r/OppenheimerMovie • u/idontneed_one • 4d ago
Did it really take only 57 days to shoot Oppenheimer? General Discussion
I recently heard that Oppenheimer was shot in just 57 days, which seems surprisingly quick for a film of its scale. I'm curious to know if that's true. How did they manage to pull it off in such a short time? Was the production really completed in 57 days, or was there more to it?
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u/niche_bish 3d ago
I worked on the film (background) and it was really impressive. Nolan and his DP were focused, efficient, and seemed nice - which surprised me because big directors can be arrogant twats just because they can get away with it. His DP had a good sense of humor, and the energy trickled down: people on set were happy to be there and it showed (NOT always the case on a movie of this size).
Also unusual - the actors never went back to their trailers between set-ups, just waited around for the next shot (and chatted with the little people ;) - for the record Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt are both very friendly and down to earth).
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u/thebookerpanda 2d ago
This is great to hear. 😊 I’m glad you had a positive experience with Cillian and Emily.
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u/serpodrick77 2d ago
I seem to recall Emily Blunt generally having a poor attitude from another reddit post but glad to hear she was nice to you
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u/PoeBangangeron 4d ago
He also keeps a pretty tight crew and doesn’t have a video village anywhere.
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u/DarknessUponUs1 3d ago
Yes. The movie is also very run-and-gun. You can tell they shot a lot of it quickly. Doesn’t have the same pizzaz as his other films, but I like the feeling regardless.
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u/NewmansOwnDressing 4d ago
I’d seen 55 somewhere, but yeah, that’s correct. The answer is that Nolan still works under the same principles he did when he made Following and Memento. Tight planning and shooting exactly what you need without bothering too much with coverage so you don’t need as many lighting setups. He doesn’t tend to do many takes, and he also doesn’t really storyboard, which in his case is helpful because it allows him and his DP to get in the room and simply come up with the shots they like without having to spend time recreating what they’d sketched out. Part of that is also that Nolan, at least on these big movies, prefers fully built, 360 sets if he can help it. In fact, his insistence on that, specifically with Los Alamos, was gonna be so expensive on this movie that he actually cut about 30 days from the shooting schedule in order to stay on budget. So on this one he really was pushing the speed of production to an extreme, but it’s just fundamentally how he works.
Nolan and Thomas have talked about their track record for making movies on time and on budget. In fact, when they pitch these movies, part of the pitch is that just about any other filmmaker pitching the same movie would be asking for tens of millions more in budget. Nolan and Thomas go, “We’ll produce this $150 million movie for $100 million, and you the studio can take that $50 million savings and pump it into marketing so that it feels like a $200 million blockbuster event.”