Adapting Oppenheimer’s Life Story to Film, with Biographer Kai Bird

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

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🗓️ 24 July 2023

⏱️ 21 minutes

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Summary

In making “Oppenheimer,” which opens in theatres this weekend, the director Christopher Nolan relied on a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography of the father of the atomic bomb, “American Prometheus,” by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. Bird is credited as a writer of Nolan’s movie, and he spoke with David Remnick about Oppenheimer’s life story—in particular, about the ambivalence that the scientist felt, and expressed publicly, about the use of the bomb, which led to a McCarthyist show trial that destroyed his career and reputation. “He’s very complicated and he’s highly intelligent, so he’s capable of understanding and holding in his head contradictory ideas,” Bird says. On the one hand, “He feared that if [the bomb] was not used, or the war ended without the use of this weapon, the next war was going to be fought by two nuclear-armed adversaries and it would be Armageddon.” On the other hand, after Hiroshima, Oppenheimer used his status as a celebrity scientist to educate the public about the dangers of nuclear warfare, a move that landed him in the crosshairs of federal officials. “What happened to him in 1954 sent a message to several generations of scientists, here in America but [also] abroad, that scientists should keep in their narrow lane. They shouldn’t become public intellectuals. And if they dared to do this, they could be tarred and feathered,” Bird notes. “The same thing that happened to Oppenheimer in a sense happened to Tony Fauci.”

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0:42.5	Yeah, eBay. Things people love.
0:49.2	This is the political scene, and I'm David Remnick.
1:09.0	This week, Christopher Nolan's film Oppenheimer, which is about the father of the atomic bomb.
1:13.4	Its director, Christopher Nolan, worked on science fiction movies like Interstellar and Inception, as well as the World War II epic,
1:17.4	and I think his best movie until now, Dunkirk.
1:20.7	To make Oppenheimer, Nolan relied on the astonishing biography,
1:25.5	American Prometheus, the triumph and tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
1:30.5	Written by Kai Bird and the late Martin Sherwin, American Prometheus won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize.
1:37.4	Nolan took some artistic license, as you might expect, but Kai Bird is credited as a co-writer of the film, and he told me that Nolan
1:46.5	stayed pretty faithful to his book. I spoke with Kai Bird last week.
1:53.5	Now, Kai, Christopher Nolan, the director of the film, is called Robert Oppenheimer, the most
1:58.0	important person in the history of the world. And as his biographer,
2:02.3	along with Martin Sherwin, of course, is Nolan right? Or is he just kind of hyping the film?
2:09.3	Well, when I first heard him say that, I thought that's a little bit of a hype, quite frankly.
	...

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