'Oppenheimer' is here

Happy Barbenheimer weekend to those who celebrate.

Gen. Leslie Groves (center right) and J. Robert Oppenheimer (center left) at the Trinity detonation site, where the first atomic bomb was tested, in 1945. Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory

Something you may not know about me is that I love movies. I watch something like 70 new releases a year (on top of dozens of old releases), I have a monthly AMC pass that lets me go to the theater as much as three times a week, I consume podcasts like The Big Picture and Scriptnotes. So for obvious reasons, the weekend of July 21 has been on my calendar for quite some time now.

Back in May, I was reading an interview in Entertainment Weekly with Christopher Nolan about his upcoming biopic Oppenheimer, and this quote caught my eye:

We were in the real Los Alamos and we had a lot of real scientists as extras. We needed the crowd of extras to give reactions, and improvise, and we were getting sort of impromptu, very educated speeches. It was really fun to listen to. You've been on sets where you've got a lot of extras around and they're more or less thinking about lunch. These guys were thinking about the geopolitical implications of nuclear arms and knew a lot about it. It actually was a great reminder every day of: We have to be really on our game, we have to be faithful to the history here, and really know what we're up to.

It occurred to me that I have interviewed a lot of scientists (about doing science), and it might be fun to interview these scientists (about not doing science). I Slacked my editor: “pitch to interview the scientists cast as extras in Oppenheimer? i am joking (unless you want me to do it lol).”

The result is this story today, in which three real-life scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory told me what it was like chatting with Cillian Murphy, staring down Matt Damon, and walking around a 1940s-era simulacrum of their workplace when it was on the cusp of changing history. Safe to say that this is one group of people who will be watching Oppenheimer first.

As for me, I’m waiting until next weekend to enjoy Oppenheimer on an IMAX screen — per strict orders from Nolan himself — but I’m excited to catch Barbie tonight.

See you at the movies!