A Major Oppenheimer Moment Was Saved By The Set Of A Completed HBO Series
"Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands," said J. Robert Oppenheimer to President Harry Truman in 1945 during a fateful meeting at the Oval Office, according to a description of their encounter in "American Prometheus." Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" stages this event to dramatic effect, with Truman (Gary Oldman) calling the theoretical physicist a "crybaby" after the latter addresses the ethical quandaries of dropping the world's first atomic weapon. This moment is memorable; it underlines the government's eagerness to literally weaponize nuclear weapons development projects while also zooming in on Oppenheimer's accumulating guilt and despair.
According to "Oppenheimer" production designer Ruth De Jong, filming this scene demanded a considerable amount of last-minute effort and improvisations, as the crew's plans to film at the original location had fallen through days before the shoot. /Film's Bill Bria attended a home entertainment release junket for "Oppenheimer," where De Jong detailed the pains she and her team had to undergo just to secure a replacement location while racing against time. Things were eventually resolved thanks to an Oval Office set from the HBO political satire-comedy "Veep," which had to be painstakingly redressed for the sake of the scene.
The scene was originally meant to be filmed at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, but after the crew lost the location abruptly, De Jong had to try several things before finding a solution:
"Ultimately what happened was we lost that location with about seven days to go, and had a locked actor and needed to have a place to shoot. [...] So I called Tom Hayslip, our executive producer, right away. [...] I said, 'Maybe we can shoot this at the end,' not knowing the information that Gary Oldman was already booked and his date was set and that was the schedule."
A miraculous stroke of luck
De Jong explained that the crew was initially choosing backup locations that they had not considered prior, such as a location scouted during the pre-production days that was glossed over in the chaos of location-jumping. When De Jong told Nolan about the Oval Office problem, he suggested building the set from scratch, but the production designer decided to exhaust other practical options before committing to such a sudden, daunting task:
"Thankfully, my supervising art director, Samantha Englender, was smart enough to have put one [location] on hold. [...] It was the 'Veep' Oval Office. It was flat-packed. Which was kind of great, but when we called the storage unit, they said, 'Oh, it'll take about four or five days to pull it out.' I said, 'I don't have four or five days. I'm sending a crew over, they're going to help you pull it out. It has to come over. We're going to go get a stage now at Universal.'"
This allowed the project to move in a more practical direction, and with the help of construction coordinator Jonas Kirk, the crew pulled it off by working on set redressing for five consecutive days. They were lucky enough to book a stage in spite of limited vacancies, and additional shoots in the White House Lobby and cabinet room were carried out with fresh construction drawings. Set designer Jim Hewitt made this possible by getting the drawings to construction as soon as he could, and the impossible was accomplished, wet paint notwithstanding.
"I don't think any of us actually believed we could do it, not because we weren't capable, but just the clock. And we did," De Jong concluded, chronicling the hectic, stress-inducing last-minute mishap that almost derailed one of the most pivotal scenes in "Oppenheimer."