A Sneaky Trip To Los Alamos Helped Christopher Nolan With An Oppenheimer Block
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J. Robert Oppenheimer has and will be remembered by history as the father of the nuclear bomb — provided his creation leaves a history left to be recorded. In fact, his other enduring creation was just a means to an end for him and his colleagues on the Manhattan Project to build the bomb. What is that creation? Los Alamos Labs, which audiences got to see on the silver screen this year in Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer."
Los Alamos (meaning "The Cottonwoods" in English) is a town/county in New Mexico located outside the state capital of Santa Fe. The American Southwest was Oppenheimer's adopted homeland; in Nolan's "Oppenheimer," Oppie (played by Cillian Murphy) says that a way to combine his physics research and New Mexico would be his paradise. The monkey's paw curls and he gets his wish, choosing Los Alamos as a site for the town laboratory to build a doomsday device.
Los Alamos National Laboratories became a permanent scientific institution and still stands in New Mexico to this day. Nolan's "Oppenheimer" was also shot on-site in the Land of Enchantment, adding historical verisimilitude. According to the behind-the-scenes book "Unleashing Oppenheimer: Inside Christopher Nolan's Explosive Atomic-Age Thriller" by Jada Yuan, the director paid the site a visit with his son, Magnus, before the shooting got underway.
The trip to Los Alamos
According to the book, Nolan came down with writer's block in June 2021 while working on the "Oppenheimer" script. In an effort to break it, he decided to see the site where history was made and brought his son along. On this road trip, they became a "two-man location scouting crew" for the eventual shoot.
The book highlights three stops that the Nolans visited during their trip to "The Hill," a local nickname for Los Alamos. The first item on the agenda was the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, which includes a replica of the gated fence that sat around the original "Site Y." The Manhattan Project was, of course, a top-secret endeavor (in the film, the scientists refer to their project only as a nebulous "gadget"), and that fence helped keep out the locals.
For the next exhibit, they walked in Oppie's own footsteps and stopped at the Fuller Lodge, a historical wooden manor. It was first built in 1928 as a dining hall for the Ranch School, the local private all-boys school, but during the Manhattan Project, the Lodge served as the scientists' dining room. Nowadays, it's a local art center and museum.
The Nolans continued looking at Manhattan Project scientists' lodgings on Bathtub Row (named as such because these houses had the only bathtubs on-site). Most of the houses have new owners, so the Nolans could only get an exterior tour of them. Oppenheimer's own house, though, was empty. Christopher Nolan couldn't help himself from getting a closer peek: "I don't know if I should say this or not, but Magnus, he did a lookout while I hopped the fence and got some pictures of Oppenheimer's house," he said in "Unleashing Oppenheimer."
Shooting Los Alamos
Many of the historical buildings Christopher Nolan saw on his trip were employed during the "Oppenheimer" shoot — but Los Alamos itself was a different story. During the visit, Nolan quickly realized the town looked too modern to pass as its 1940s self (he cited the Starbucks on Main Street).
So, rather than attempting to shoot in Los Alamos, the crew built a replica of the town inside the Ghost Ranch, a 21,000-acre spread of desert land north of Santa Fe. Within this site, the crew found the dry isolation the film's Los Alamos scenes needed. Production designer Ruth De Jong tells it as such in "Unleashing Oppenheimer":
"When I brought Chris there, he said, 'This is very epic.' You felt like, 'No one will find you here.' There's no one. The rest of the world is happening and going on, and we're doing this thing that we think will save humanity."
Being a screenwriter and director of a film informs the first job — if you're only writing the script, you leave the responsibility for realizing it in someone else's hands. If you're a writer/director, though, you have to write your story in a way that you know you can film it. Seeing the Los Alamos historical sites clearly gave Nolan inspiration for how to render them onscreen. As for not shooting in the town itself? Sometimes, curing writer's block can be as simple as knowing what you don't want to do.
"Unleashing Oppenheimer" is available from bookstores and digital retailers.