Christopher Nolan Blew His Daughter's Face Off (In Oppenheimer)
There is a dream sequence in James Cameron's 1991 action film "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" wherein Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) has a vision of the future. Thanks to encounters with multiple time travelers, Sarah knows that the world is going to be devastated by a nuclear holocaust in August of 1997. In her dream, Sarah watches her younger self and her infant son playing in a playground. She watches from the other side of a chain-link fence, unable to interact, knowing that a bomb is about to go off. She screams in helpless terror and no one listens. Then there's a flash. In an instant, the bulk of Los Angeles is reduced to ash. Millions die. She wails in pain as the nuclear heat chars her body. Her screams continue as the flesh is blasted from her bones, reducing her to an ash-coated skeleton. It is only then that Sarah awakens.
Christopher Nolan's new biopic "Oppenheimer," due in theaters on July 21, has a lot of similar nightmares lurking under its surface. J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) developed the earliest atomic bombs, and with them, a widespread fear of worldwide nuclear annihilation. Naturally, "Oppenheimer" had to feature multiple scenes of atomic destruction, and the film's advertising has promised a few notable moments of boom-boom and, as it turns out, flesh-melt.
According to a new interview with the Telegraph, Nolan needed a few extras to come in a play nuclear blast victims including, of all people, his daughter Flora. Flora already appeared briefly in Nolan's "Interstellar" as a girl with no speaking lines who can be seen in the back of a truck. She might have been a little taken aback when her father called up to ask if she wanted to have her face blasted off her skull.
Wanna get your flesh melted?
Luckily, Flora knew what her father was talking about. Nolan, in the Telegraph interview, might have realized in the moment how weird the request sounded, as he immediately began to explain himself. "Now hold on a minute," he said. "That's sort of it, but a little cart-before-the-horse."
The story goes that Flora was visiting her parents from college while "Oppenheimer" was in production. She merely hung around the set, watching her father at work and likely waiting for moments to have conversations in between shots. Even at that late date, there was a role that hadn't yet been cast in "Oppenheimer." There was to be a dream sequence wherein a character envisions a young woman being melted by a nuclear flash. The morning that scene was to shoot, Nolan asked his daughter if she wanted to step in. Luckily, she was game. Nolan said:
"We needed someone to do that small part of a somewhat experimental and spontaneous sequence. [...] So it was wonderful to just have her sort of roll with it."
One can make psychological studies if they want over the symbolism of Nolan metaphorically melting his own daughter, but it's more likely that they both saw it as good fun, if not a little macabre. Nolan was even concerned he might be compared to other filmmakers who similarly have cast their kids in grim roles. "I hope you're not going to make me sound like Michael Powell on 'Peeping Tom,'" he said. In Powell's amazing 1960 slasher, the director cast his nine-year-old son in the role of the serial killer as a young boy, and then played the boy's abusive father himself. Yeah, Freud would have a field day with that one.
An unexamined life is just fine, thank you
Nolan, of course, didn't want to weigh in on any kind of psychological ramifications of the scene ... too much. After a moment's reflection, he finally came to the following conclusion:
"Truthfully, I try not to analyse my own intentions. But the point is that if you create the ultimate destructive power, it will also destroy those who are near and dear to you. So I suppose this was my way of expressing that in what, to me, were the strongest possible terms."
Nolan clearly isn't advocating for nuclear war, and, in putting his daughter in a flesh-melting scene, it seems he wanted to scare himself.
It was hard for Nolan to communicate the fear of nuclear war that was clearly on the public's mind — as well as James Cameron's — back in the 1980s and early 1990s. Prior to the end of the Cold War, many Americans lived with a distant fearful cloud over their heads. One of Nolan's younger sons pointed out to him that no one cares about The Bomb anymore. That is, until current events changed the boy's tune.
Nolan said: [O]ne of my sons literally said to me, 'But Dad, nobody worries about [nuclear war] anymore.' My response at the time was to think, 'Well, you probably should,' and that became a reason for me to make the film." Then Russia invaded Ukraine in a dark assertion of power, greed, and destruction. "And of course," Nolan said, "my son's not saying that anymore."