Atomic explosion without special effects in Oppenheimer? How Christopher Nolan directed the bomb scene

“We knew that the Trinity nuclear test had to be the highlight of the movie”– Christopher Nolan tells us in the aforementioned interview, which took place around Oppenheimer, his new feature film. “That had to be one of the most important moments because it’s the turning point of the whole story.”

Led by an English director, even the plot is a prop, which then moves into a tense and tumultuous final hour. Often highlighted during the promotion, the nuclear test scene is certainly one of Oppenheimer’s strong moments, a mix of poetry and terror that stops time while making the audience feel like the characters on the screen.

But how was it done? If the synthetic image option is necessary in the first place, it is a misunderstanding of Christopher Nolan, who has become famous, among other things, for wanting to limit digital tricks as much as possible. Which he confirms here: “I asked my special effects teams to find methods that would allow us to capture something real, tangible.

Like one of the two magicians of Prestige, the screenwriter and director will not reveal his tricks to us. But information gleaned from other media makes it possible to piece together the tricks used by a man who admits that computer imagery reduces the sense of danger and puts the viewer at ease, which was not Oppenheimer’s intention.

in the given interview The whole movieSpecial effects supervisor Scott R. Fisher (Oscar winner for Tenet and Interstellar) specifies that he used a forced perspective technique, which makes it possible to simulate differences in size between intervening objects or characters in the same scene. Like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings.

Large-scale experience and small details

Except that he didn’t use miniatures, but models as large as possible, and in reasonable proportions: the closer these elements were to the camera, the larger they appeared, favoring the effect that Christopher Nolan and his teams were looking for. But that was only one part of the challenge. Even the simplest.

Because then it was necessary to reproduce the explosion itself, without going so far as to use a real nuclear weapon. And this was done with a mixture of gasoline and propane, the combination of which allows for a massive pyrotechnic aspect associated with aluminum powder and magnesium to create the blinding flash characteristic of this type of vehicle.

The mix of large-scale experience and small details, according to Christopher Nolan himself, was intended to leave a lasting impression on the audience, while making it feel as if they were experiencing what Oppenheimer and his entourage were experiencing during the Trinity test. By reproducing the famous mushroom characteristic of the atomic bomb.

in the given interview EmpireThe director reveals that his teams filmed the TNT explosion in all its aspects to composit (combine image sources into a single shot) and add layers to the explosion created for the film. who therefore used various techniques to reproduce this key moment in Oppenheimer’s history. and the world.