A Christopher Nolan film release is an event like no other. This is especially true of Oppenheimer, which is the master movie maker’s first biopic and is being described as his “most mature” film so far. As the biggie storms theatres globally today, The Telegraph brings you up to speed on the hows and whys, whats and whens of Oppenheimer.

1. While it is known that Oppenheimer is based on the 2005 biography American Prometheus written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, not many are aware of the fact that what egged Nolan on to attempt a film on Oppenheimer — “the father of the atomic bomb” — was a book of Oppenheimer’s speeches given to him by actor Robert Pattinson at the wrap party of Nolan’s previous movie, Tenet.
2. This will be Nolan’s sixth film to be shot on IMAX 65mm 15-perf. While the IMAX format is generally employed by big-ticket films to sweeping action set-pieces, this is a rare biopic which has been shot entirely in the format. Also, Kodak developed the first ever black-and-white film stock for IMAX because Nolan wanted the black-and-white portions of the film — that mostly focus on Robert Downey Jr’s Lewis Strauss — to have the same quality. Nolan has gone on record to state that the entire reel of IMAX film stock used for the production is 11 miles long and weighs 600 pounds.
3. Nolan has said that the film, despite its theme naturally calling for dramatic visuals, does not have a single CGI shot.
4. Matt Damon manifested this film for himself. Damon reportedly went into couples’ therapy and promised wife Luciana Barroso that he would take a break from acting, and would only break if Christopher Nolan called. “I actually negotiated in couples therapy ­— this is a true story — the one caveat to my taking time off was if Chris Nolan called. This is without knowing whether or not he was working on anything because he never tells you,” he added. “He just calls you out of the blue. And so, it was a moment in my household,” Damon has recently revealed. Soon enough Nolan called Damon, who had also acted in the director’s Interstellar, for the role of Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, the military leader who supervised the Manhattan Project and the creation of the atomic bomb.
5. At 180 minutes, Oppenheimer is Nolan’s longest film.
6. Early reviews of the film have been effusive in their praise, even celebrating Oppenheimer’s flaws as being essential to its narrative and ambition. While the BBC hailed it as a “magnificent story of a tragic American genius”, The Guardian calls it “flawed but extraordinary”. Los Angeles Times describes it as Nolan’s “latest stunner” while The Wall Street Journal heaps praise on the auteur’s “explosive historical epic”.
7. J. Robert Oppenheimer was mentioned by name in Nolan’s previous film Tenet (2020) during a conversation between Priya Singh (Dimple Kapadia) and The Protagonist (John David Washington), indicating that Nolan possibly already had the idea of what his next film was going to be about.
8. Nolan has said that the idea to cast Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer came to him while looking at the book cover photo of J. Robert Oppenheimer in American Prometheus. Wanting to achieve Oppenheimer’s gaunt physique, Murphy lost weight and kept to a strict diet during filming.
9. Director Sam Mendes originally optioned the rights to American Prometheus and set it as his follow-up to Jarhead (2005). However, he gave up on it and moved on to his 2008 film Revolutionary Road.
10. Not many know that Nolan’s older brother Matthew is a hitman who is on the run. Matthew, who many say has inspired Nolan to experiment with the trope of the lost family in many of his films, once operated with the alias Matthew McCall Oppenheimer!