As cinemas struggle to compete with the shifting tide of streamers, auteur filmmakers such as Oscar-winner Christopher Nolan stand at the forefront of what he calls the “gold standard” of moviemaking. While promoting Oppenheimer, his latest project with Cillian Murphy as the titular American physicist who headed secret weapons for the Manhattan Project, Collider’s Steve Weintraub spoke with the writer-director about his editing process and conviction behind his dedication to filming in IMAX.

Oppenheimer is receiving a theatrical release that will allow audiences to experience Nolan’s vision the way he intended, everywhere in IMAX, and in 30 IMAX 70mm locations, utilized to capture “the incredible disparity of scales” portrayed in the movie. As with his epics like Inception and Interstellar before, Oppenheimer explores morality and identity, this time through one of man’s greatest scientific achievements that posed the question, “But should we?” Joining Murphy on the explosive roster are Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, and Gary Oldman.

In this one-on-one interview, which you can watch or read below, Nolan discusses his work’s influence over IMAX today and the limits he pushed with Oppenheimer, as well as why the director chose not to use CGI in a film that depicts the impact of a city-leveling nuclear weapon. He also discusses his editing process with returning collaborator Jennifer Lame, exactly how he was able to pull off practical explosions with VFX supervisor Andrew Jackson, and why, and the use of color and black and white to tell two converging stories.

COLLIDER: I want to start with a really sincere thank you for your work. I love your work, I love how you champion IMAX and the large-screen format. I just really want to thank you because I know how hard it is to make movies.

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: Well, thank you. That’s very kind of you to say.

I saw pictures of the IMAX platter and Oppenheimer, and it seems very close to the edge. I’m curious if the actual runtime of the film was dictated at all by the platter of IMAX.

NOLAN: There’s a relationship, but no. The dictating went the other way. The thing we’ve done with the platter over the years, because when I started working with IMAX film it was two-and-a-half hours, that’s it, and then we got to Interstellar, which went up to two-forty-seven; what they were able to do for me is engineer the platters a little bit wider so it has an extra rim, and that got a little wider and a little wider over the years. Then on this, I went to them and I said, “Okay, I’ve got a 180-page script. That’s a three-hour movie on the nose. Can it be done?” We looked at it, they looked at the platters, and they came to the conclusion that it could just be done [laughs]. They’re telling me this is the absolute limit because now the arm that holds the platter went right up against it. So, this, I think, is finally the outer limit of running time for an IMAX film print.

Image via Universal

Thank you for sharing that story. That’s amazing. So, I’m fascinated by the editing process because that’s where movies come together. Which of your films changed the most in the editing room in ways you didn’t expect going in?

NOLAN: That’s a really hard one to answer because I’m a writer-director. So whether I co-write or I write by myself, that final draft of the script I very much have an editing hat on already. Structurally, the films tend to be fairly disciplined, I would say, but the discoveries you make in editing are complex and multi-varied, and things transform over time. The approach Jen Lame, my editor, and myself take is to view the film as a whole. So we’re watching it every week. We’re putting it up, usually inviting one or two people in who don’t know anything about the script to watch it with us and see it through their eyes.

Every film presents unique challenges. I think in the case of Oppenheimer, it was very much being guided by the balance between the color sequences where we’re trying to see everything from his point of view, be in his head, see through his eyes, and then the black and white sequences, which are much more Robert Downey Jr.’s point of view—Lewis Strauss, the character he’s playing. I try to balance the subjective with the objective and give sufficient momentum to those two timelines. There’s a feeling of confluence at the end. But every film is different. Every film has its unique challenges. Some films are improved in the edit suite through tightening and speeding things up a lot, and that’s very often our process. Other films, Interstellar was one, where you couldn’t just keep squeezing it. It wouldn’t help the pacing. You actually needed to let things breathe. You needed to let the sights and sounds you were experiencing with the audience breathe a bit, hence the bigger IMAX platter.

Image Via Universal Pictures

Are there any CGI shots in this movie?

NOLAN: There are no CGI shots in the movie.

I just want to say, first of all, amazing, and second of all, the thing that I was blown away by was the way you shot the explosions using IMAX cameras. How did you pull that off?

NOLAN: [Laughs] One of the first people I showed the script to was my visual effects supervisor, Andrew Jackson. He’s very well-versed in CG, but he’s also very well-versed in practical effects and understands the value of that. I showed it to him very early on, and I said, “Okay, what we need in this film is a thread between the interior process of Oppenheimer, his imagining, his visualizing of atoms, molecules, those interactions, those energy waves. We need a thread that runs from that right through to the ultimate expression of the destructive power when that force is unleashed. It has to live in the same family.” I think computer graphics, they’re very versatile, they can do all kinds of things, but they tend to feel a bit safe. That’s why they’re difficult to use in horror movies. Animation tends to feel a little safe for the audience. The Trinity test, ultimately, but also these early imaginings of Oppenheimer visualizing the Quantum Realm, they had to be threatening in some way. They had to have the bite of real-world imagery. The Trinity test, for those who were there, was the most beautiful and terrifying thing simultaneously, and that’s where we were headed with this film.

Image via Universal

So he spent many months working on extremely small things and extremely large things in combination with Scott Fisher, our special effects supervisor, who is second to none in the world of blowing things up on a vast scale. So it was really a combination of scales, and ultimately, that spoke to the whole of the film because quantum physics and the expression of quantum physics through nuclear weapons is really about the incredible disparity of scales. The laws of quantum physics work at this tiny, tiny level and then they find expression out in the stars and black holes and supernovas and all the rest. We were really trying to embrace both ends of the scale, and Andrew’s methodology and how he achieved those things truly did embrace both ends.

Don’t miss out on the IMAX release of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, in theaters July 21.