Oliver Stone Says He Once Turned Down An Oppenheimer Film Project & Calls Christopher Nolan’s Film A “Classic”
01.08.2023 - 17:17
/ deadline.com
JFK filmmaker Oliver Stone posted a series of tweets Tuesday praising Christopher Nolan’s latest film Oppenheimer during which he revealed he once turned down a project based around J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life because he couldn’t crack the narrative.
“Saturday, I sat through 3 hours of Oppenheimer, gripped by Chris Nolan’s narrative. His screenplay is layered & fascinating. Familiar with the book by Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin, I once turned the project down because I couldn’t find my way to its essence. Nolan has found it,” Stone tweeted.
Stone continued to describe Nolan’s direction in Oppenheimer as “mind-boggling and eye-popping” before heaping praise on the film’s cast.
“Each actor is a surprise to me, especially Cillian Murphy, whose exaggerated eyes here feel normal playing a genius like Oppenheimer,” Stone wrote.
Stone concluded by describing Oppenheimer as a “classic” that he “never believed could be made in this climate.” However, the filmmaker did lay out two extended points of contention with the biopic that he said was addressed in his 2012 series, The Untold History of the United States.
#Oppenheimer is a classic, which I never believed could be made in this climate. Bravo. Two historical points I’d argue. Historian Peter Kuznick and I, in our #UntoldHistoryoftheUnitedStates series (2012), made the important distinction that — pic.twitter.com/3AkValOlRi
“Aside from the points mentioned in my previous post, the movie packs in the essence of the tragedy of Oppenheimer, a man historically in the middle of an impossible situation, though one, as Nolan shows, partly of his own making,” Stone ended.
Nolan’s Oppenheimer reached a $405.6M global cume over the weekend. The international box office is now $231M