Adapting Robert Oppenheimer’s Story to Film, Plus Greta Gerwig on Becoming a Director

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2023

⏱️ 27 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: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” 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 the ambivalence that the scientist expressed publicly about the use of the bomb, which led to a McCarthyist show trial that destroyed his career and reputation. “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.”

Plus, Greta Gerwig talks about her path to directing. Like “Barbie,” Gerwig’s two previous films as a director and writer are concerned with coming of age as a woman. Once criticized as a “bossy girl,” Gerwig recalls, she tamped down her instinct to direct, focusing early in her career on acting and then screenwriting. She told David Remnick how she finally gave herself permission to be a filmmaker.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:11.2	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.
0:14.3	This week, the conversation about movies is all about the phenomenon known as Barb and
0:18.5	Hymer.
0:19.5	First, there's Greta Gerwig's film, Barbie, and we're going to hear from her about her
0:24.5	path to becoming a filmmaker later in the show.
0:28.8	And then there's Oppenheimer, which is about the father of the atomic bomb.
0:33.7	Its director Christopher Nolan worked on science fiction movies like Interstellar and Inception,
0:39.1	as well as the World War II epic, and I think his best movie until now, Done Kirk.
0:44.4	To make Oppenheimer, Nolan relied on the astonishing biography, American Prometheus, the
0:50.6	triumphant tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
0:54.2	Written by Kai Bird and the late Martin Sherwin, American Prometheus won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize.
1:01.0	Nolan took some artistic licenses you might expect, but Kai Bird is credited as a co-writer
1:07.2	of the film, and he told me that Nolan stayed pretty faithful to his book.
1:12.6	I spoke with Kai Bird last week.
1:15.5	Now, Kai Christopher Nolan, the director of the film, is called Robert Oppenheimer, the
1:20.0	most important person in the history of the world.
1:23.8	And as his biographer, along with Martin Sherwin, of course, is Nolan right, or is he just
1:28.7	kind of hyping the film?
1:31.1	Well, when I first heard him say that, I thought that's a little bit of a hype, quite frankly.
1:39.0	But the more you think about it, and the more I revisit my 18-year-old book, it's true.
1:49.0	The Oppenheimer gave us the atomic age, and we're still living with it.
	...

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