences?

GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Christopher Nolan, and he wrote and directed the new film "Oppenheimer." He also made the films "Dunkirk," "Tenet," the "Batman" trilogy, "Inception," "Insomnia" and "Memento." We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF LUDWIG GORANSSON'S "MEETING KITTY")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Christopher Nolan. He wrote and directed the new film "Oppenheimer," about the man who was called the father of the atom bomb. He also made the films "Dunkirk," "Tenet," the "Batman" trilogy, "Inception," "Insomnia" and "Memento."

What era of the nuclear age did you grow up in? Did you have to do, like, school take shelter drills? Were there bomb shelters where you grew up?

NOLAN: Yeah. I mean, it was interesting talking to Steven Spielberg after I showed him the film because he was talking about his experience in the 1960s - Cuban Missile Crisis, all of that and duck-and-cover drills. And I was talking about the 1980s, which was very similar in the United Kingdom. There was a lot of fear surrounding nuclear weapons. It was a time of protest. Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was at its height of membership. There were protests around Greenham Common, which was an airbase in the United Kingdom the Americans were putting cruise missiles in. There was a lot of fear in pop culture around nuclear weapons. And I've sort of watched that fear ebb and flow over my lifetime as the geopolitical situation shifted. But, of course, the danger has never gone away. And it's almost as if, you know, our capacity to be afraid of one particular threat to humanity gets exhausted and we have to worry about something else.

And that's not to say that nuclear weapons are the only threat to humanity. I mean, you know, climate change, things like that - there're all kinds of very complicated problems that need to be dealt with and worried about, but nuclear weapons is the one that's never gone away. And nuclear weapons are singular in their ability to instantly destroy life on Earth. And so when I first started writing this film and I spoke to one of my teenage sons about the subject I was working on, he literally said to me, oh, is that really something people worry about anymore? And, of course, in the time it took me to make the film, with the invasion of Ukraine and so forth, he was not asking that question two years later.

GROSS: One of the things that you had to think about was what was going through Oppenheimer's mind when the button was pushed, launching the test bomb. I'm wondering what went through your mind when the button was pushed, launching the bomb in your movie.

NOLAN: I mean, it was an interestingly analogous situation. I don't like to use computer graphics. I don't like to do things with green screens and so forth. So we had engineered a situation whereby we were performing very large explosions for the actors there, out in the desert in the middle of the night, in the same bunkers they would have been in. And I think that gave all of us some feeling of the tension that would have been there leading up to the Trinity test, in particular because when you do pyrotechnic effects, safety is obviously of paramount importance. And so there's an extraordinary amount of tension and planning around those moments before you trigger those events. And there's always that slight uncertainty about exactly what they're going to look like, what they're going to sound like, you know, how frightening they're going to be, essentially. So I think all of us, in our own small way, got some taste of what the tension there would have been for the people at Trinity. And I think that helped us construct the drama of it for the audience.

GROSS: Can you talk a little bit about how you created the image of the bomb exploding?

NOLAN: One of the first people I showed the script to when I finished it was my visual effects supervisor, Andrew Jackson. And I showed it to him right away because I said to him, you know, we have to get the Trinity test across. We also have to try and give some insights into the way Oppenheimer would have visualized molecular interactions and how that builds to its ultimate expression in the Trinity test. But I want to do it without computer graphics. And the thing with CG is it tends to - even though it's very versatile, as animation, it tends to feel a bit safe, a bit anodyne.

And it was very important to me that - firstly, the atomic interactions that Oppenheimer is visualizing. But then ultimately, the power of the device they build itself - the gadget, as they call it, that they detonated at Trinity - you wanted it to be the most beautiful and the most terrifying thing simultaneously. So Andrew spent many months experimenting with very small things, very microscopic images that could be filmed to represent bigger things but then also massive explosions using, you know, different forms of explosives - magnesium flares, petrol explosions, black powder explosions, things like that - and different frame rates and so forth. So there was just a lot of experimentation that went into it. And what I was very happy about was that the imagery that he was giving me did have the requisite threat, even with its hypnotic beauty.

GROSS: What's your approach to biopics, like what liberties to take and what to be faithful to?

NOLAN: Well, in a funny sort of way, my approach is to not even acknowledge biopic as a genre. In other words, if something works, like "Lawrence Of Arabia," for example, you don't think of it as a biopic. You think of it as a great adventure story even though, obviously, it's telling the story of somebody's life. Or "Citizen Kane" or, you know, one of these great films - I mean, obviously, there's fiction.

But for me, I had the benefit of this extraordinary book, "American Prometheus," that was written - you know, Martin Sherwin, who first started writing it - he spent 25 years researching Oppenheimer's story and speaking to everybody who knew him and, you know, all the rest. So by the time he and Kai Bird finished, they put the book out, it won the Pulitzer Prize, you know, I had this extraordinary sort of bible to work from. And so for me, it was really a process of saying, OK, what's the exciting story that develops, the cinematic story that develops from a reading of it, from several readings of it? And then I started to develop a structure for how I might be able to put the audience into Oppenheimer's head.

GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you again. If you're just joining us, my guest is Christopher Nolan. He wrote and directed the new film "Oppenheimer." He also made the films "Dunkirk," "Tenet," the "Batman" trilogy, "Inception," "Insomnia" and "Memento." We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF PATRICK ZIMMERLI, BRAD MEHLDAU AND KEVIN HAYS' "EXCERPT FROM STRING QUARTET #5")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Christopher Nolan. He wrote and directed the new film "Oppenheimer" about the man who was called the father of the atom bomb. Nolan also made the films "Dunkirk," "Tenet," the "Batman" trilogy, "Inception," "Insomnia" and "Memento."

You made the "Batman" trilogy, a very popular trilogy and a dark one, at that. I mean, the second one was called "The Dark Knight." You wanted to get dark right even in the title. What did comics mean to you growing up?

NOLAN: Well, I think, like a lot of kids, you know, I would read comics. And they were a great sort of launchpad for your imagination. You know, the way in which your brain processes the frames of a comic book, not unlike the way a filmmaker processes storyboards, you know, that have been drawn for a sequence or something - you're kind of - you're using your brain to flesh out from the work of the sort of artists and writers. And I became more interested in the character of Batman in that great era of sort of graphic novels - you know, the work of people like Frank Miller in particular. So they meant mythology, I suppose. They meant modern-day mythology, and they meant larger-than-life sort of operatic figures.

So when I took on the character of Batman in the trilogy we made, in the "Dark Knight" trilogy, you know, it was really all about an operatic approach to storytelling. So it's heightened reality, and that character really allows you to do that. And what I loved about Batman - of all the characters, the reason I wanted to deal with Batman is for me, he was the most human and relatable of superheroes because he doesn't really have any superpowers unless you count his extraordinary wealth. You know, that's the thing he brings to bear. But he's basically a guy who does a lot of pushups. And...

GROSS: (Laughter).

NOLAN: That's how he makes himself into this powerful figure and uses his brain and so forth. So, you know, working with Christian Bale, you know, we were able to make an operatic character but one who was relatable enough that you could get drawn into the psychology of the character that's quite dark and quite interesting and leads you some very unexpected places. And we had a lot of fun, you know, working on those films for, you know, almost 10 years.

GROSS: Heath Ledger was certainly a very terrifying villain in "The Dark Knight," and one of the things he did in that film is just, like, constantly lick his lips. And that's in part because how he was scarred as a child. But did you suggest that he do that? Did he come up with that?

NOLAN: No, he came up with it as a result of the makeup that he was wearing for the scars. It would sort of - the makeup had to be applied over his lips, and it would start to sort of peel off. And so he found himself sort of licking to keep it back down and sort of stick it back again. And as with so much of what Heath arrived at in terms of the characterization, he sort of saw that in the mirror, as it were, or sort of felt himself doing it and started to apply it to the character. So it became this kind of lizard-like sort of tongue, you know, this little weird thing that he was doing.

And we would talk a lot about those kind of things because he's - you know, he was just one of the great actors who approaches everything from an interior point of view but also allows the exterior to feed into that. A lot of the actors I've worked with - Cillian is like that. Tom Hardy is like that. These great actors who - yes, they approach it all almost in a method way, you know, psychological truth. But also, they're thinking about what shoes they're going to wear, you know, and how that's going to affect how they move and so forth. And so there's this kind of - I think with a lot of this generation of actors, there's a great kind of coming together of, you know, if you like the approach of the sort of Marlon Brando school but also the Charles Laughton school. So it's both things. It's exterior, and it's interior. And so much of what Heath was able to bring to that character was about the appearance and how it would interact with the psychology.

GROSS: The character of the Joker, as portrayed by Heath Ledger, is not only, like, a villain. He's a sadist. He enjoys threatening people with torture and torturing them in various ways. And I'm wondering how you felt about shooting that - like, so much sadism.

NOLAN: I think, you know, whenever you're dealing with a dark subject, a dark psychology in particular, there's a sort of - there's a peculiar mix of emotions that you feel in figuring out how to portray it in the way you're going to shoot it and the way the actors are going to perform it and talk to them about it. And you have to share some of the characters' excitement. Particularly in the case of the Joker, it's an excitement about chaos and anarchy. But for me, those are very frightening things. You know, the utter breakdown of society, the idea of complete anarchy, the idea of lawlessness - you know, these are things that they have a very nightmarish quality for me. And so whilst you have to share some of the energy of the character, you have to see it from their point of view, you're also very aware and very uncomfortable the whole time, really, about the darkness of it and about all the things that give it that particular dark energy.

GROSS: When you're not working, do you live in your head a lot, and does your head become a kind of dark place where negative thoughts consume you?

NOLAN: No. I mean, I certainly live in my head a lot. It's how I work. You know, I think "Oppenheimer" - of all the films I've worked on, it's the one that I actually find the most disturbing and the most under my skin. And I was quite glad to be finished making it, to be quite frank. And it's because I try to approach it from his point of view and try to find genuine positivity in his story, in his relationships, in the things that he was able to achieve and the ways in which he was able to defend himself or the way his friends would stand up for him and all the rest. And, you know, there are particular resolutions to the way we tell the story that I think have a lot of positivity. But there is no getting around the undeniable darkness of his situation, his story and how it has affected the world. And there's something very uncomfortable and insidious about that that I'm quite grateful to be able to leave behind.

GROSS: But now you have to talk about it.

NOLAN: But now I have to talk about it. I'm almost there, though. I'm almost there.

GROSS: Yeah. Right.

NOLAN: I mean, you know, it's - if, you know, movies are a sort of collective dream, there's a sense in which "Oppenheimer" is a collective nightmare. And there's something about telling that and getting it out in the world that stops it being, you know, my own personal thing. And that helps. But, yeah, I think of all of the subject matter I've dealt with, it's certainly the darkest.

GROSS: So I want to ask you about dreams. You know, you edit some of your films out of chronological sequence, and I think dreams are that way, too. Like, dreams often don't make any sense at all. You have to kind of look for the meaning within them and interpret them. But they don't make chronological sense. You just kind of hop from one scene to another that may or may not be related. Do you think that your dream life has influenced your editing life at all? And one of your - I mean, "Inception" is literally about dreams. It's about, like, stealing dreams and implanting information in someone's mind through dreams, like, tapping into other people's dreams.

NOLAN: Well, it's also about what you just described. It's about the time scale of dreams. You know, "Inception" is very much about how you can have a much longer - a feeling of a much longer period of your life in a very short space of time in a dream. So, yeah, that film in particular really drilled down on my relationship with my dream life and the relationship between dreams and reality. But I think cinema in general for me is very influenced by its relationship with dreams. There is a very real sense in which movies are sort of shared dream worlds, are shared kind of dream consciousness. They have an interesting effect on the brain. You know, when you see a film, it's often quite - it's quite interesting to talk to people who've seen a film about the time span of the film they saw, not the literal time they were sitting there in the cinema but what time slice it represents of the characters' lives, for example. And that's a very complicated aspect of how movies get into our brains and how we look at them and how we sort of judge them.

GROSS: So in "Inception," your movie about dreams, Leonardo DiCaprio says we never remember the beginning of a dream. Is that true? I mean, it's a question I've never asked myself. I don't know if I remember the beginning of my dreams because I'm lucky if I remember my dreams. And when I do, it's usually I remember the mood. I remember a few frames of the dream. I don't really remember the chronology very well, and I have no idea where it started. So what made you think of that?

NOLAN: I wrote "Inception," you know, very much from my own impression of the way I dream and sort of dream rules. And I sort of trusted that there would be enough people in the audience that roughly corresponded with the way that I dream that it wouldn't be, you know, overly controversial. I remember many years ago seeing a film, I think it was - it must be - I think it was George Burns. I think it was "Oh, God!" There's a moment where somebody says, well, you know - they say, am I dreaming? And they say, well, is it in color, you know? And they say, yeah. And he's like, OK, well, you know it's not a dream because you only dream in black and white. And I remember as a kid thinking, well, I don't dream in black and white. That's weird.

But this is the danger. You know, when you write about memory - you know, when I was doing "Memento," for example - you know, it is a very personal thing. And everybody's brain is a little different. The way we process the world is a little different. I know that I, as an audience member - I respond to a consistent rule set, if you like. So as long as the film is telling me up front that, OK, this is how we see the world; this is the world of the film you're watching - as long as they're sort of true to that in the telling of the story, then I'm OK with it.

GROSS: You know, that whole question of, like, oh, we only dream in black and white - people used to ask each other that. Do you dream in black and white or in color? And do you think that was because our only understanding in that time of what imagery looked like in representation outside of paintings was film and TV, which were in black and white...

NOLAN: I think that's...

GROSS: ...And photographs?

NOLAN: Yeah. No, I think you've hit the nail on the head, actually. And I think it relates to the earlier answer of the relationship between, you know, our view of dreams and our view of motion pictures.

GROSS: Yeah.

NOLAN: The way in which you remember movies is very similar to the way in which you remember dreams. And every now and again, you see a film that taps that in a way. You know, I think "Memento," for a lot of people, sort of bled off the page, if you like, or off the strip of film running through the projector and built a bigger world in people's minds. I think the films of David Lynch have always done that incredibly well over the years. They have a dream logic that quite often - I remember seeing "Lost Highway," for example, and not really understanding the film at all and then, a couple of weeks later, remembering the film the way I would remember one of my own dreams. And that suddenly felt like a sort of remarkable feat that Lynch had achieved in terms of mapping a dream into the space of a motion picture and vice versa.

GROSS: Would you be willing to share one of your worst nightmares that has always stuck with you?

NOLAN: Absolutely not.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: OK. Are dreams very personal to you?

NOLAN: Very personal - exactly.

GROSS: Yeah, OK. Well, let's take another short break here, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Christopher Nolan. He wrote and directed the new film "Oppenheimer." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF LUDWIG GORANSSON'S "CAN YOU HEAR THE MUSIC")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Christopher Nolan. He wrote and directed the new film "Oppenheimer." He also made the films "Dunkirk," "Tenet," the "Batman" trilogy, "Inception" and "Insomnia" - oh, and "Memento."

Your new film, "Oppenheimer," is shot to be seen on an IMAX. And a lot of people will not have the opportunity of seeing it that way. But I think some people are puzzled. Like, why shoot a movie that's largely people talking to each other and people thinking and people being anguished over the possibilities of the bomb - why shoot that in IMAX, which is usually reserved for films that have incredible landscapes or that have incredible, fantastical cinematography?

NOLAN: Well, I've used IMAX for years. And going into "Oppenheimer," talking to Hoyte, my DP, we knew that it would give us, with its high resolution, its sort of extraordinary analog color, sharpness, all of these things - the big screens that you projected on. We knew it would give us the landscapes of New Mexico, that it would give us the Trinity test, which we felt had to be a showstopper. But we actually got really excited about the idea of the human face. You know, how can it help us jump into Oppenheimer's head? The story is told subjectively. I even wrote the script in the first person - you know, I this, I that. We were looking for the visual equivalent of that. And so taking those high-resolution IMAX cameras and, you know, really just trying to be there for the intimate moments of the story in a way that we felt we hadn't really seen people do before with that format - that was, you know, a source of particular excitement for us. And as we started to project dailies, because we still print the film and project the dailies, you know, in the old-fashioned way - but you start to see how that's going to help tell the story and how that's going to help, you know, put us in his head. And that became very exciting.

GROSS: Does it pain you to think that probably a lot of people will end up watching "Oppenheimer" on their phones or on little tablets?

NOLAN: (Laughter) No, not at all. I actually - you know, I'm one of the first generations of filmmakers who grew up with home video. So, you know, my family got its first VHS player when I was about 11 years old. And so I've sort of come of age in a world of film where - more people are always going to see your film in the home. That's always been the case. But the thing about the way film distribution works is if you make your film for the biggest possible screen and you put it out there and the biggest possible way, firstly, the technical quality of the image carries through to all the subsequent versions of the film that you then master. But also, the excitement around the event of the thing, what the thing is - it starts to be defined in the popular imagination by its theatrical release, and that follows right the way down for the life of the movie. So that's the world of filmmaking that I've grown up in and one that I very much enjoy.

GROSS: I'm interested in your relationship to technology. I mean, you're using state-of-the-art technology - you know, 70 millimeter for IMAX. At the same time, I've read that you don't have real, like, tech cellphone. I think you have, like, a flip phone, maybe. And I think there's other, like, tech things, like email, maybe, that you don't use. And so it strikes me as kind of strange that you'd use such, like, state-of-the-art, you know, cinematography but, you know, reject things like a cellphone. At the same time, I know that there's - like, CGI - you don't like to use CGI because it looks fake to you. So, like, where do you draw the line with technology?

NOLAN: Technology is whatever the tools are available to us. So I shoot my films on celluloid film, preferably IMAX celluloid film, because it's the best analogy for the way the eye sees the world. So it gives you the highest possible quality. For me, it's about using the best tool for the job. So, for example, you know, sometimes I get asked whether I still, you know, edit on film. And I've never edited on film. I've always edited on the computer because it's the only practical way to do it. But then when we finish the creative process of editing, we cut the film up. We cut the negative up. We glue it together. We print from there, and that's the finishing process. And so for me, you know, the approach to technology is always about, how can it help you? How can it help you do something better?

And I've always liked not having a smartphone in my pocket because it just sort of means when you get those pockets of time, you know, when you turn up early for a meeting and you're waiting for somebody or whatever, you spend a bit more time thinking and just, you know, I suppose using your imagination in a way. And for me, with the amount of work that I try to do and figuring out what the next project is, advancing different things in my mind, having those pockets of time is actually pretty valuable. I've also got a terribly addictive personality, and I think if I had a smartphone, I'd spend the whole time, you know, just on it and, you know, absorbed in it the way I see a lot of people absorbed in it. So it's something I never started doing. And now it feels a bit of a superpower that I don't have one. So I'm going to try and maintain my allegiance to the dumb phone or the flip phone.

GROSS: Thank you so much for coming back to our show.

NOLAN: Sure. Thank you for having me.

GROSS: Christopher Nolan wrote and directed the new film "Oppenheimer." After we take a short break, Maureen Corrigan will review the new novel by James McBride, who also wrote the novels "The Color Of Water" and "The Good Lord Bird." This is FRESH AIR.

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