Oppenheimer: No CGI allowed! This is how the atomic bomb exploded in the new Nolan

• “Oppenheimer” takes us to a dark point in human history.
• The explosion of the first atomic bomb is shown in Christopher Nolan’s new film – and that completely without CGI.
• In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Nolan reveals how the scene of the detonation came about.

Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” is about the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who detonated the first atomic bomb. During the so-called Trinity test, the weapon was detonated on July 16, 1945 in the New Mexico desert. We also get to see this spectacular and disastrous detonation in the film.

But Nolan made it extra difficult for himself – it is created without the help of CGI, i.e. computer-generated special effects. In the book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, it is described that the explosion filled the entire sky with white light and one of the chemists present, James Conant, thought something was gone wrong and the world would have been in flames.

Depicting something like this without the help of non-CGI has certainly been one of Nolan’s biggest challenges for Nolan’s blockbuster based on Bird and Sherwin’s book. The director reveals this in an interview with the US magazine Entertainment Weekly: “We always knew that the Trinity test had to be a scoop. It’s the fulcrum around which the whole s tory revolves.”

Practical effects and abstract representations

After Nolan already used CG effects in his superhero film “The Dark Knight Rises” to show an atomic bomb explosion, he was sure for “Oppenheimer” that he wanted to go a different way. To do this, he hired visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson to think about how the detonation could be implemented using practical effects.

Nolan also wanted to visually implement Oppenheimer’s train of thought through abstract but spectacular images of the quantum world. Jackson is well versed in both the computer world and the analog world, so he was the right candidate for the job.

And so he spent months and months and months doing all these experiments and figuring out all these methods, some very, very small and microscopic, some absolutely colossal.

Nolan on Andrew Jackson’s assignment

Production Designer Ruth De Yong and Special Effects Supervisor Scott Fisher were also tasked with constructing the physical bomb. The two have built the complete bomb as a replica in great detail. In order to make the actors’ and actresses’ reactions more believable, they also followed the whole process of bringing the fake bomb to the detonation site and setting it up. Even after the explosion, the actors and actresses were filmed to preserve authentic scenes.

“Ruth De Yong [baute] the bunkers as they would have been so we could shoot in the middle of the night, in the desert, in the real locations and [die Schauspieler] “We were able to experience a certain level of tension there, as it had built up in the weeks leading up to that crazy night,” Nolan said. The weather did as it should, too. And even if it didn’t, Nolan would have kept filming to keep the scenes authentic.

Showing the whole process and the resulting tension that leads to the explosion of the Trinity test is the key of the whole work. “Oppenheimer” will be released in German cinemas on July 20, 2023.