‘Oppenheimer’ cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema breaks down four key scenes: "Limitations become advantages"

Oppenheimer marks the fourth collaboration between writer/director Christopher Nolan and Dutch cinema­tographer Hoyte van Hoytema, following Interstellar, Dunkirk and Tenet. A three-hour epic centred on J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the “father of the atomic bomb”, Oppenheimer was shot on real locations — including Los Alamos, site of the Manhattan Project and Trinity Test — with Nolan filming in his beloved Imax format, alongside the Panavision 65mm cameras favoured by David Lean for Lawrence Of Arabia, using colour and black-and-white — the latter requiring the creation of a new film stock.

“It’s no secret that if Chris and I could shoot a film entirely on a bigger format, we would totally commit to that,” says van Hoytema, nominated for best cinematography at Bafta and Oscar — one of 13 nods at both sets of awards for the film, which has grossed $957m worldwide for Universal. “The problem with that is the sound. The big-format cameras, the Imax cameras, are very noisy but are priceless when it comes to depth and image quality.

“So we always try to incorp­orate as much as possible, to suck in audiences, then deal with the practicalities, which is that intimate scenes need sound and dialogue to be recorded directly from an actor’s mouth. We shoot those scenes on the next best thing, which is 65mm 5-perf. But even then, we try and do a few takes in Imax in the hope we can incorporate it.”

Nolan split the film into two distinct stylistic strands: “Fission” (colour), designed to put the audience subjectively into Oppenheimer’s head during his early years as well as his time on the Manhattan Project; and “Fusion” (black-and-white), which offered a more objective point of view, focusing on Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), who, it is eventually revealed, was the driving force behind Oppenheimer’s security clearance being revoked in 1954.

“It was constantly close-ups, close‑ups, close-ups, talking, talking, talking. The challenge was, ‘How the hell do we make this interesting?’” says van Hoytema, who talks Screen International through four key scenes, two in colour, one in black-and-white, and one a mix.

Oppenheimer is grilled over his government security status

The scene: Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) faces a hearing of the Atomic Energy Commission to determine whether he should have his government security status revoked. Many witnesses are called, including his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt).

Hoyte van Hoytema: “I think the worst thing that can come from my direction is I panic, thinking that what we have in front of the camera is not interesting, and that I must tweak and doctor it to make it palatable. But if Chris does his job right, script-wise, there is not so much for me to add. As it’s said in the film, the hearing [takes place in] a dingy little room, dreary and drab. And with slightly too many men in a too-small room. That’s something that, as a cinema­tographer, you must flow with.

“I loved the fact we decided to shoot it on a real location in a real room. That always excites me because I hate the idea of pulling out walls to find cool shots and get tempted into things [the scene] is not. That room forced me to focus on him, on his face, on what he sees and what he says, the way he looks at those men, and the way those men move in on him. All that stuff happens in small gestures, small expressions and small emotions growing bigger but growing under the skin. I found it super-enjoyable to do. Those limitations become advantages because they tell me I must trust, trust, trust. Trust the writing. There’s no necessity to polish it.

“We start on an extremely naked close-up of Oppenheimer. We built a lens that allowed us to be closer to our characters, so the Imax camera would literally be a foot from their faces sometimes. We built this lens, which Chris and I referred to as the ‘paranoia lens’ because it has that paranoia feeling you had in the ’70s when filmmakers got a little more funky, and a little bit closer in people’s faces and didn’t care so much about the glamour.

“We had this one lens, which, on Imax, was a 40mm lens that was usually reserved for epic wide shots, but you could never get close to people. Technically it was not possible. But our lens magician at Panavision, Dan Sasak, tweaked that lens, and suddenly we could go closer and closer and closer for those few intimate moments. We used that several times throughout the movie.”

The congressional hearing

The scene: Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr) attends a Senate Committee in Washington DC to ratify his appointment to the cabinet of President Eisenhower.

van Hoytema: “These Senate hearings were in Washington. However we had budget restraints, time restraints, and Chris tried to bring this film in on a certain budget, so we found this room in Santa Fe, New Mexico. That’s where we shot everything. In a real, practical location. Conceptually [with these scenes] we wanted a bit more objectivity when we watched Strauss — we don’t necessarily want to be in his head, because we are establishing him as a nemesis or antagonist. We started very objectively, more of a fly on the wall. But, as you sit through those hearings, you get sucked into this character, into his charm. And antagonist and protagonist get closer to each other. So, we moved closer to him throughout the scenes, which allowed us, as an audience, to step closer.

“There are a lot of what we called ‘paranoia close-ups’ of Strauss that, in the beginning, we reserved more for Oppenheimer. We almost want to be like old political thrillers. But we didn’t want to be too interpretive. It’s a hearing and it is mundane, so we didn’t try to overdramatise it. But it gets very exciting when you start cross-cutting [with Oppenheimer’s Atomic Energy Commission hearing].

“Shooting in black-and-white was a whole endeavour. Chris wanted to shoot in black-and-white, and we both love 65mm. But black-and-white 65mm film didn’t exist. We had to go to Kodak and ask, ‘Could you manufacture it?’ After a month or so, they had a prototype roll of film.

“We started testing and found it was absolutely amazing. But it brought with it a lot of other problems — like the cameras. The backing of the film is thinner than with colour, so we had to re-engineer the way the film was held in the camera. The lab had to exchange all the chemicals in their machines for black-and-white, which took three days, because nobody had done 65mm black-and-white before. It was a huge operation. We had to plan our production around when we were shooting black-and-white and when we were shooting colour — to change during the shoot had huge implications.

“I tried to light [the Senate scenes] as I had seen in photographs, with harsh, incandescent lighting that is generally very ugly and not very generous to film. But we found out that when we shot it on big-format black-and-white, it became very interesting, and you started seeing new textures and it got meatier.”

Detonating the first atomic bomb

The scene: The Trinity Test at Los Alamos, New Mexico, when Oppenheimer watches as they detonate the first atomic bomb.

van Hoytema: “Chris was very clear in the beginning that he wanted to shoot as much as possible in the real places. He didn’t necessarily want to overdramatise it. He also didn’t want to make a documentary. He just wanted to be truthful and make a very compelling movie. And so, of course, you end up in New Mexico and Los Alamos. We couldn’t shoot on the actual site; we were 20 miles away from where the original Trinity Test was done. We tried to show the magnitude of Trinity because Los Alamos was the only time in the film we could measure the scope of what an atom bomb can be, as we build towards this one explosion.

“I get asked a lot, ‘How did you do that? How did you make that one explosion?’ And for us to figure out how we were going to shoot Oppenheimer, we did a plethora of testing. That Trinity Test is not a single solution or decision, it’s a whole bunch of different things that we figured out if we combined them, they became interesting. If you look at the explosion, every single shot is very different. Some are shot in little aquarium tanks with newly built snorkel lenses. Some are big explosions on site. Others are weird light gags. We used different cameras too. Some can shoot high-speed. Some shoot large-­format. Some have magazines laying on their side.

“There was almost an excited desperation in trying to figure out how we were going to do it. Chris didn’t know, I didn’t know, but we were determined to figure it out. So, long before the shoot, we set up a film studio at the Universal lot with endless science experiments, involving Andrew Jackson and Scott Fisher, our brilliant visual-effects supervisor and special-effects supervisor. They built machines with ping pong balls swinging on wires. They inflated balloons underwater, then built lights that went inside these balloons, so they had a glowing core.

“There was a lot of analogue and old-fashioned processes involved, but with the promise that we were able to commit them to big-format film. And so in Trinity you see the result of all these weird, little experiments. It was an accumulation of a lot of different things, but that’s kind of how we cobbled together the film as well. For me, the result of a film is a patchwork of things we have seen, that we have liked, and that we want to incorporate. And then, under the genius supervision of Chris, it comes together and is experienced as a very coherent, single thing.”

Einstein by the lake

The scene: Oppenheimer talks to Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) by the lake at the Institute For Advanced Study at Princeton. Afterwards, Einstein walks past Strauss without acknowledging him, the latter blaming Oppenheimer for the snub. The scene is repeated from differing perspectives, culminating with an extreme close-up of Oppenheimer that ends the film.

van Hoytema: “This is an interesting one because it is an accumulation of all these approaches — not only the colour and black-and-white, but the lensing — throughout the film, culminating in that scene. And we have Strauss meeting Oppenheimer there. It’s one of the few scenes where we use a very long lens, and are still relatively close, which is a point of view on Einstein, which is very obviously a human’s point of view. It’s a dirty, through-the-window shot.

“Towards the end of the scene, we creep in on Oppenheimer, and get the feeling that we crawl right through Cillian’s eyes into his head, and start understanding the world, how he sees it now. More importantly, we shoot a close-up of him that is more powerful than most of the other close-ups in the film, even though we have been on top of his face for the whole movie. So, the challenge was, ‘How the hell do we make that interesting? And how the hell can we reserve something special for the end of the movie without it feeling like a trick or self-conscious?’

“When you work on a very big format, you can almost see the pores in people’s skin. It’s that intimate proximity that you experience when you put your face close to another person. But I think that last shot, apart from my work and the fact it’s a powerful close-up, is about projection. Very often the quality of my work has everything to do with projection. What do you as a viewer project onto it? And with that close-up, you’re so charged and overloaded with melancholia and information that the more you project on, the less I have to do as a cinematographer.”

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