Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan explains why the movie shifts between black-and-white and color. The director of blockbusters The Dark Knight, Inception and Interstellar this summer turns his lens on a real historical figure of massive import, unleashing his highly-anticipated biopic of A-bomb creator Robert Oppenheimer. Starring Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, the film has already wowed audiences with its dramatic trailers, teasing a literally explosive story about the quest to build humanity’s ultimate weapon.
Among the many things teased by those compelling Oppenheimer trailers is the film’s color scheme, which shifts between color and black-and-white, and now Nolan himself has revealed why he employed this unconventional approach. Speaking to Total Film (via GamesRadar), the director explained that the shift signals a literal change in perspective, which in fact was written into the script from the very beginning. Check out what Nolan said in the space below:
“I wrote the script in the first person, which I’d never done before. I don’t know if anyone has ever done that, or if that’s a thing people do or not… The film is objective and subjective. The color scenes are subjective; the black-and-white scenes are objective. I wrote the color scenes from the first person. So for an actor reading that, in some ways, I think it’d be quite daunting.”
Everything Christopher Nolan Has Revealed About Oppenheimer
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