Christopher Nolan Says There Are ZERO CGI Shots In The New Oppenheimer Movie

SOURCE: Director Christopher Nolan has always been clear that he's not interested in using CGI to flex a big budget or create a spectacle. If possible, he prefers to use practical camera work more often than not to avoid having his work feel wholly unrealistic, employing effects only where necessary to make things feel seamless. With Oppenheimer, however, Nolan took on a massive challenge: recreating the testing of an atomic bomb. Speaking to Collider Editor-in-Chief Steve Weintraub, Nolan said that his latest film not only has a focus on practicality, but it contains "zero" CGI shots.

Already, we knew that at least some of the work was going to be practical. Nolan previously detailed how the Oppenheimer team recreated the Trinity test, the first-ever test explosion of the nuclear bomb in the desert of New Mexico in 1945, entirely without CGI. That alone seemed like a monumental feat considering the logistical planning required to match the brilliance of the explosion described by the onlookers at the time of the real-life blast, but Nolan pulled it off. It should be no shock considering the mountains this team has moved to make the film work, including creating a whole new technology to film the black-and-white sequences in IMAX.

Christopher Nolan is a madman. This sounds cool and all until an actual nuke goes off in the theater because fuck CGI according to him. You're walking out that theater a different human if you watch this thing in 4DX. Cillian Murphy had to lose sleep every night during filming knowing he was going into an actual warzone the next day. What a treat that will be at the movie theater if you're pulling the Barbenheimer double feature. Truly polar opposite movies. This one had me in legit tears:

There was that story last year about how Nolan was recreating the Trinity test and that he's an absolute lunatic for trying to recreate a nuclear bomb, and here we are a few weeks from release. I think we're looking past the part where he said he had two nuclear bombs and only used one of them? Seems like something we should be concerned about in the hands of a guy like Nolan but I digress. 

I don't know a damn thing about CGI versus VFX and I'm not going to pretend to, but this does seem like the perfectly crafted wording to hype up the movie to those like myself who don't know the difference. Some movie buffs online are calling that poor taste by Nolan because it's diminishing the work of all the VFX artists of the film, but I say we just let Nolan cook because this movie is going to be scenes. Craziest part is the entire budget for the movie was just $100 million. 

Any movie buff has a tough choice to make on July 21st, so read Kenjac's blog on which to watch or just look at the tale of the tape: 

Pure cinema.