When Academy Award-winning screenwriter Matt Damon got the script for Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer,’ he figured it would be the usual dense, brainy screenplay that Nolan is known for. However, what he did not expect was to find himself reading a script written completely in the first person. It was such an unusual format that it left the actor “totally overwhelmed.“
“I kind of offended Chris because he came over and he said, ‘What’d you think?’ And I just kinda blurted out, ‘I have no notes,’” Damon said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. For the ‘Good Will Hunting‘ Oscar winner, that was the biggest compliment he could give: ” Like, ‘I have nothing to say, this is amazing.'”
Why Christopher Nolan Wrote the Entire ‘Oppenheimer’ Screenplay in First Person
Later on, Damon found out that Nolan took his short answer differently. When the director met with co-star Emily Blunt a week later, she was “effusive in her praise and very articulate.” As Damon remembered it, Nolan said, “That’s better than what I got from Matt, I just got ‘he had no notes.’“
What made Damon so speechless was the way Nolan wrote the screenplay. For the first time in his career, the director wrote an entire script from the main character’s point of view.
“I actually wrote in the first-person, which I’ve never done before,” Nolan told Empire magazine. “I don’t know if anyone’s ever done it before.” The script did not just have first-person narration here and there. Every single part of it, from character descriptions to setting details to stage directions, was written as if J. Robert Oppenheimer himself was typing it.
Instead of writing “Oppenheimer walks across the room,” the script said, “I walk across the room.” As Damon later explained to Collider, “It just ripped you into that world.“
How Nolan Used Practical Effects to Show ‘Oppenheimer’s Internal World
Nolan wanted to do something that movies have always had a hard time with, which is showing intelligence and genius in a way that actually grabs the audience. The script became the starting point for that vision. “We have to find a way into this guy’s head,” Nolan remembered telling his visual effects supervisor. “We’ve gotta see the world the way he sees it, we’ve gotta see the atoms moving, we’ve gotta see the way he’s imagining waves of energy, the quantum world.”
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The director stuck to this subjective experience even in how he shot the movie. Nolan pushed his team to do it without computer graphics and insisted on using practical effects to show what was going on inside Oppenheimer’s head.
For Nolan, writing in the first person was not just some trick; it had a real purpose. “It was a reminder to me of how to shoot the film. It was a reminder to everybody involved in the project, ‘Okay, this is the point of view of every scene,’” he explained. Most importantly, it told the audience how they should relate to the main character. “I wanted to really go through this story with Oppenheimer; I didn’t want to sit by him and judge him,” Nolan said. “You are faced with these irreconcilable ethical dilemmas with him.”
The Cast’s Reaction to Nolan’s First-Person Screenplay and Damon’s Final Takeaway
The way the script was written left a big mark on the cast. Cillian Murphy, who played Oppenheimer, told Collider it was “one of the best screenplays I’ve ever read, without a shadow of a doubt.” Emily Blunt described reading it as “pulse-racing and emotional and immersive” and said the script “plays like a horror movie” because of how it pulls readers into Oppenheimer’s “internal storm.”
Damon, even though he accidentally gave a short answer, eventually got what Nolan was going for. “He was so clear that with the way that it was written in that subjective voice, the whole movie lived or died hinged on that performance,” he said about Murphy’s acting. The first-person script was not just a gimmick. It was a mission statement. It made sure that everyone working on the film knew they were going along for the ride inside one of the most complicated minds in history.
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