Trivia: The IMAX prints of the film are 11 miles long, weighing 600lb.
Trivia: Robert Downey Jr. declared this was "the best film I've ever been in" at the UK premiere.
Trivia: Josh Hartnett was one of the final 3 actors in the running to play Batman in Batman Begins, but withdrew. He later said he regretted his decision and wanted to work with Christopher Nolan, finally getting his chance here.
Trivia: Christopher Nolan has stated there are no shots in the movie that were entirely created using visual effects. Visual effects studio DNEG worked exclusively on the movie, and it marked the eighth collaboration between Christopher Nolan and DNEG.
Trivia: This film, combined with Barbie, became an internet phenomenon, dubbed "Barbenheimer", due to the fact that the two films were released on the same day, with some filmgoers opting to see the movies together as a double feature for no other reason than their vastly different subject matter.
Trivia: Cillian Murphy's sixth film with Christopher Nolan, after Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, and Dunkirk.
Trivia: During a break from acting, promised to his wife, Matt Damon had one condition: he'd return if Christopher Nolan called. Lucky for him, Nolan offered the role of Leslie Groves, pausing Damon's hiatus.
Trivia: Alden Ehrenreich is one of the few main cast not playing a real person - his character has no name.
Trivia: This film was produced remarkably quickly for one of this scale, with only 3 months for preparation and 57 days of filming.
Trivia: Christopher Nolan's daughter, Flora, has a cameo as the girl whose skin is flaking off in Oppenheimer's vision of the effects of dropping the bomb.
Trivia: Director Christopher Nolan usually prefers using practical effects when possible. For the scene where the nuclear bomb is tested, a more manageably-sized explosion was created by a pyrotechnics team. The explosion was actually fairly close to the actors, but was filmed at specific camera angles to make it seem further away and thus bigger (a technique called "forced perspective"). Super-slow-motion was also utilized, as it subconsciously creates the illusion of a larger scale.
Trivia: This is the first Christopher Nolan-directed film since 2002's Insomnia in which Michael Caine does not appear.
Trivia: In the scene just before the Trinity test, Richard Feynman declines to use a set of welding goggles, claiming the vehicle windshield will filter out the damaging ultraviolet light. This is based on the real event, as he was likely the only person who didn't use dark glasses to witness the test.
Trivia: This is the first Christopher Nolan film since 2000's Memento not to be distributed by Warner Bros. Nolan's partnership with the studio soured over his dissatisfaction with their decision to release new films on HBO Max on the same day as their theatrical releases during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Suggested correction: While this is correct, an argument can be made that since the colour scenes are meant to be subjective and the black and white scenes are meant to be objective, Oppenheimer could have been unintentionally mapping the modern US flag onto this scene.
THGhost
That's a ridiculous stretch with zero evidence, not least as 48 star flags are seen in colour in other scenes. Sometimes a mistake is simply a mistake.
There is evidence, though. Nolan said so himself. Look it up. As for the mistake itself, I'm merely repeating what I've read on Twitter, and this correction was merely a suggestion. Seeing the 48 star flags in other colour scenes still doesn't disprove this theory. It is just a theory though, so no need to shoot it down so hard.
THGhost
He's said subjective in terms of the colour scenes being "first person", and maybe not strictly factual in terms of creating moments between characters and conveying emotion, but nowhere does that stretch to "one random scene happens to feature 50 star flags because Oppenheimer is mapping the modern flag onto it, when nothing like that happens anywhere else in the film."
Meh, take it up with Twitter. I just thought it was interesting, so I posted it here for a different point of view/perspective for others to read. It is most likely bull**** though.
THGhost
The fact that a director realized they had made a mistake and retroactively made up a deus ex machina explanation for it in no way invalidates the mistake. Nice try, Mr. Nolan but this posting is absolutely valid.
While Christopher Nolan's talked about the subjective/objective colour/black and white thing, which is entirely fair and no doubt exactly his intention, I don't think he's actually tried to "excuse" this by using that explanation, that's just other people trying to connect the two things. I'm not sure Nolan has commented on the flag issue in interviews at all.
Precisely, and I was in no way trying to invalidate the original mistake. I just found the whole theory interesting and posted it here. It is rather hilarious that a director with such attention to detail like Nolan would have missed something like this. We shall see if he gets it fixed for the streaming/physical release.
THGhost
It's not fixed in the home video version. However, the behind-the-scenes materials provide a reason for the mistake, in that putting a crowd in the scene was apparently a spur-of-the-moment decision. It's like that in their haste to bring in the crowd, the set decorators bought some modern miniature flags and put them into the scene without anyone realizing the 48/50 discrepancy.
Vader47000