J. Robert Oppenheimer is a biographer on the nearly impossible adaptation – The Hollywood Reporter

Writer-director Christopher Nolan won Oppenheimer an Oscar for Adapted Screenplay for Universal.

Adobe Stock; Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal (3)

In September 2021, a friend sent me a paragraph-long notice in a magazine that Hollywood director Christopher Nolan was working on a film about J. Robert Oppenheimer. This was disturbing news to me, the co-author of American Prometheus: Triumph and Tragedy c. Robert Oppenheimera 720-page biography of Oppenheimer published in 2005 that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. My co-author, Martin J. Sherwin, and I had never heard of Nolan.

But we have long hoped that our biography of Oppenheimer would one day be made into a movie. Even before the book won the Pulitzer Prize, a major Hollywood director optioned the biography. At first, we were thrilled. When we won the Pulitzer Prize, the director sent us a bottle of French champagne. The script has been written. But after nearly four years, a prestigious studio rejected the script, and the project was abandoned. When Marty and I were finally allowed to read the draft of the script, we understood the problem: the script was completely flat and boring. The screenwriter attempted to tell the entire story of Oppenheimer’s life from his childhood to his early death from esophageal cancer at the age of 62.

American Prometheus It was optioned again in 2010 and a third time in 2015. Two more screenplays were drafted. The third story was so terrible that Marty and I felt compelled to draft a memo listing 108 historical errors confined to a text featuring a poet/ghost as the narrator. By 2021, Marty and I had concluded that Hollywood was unable to handle the complexity of Oppenheimer’s story or the existential issues surrounding the dawn of the atomic age.

But in September 2021, shortly after I read about the Nolan Oppenheimer project, I got a call from Charles “Chuck” Roven, a producer who has worked on several Nolan films. He assured me that Nolan’s new project was indeed an adaptation of our book. The next day, I found myself talking to Nolan on the phone. Later, he invited me to meet him at a boutique hotel in Greenwich Village.

At our first meeting, Nolan explained that he had already written a script to spec. He didn’t contact us because he first wanted to see if he could handle a script based on such a complex biography. I finally learned that in March 2022, Dave Wargo, the MIT-trained physicist who last optioned the book, traveled to Hollywood and was able to get the book into Roven’s hands. Soon after, Nolan read the book, and spent the next five months experimenting with the script.

Nolan said it was long — very long — and he wasn’t ready to share it with us yet. But he was willing to answer our questions about what was in the text and what wasn’t.

First, I asked him if he had ever managed to use Oppenheimer’s favorite toast in a strong gin martini: “To confuse our enemies!” Nolan laughed and said the toast was in the script, but he recently deleted it for space reasons. He explained that he would lose artistic control if the film lasted more than three hours.

I was still skeptical. But over the course of a two-hour conversation, my wife, Susan, and I came to sense that Nolan’s script might have promise. She explained that Marty and I had always believed that what happened to Oppenheimer after he built the atomic bomb was central to the story. Nolan said yes, he agreed, and assured us that the 1954 trial, a kangaroo court in a security hearing, featured heavily in the film’s script.

We left that first meeting impressed by Nolan’s wit and charm. Unfortunately, Marty was too ill to travel to New York that day. But I told him that maybe, just maybe, Nolan would succeed where others had failed. Sadly, two weeks later, Marty died of small cell lung cancer. He never had the opportunity to meet Nolan in person.

Several months later, Nolan shared the final script. It took four hours to read, and I was blown away by its complexity and emotional intensity. He captured Oppenheimer’s enigmatic character, but was also faithful to the historical narrative. I found a simple error – but when I started to explain it, Nolan interrupted me and said, yes, he was aware of it and was trying to figure out how to fix it. (he did.)

Then I asked him about the mysterious witness who appeared at Louis Strauss’s Senate confirmation hearing. This was a scene near the end of the movie, and I didn’t recognize the scientist (played by Oscar winner Rami Malek). Nolan responded that he was curious to know more about why Strauss lost his 1959 confirmation — and was so curious that he took the trouble to track down a transcript of Strauss’s confirmation hearing. This was something Marty and I had never done. In our book, we reported on the results of the confirmation hearing, but we didn’t bother to read the transcript. Nolan did so, and found in it the dramatic testimony of “World X” that appeared at the end of his film.

I was amazed. Nolan has done his own historical research.

When I finally saw the finished film, I was even more impressed. Nolan, his producer, and his wife, Emma Thomas, escorted me into an empty IMAX auditorium and seated me right in the middle of the screening room, then relegated me to the end of the aisle, leaving me to watch the film in complete privacy. At times, I would cry, partly affected by the pictures, but also by Marty’s absence. When it was over, she walked up to Nolan, hugged him, and whispered, “He’s great.” Then I turned to Emma and said, “Normally, the author says the book is always better than the movie. But in this case I’m afraid some people will say the movie is better.”

I’m still not sure.

Kay Bird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography.

This story first appeared in the February standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To obtain the magazine, click here to subscribe.