this is bbc news. the headlines. england's lionesses get off to a flying start at the women's world cup as they beat haiti 1—0 in their opening match. the european champions are one of the tournament favourites. as greece sees its hottestjuly weekend in 50 years, scientists warn of the unprecedented speed and timing of record—breaking heatwaves, with some fearing the worst case scenario may already be unfolding. the death toll in south korea rises to 47 after heavy rains caused severe flooding and landslides. the country is once again bracing itself for more monsoon rains. and in the uk, sir keir starmer says the labour party must learn the lessons of a by—election defeat which he blamed on plans to expand london's ultra low emissions zone.

now on bbc news: the arts interviews: christopher nolan. christopher nolan almost needs no introduction. the acclaimed director is behind blockbusters, including the dark knight trilogy and interstellar. the futuristic science fiction epic which blasted matthew mcconaughey and anne hathaway into space, as well as historical films like dunkirk, which brought the story of the evacuation of allied soldiers in 1940 to a wider audience. nolan delivers box office successes, and the movies have won 11 oscars from 36 nominations. but the director has never clinched the coveted best picture or best director award. perhaps his latest, oppenheimer, will change that. starring cillian murphy as theoretical physicistj. robert oppenheimer, it charts the invention of the first atomic bomb, which was tested by scientists in the desert in new mexico in 1945, and then dropped controversially on hiroshima and nagasaki, ending

world war two. i sat down with christopher nolan ahead of the film's premiere in london. well, christopher nolan, thank you so much for talking to us at the bbc. your actors speak very highly of you. i've seen that cillian murphy hailed you as a genius, that emily blunt says you've singlehandedly changed cinema for everybody. you were named back in 2015 as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by time magazine, then the likes of steven spielberg, martin scorsese. they all praising your filmmaking. without embarrassing you, how do you do it? gosh, that's a that's a long list of of accolades. some deserved, some probably not. how do i do it? i just love making films. i started making films when i was a kid. i borrowed my dad's super eight

camera, sort of making super eight films when i was seven or eight years old. and i've never stopped. it'sjust something i love doing and ifeel very fortunate, privileged to to be able to work with a team of really, really talented people on each film. in the case of oppenheimer, this incredible cast that you've already mentioned, cillian and emily, but also, you know, robert downeer and matt damon and ken branagh, a very, very long list, florence pugh and many others. for me, how i do it is to bring together talented people like that and in the service of making films that i would have wanted to see as an audience member, you know, i view myself as the audience — not, it's not a sort of us and them thing. i make the films that i would really want to, you know, go to the cinema and sit down and my popcorn and watch the film. i've seen oppenheimer. many people will be about to see oppenheimer when it premieres this week, after it premieres this week. let's talk about that. i mean, you have played

with concepts of physics in some of your films already. i'd say interstellar, about time and gravity. clearly, as far as oppenheimer goes, the atom bomb is the ultimate and most awful human expression of physics. did your interest in physics lead you to the man, or did the human story of the man come first for you? i mean, really, well, it's a bit of both. i knew the name oppenheimer, like a lot of people. i knew that he was strongly involved, very much associated with the atomic bomb, father of the atomic bomb. and i knew that something else there was more to the story, i put it that way. and like a lot of people, that was about all i knew. and then, over the years, partly with my interest in physics, i did find out a few more things. one key thing in particular that i put into tenet in dialogue, as a sort of analogy and a reference to to help people understand some of the plot that was going on. and it's this moment where the lead

scientist of the manhattan project, led by robert oppenheimer, realize that they can't fully eliminate the possibility of a chain reaction that would set fire to the atmosphere and destroy the entire world, when they detonate that that first test at trinity. and i became really interested in exploring that moment and taking the audience to that moment where they made that incredible decision. because how could you make that decision? how could you make that decision? how could you take that on yourself? you know, there's a possibility that when you push that button, you might destroy the entire world. and yet they went ahead and they pushed it. and the reasons behind that were equally dramatic. you know, they were in this incredible, very tense race against the nazis to harness the power of the atom during world war two. they really felt they had no choice. and of course, the way scientists analyze probability is very different to the way the rest of us do.

the magnitude of the consequences doesn't really factor into their assessment of the likelihood of something, you know, a bit more mathematical, but more scientific than than we all are. but that was really the hook for me. i put it in tenet, referred to it there. and actually when when we wrapped that film, rob pattinson, who's in that film, he gave me a book of oppenheimer�*s speeches from the 1950s, where oppenheimer is giving a series of speeches, really wrangling with the consequences of this technology that they've unleashed on the world. and it's such a compelling thing to imagine to be with this person, with his fellow scientists, trying to reckon with the consequences of unleashing atomic power on the world. we knew the world would not be the same. few people laughed. a few people cried.

most people were silent. and what's your sense of him as a man and how he did deal with what he had created? i mean, the other thing that really interested me in his story as i started to research it, and i was given the book american prometheus, which is the book that i'm adapting. it's by kai bird and martin sherwin, and it's 25 years of research. it won the pulitzer prize. it's a very authoritative source, and it lays out the events of his life in very compelling and great detail. and there are a lot of different things that you come to that sort of hook you. i mean, one of the first was... because you can debate the notion of, you know, "how important is oppenheimer to nuclear weapons? would they would it have happened without somebody else

have done that?" another universe, put it that way. when you're reading american prometheus, you come to the bit where you realize that los alamos. you know, which has become this laboratory devoted to production of nuclear weapons. it's a very, very famous place, a place that changed the world, which they created in the desert during world war two. well, it existed as a name and as a place that he liked to go camping with his brother. it was that personal to him. and so you see that personal connection. you're like, okay, we can't really answer the question of, "would these things have happened with somebody else in charge or whatever?" at the end of the day, in the world in which we live, a lot of idiosyncrasies about his personality, a lot of caprices, a lot ofjust things that happen in his life change the world we live in and we'll always live it. and it's that contrast between the intimate and the global that i find really, really compelling. and then i think, looking towards the end of his life, looking to what happens after world war two, because it's extremely dramatic and suspenseful.

as far as my assessment of his character, part of the reason i became so driven to tell the story, and find the story so dramatic is i'm drawn to complex protagonists, whether in fiction or in this case, historical reality. but i'm drawn to characters who are complicated, who are hard to understand, perhaps don't even understand themselves fully. and oppenheimer is a person who. with his intellectual brilliance was able to speak very, very carefully post—1945 about his involvement with the bomb. he never apologized for hiroshima and nagasaki. he never expressed individual shame about that. he was extremely cautious in the way he talked about it. and yet all of his actions post—1945 to me are the actions of somebody wracked by guilt, feeling a tremendous and overwhelming sense of responsibility.

and it's that disparity between what he allowed the world to see outwardly and what seems to have been driving him that i wanted to to drill down on. and it's what makes his story the most dramatic i've ever encountered. it does feel like a very timely film. i wonder if it does for you with... we haven't talked about nuclear threats for a while and then with what's going on in the world right now, suddenly the the fear of it has risen up again. yeah. i mean, our relationship with the fear of nuclear weapons, with the threat of nuclear weapons is very complicated. i grew up, you know, in england as a teenager in the eighties. nuclear holocaust was very much on our minds. it was in the popular imagination, things like sting's song russians that refers to oppenheimer�*s deadly toys. it was one of the first times i remember thinking about who oppenheimer would have been. you know, it was time of the height

of membership in cnd, the protest agreement, greenham common, you know, these kind of things. so when i was 12 or 13, myself and my friends, we were convinced we would die in a nuclear holocaust. when i talk to one of my teenage sons about what i was writing when i started writing this script, he actually said to me straight out, it's like, "do people really worry about that anymore? "are people concerned about nuclear weapons in the way that would make that important and compelling?" and my response to him was, "well, maybe that's a reason to tell a story, but beyond that, it's just such an incredible, dramatic story of the highest stakes imaginable." but the sad truth is in an awful way, you know, it's not a question he's asking two years later. it's not a question anyone�*s asking. and that is symptomatic of our complicated relationship with nuclear weapons. we choose to worry about them at certain times. and we let that fear, that concern recede at other times. but the threat never

changes, never goes away. i mean, when you really drill down on the different ways in which nuclear weapons can be triggered, can could cause a nuclear armageddon. the threat of peacetime isn't significantly diminished, quite frankly, particularly with a number of countries expanding, number of countries acquiring nuclear weapons. so it's something that. the threat never goes away. but we choose when we're going to worry about it or not. famously oppenheimer quoted from the hindu scripture, "now i am become death, the destroyer of worlds." i wonder whether you equate his discoveries with what's happening now in terms of those suggestions around ai that it could be an existential threat to humanity. well, i mean, one of the interesting things about putting this this film out is it's coming at a time when there are a lot of new technologies that people

start to worry about, the unintended ai being the latest one and one that people are particularly concerned about. and when you talk to leaders in the field of ai, as i do from time to time, they see this moment right now as their oppenheimer moment. they refer to it as their oppenheimer moment. they're looking to his story to say, okay, what are our responsibilities? how can we deal with the potential of unintended consequences? sadly for them, there are no easy answers. in oppenheimer�*s story, there are troubling questions. it is a cautionary tale, and there's some really amazing and dramatic questions that come out of it, which is why i wanted to make a film of it. but this film certainly doesn't offer any easy answers to any of these questions. and i think these technologies are in particular, if you look at it, i, i think that it's a good thing that people look to oppenheimer

story in this way. but as far as i'm concerned, i do put nuclear weapons in a different class. i think they are a very specific and singular threat against humanity. what oppenheimer did was he gave us the power to destroy ourselves, and that had never happened before. it didn't exist before, and it will never go away. in that way, he irrevocably changed life on earth. i'd like to talk a bit about yourfilm making processes and practices. i mean, everybody i've spoken to about you describes your level of professionalism that your films always come in on budget, they're always on time, they're commercial successes. i think it's $5 billion taken at the box office for various all yourfilms, you've made huge numbers of awards. i even had actually that you encourage people not to sit down on set. you're never in a director's chair. does that does that help with keeping it, keeping

it fast moving? i don't encourage you discourage people from sitting down on set. they do what they want. but i don't sort of it's become a thing over time that i don't sit in my chair when it's put out. and so eventually they stop bothering to put it out for me. but the reason is that why don't you? you know, directing films. it's quite a physicaljob. it's quite tiring, very long days. you're on your feet all day. when you sit down, your energy level ebbs, you know, and it's harder to get up. so make sense. so i keep my energy levels up by by not sitting down, but i don't i don't impose that. it might make them feel a bit guilty, but that's on of them, not me. absolutely. you're known for your realism, for putting observed reality in front of your camera. there was even a room, i think, only halfjoking that you'd actually detonated a real bomb for this film in order to make sure it looked. looked right. i'm sure you didn't. but the scene of the trinity test in the film is very powerful and very real. what was your process and your thinking when you were recreating

that moment of the atom bomb first detonating on film? well, taking on oppenheimer�*s story, it's very clear that the trinity test has to be the showstopper. it's the the fulcrum around which the whole story turns. and one of the people i, i showed the script to first was andrew jackson, my visual effects coordinator. he... he's very good with computer graphics, but he's also very good with analog methods. and i said to him, i really don't want to use any computer graphics in this film because i think computer graphics, however versatile they are, and they can be used for all kinds of wonderful things, but they tend to feel a little bit safe, a little anodyne. i wanted him to have spiky imagery stuff with bite to it, because what we're trying to do with all of this imagery is starting with as a young man,

oftentimes visualizations of what's inside don't matter what makes up the universe. this was a revolutionary new way of looking at it, where they're seeing the energy inside this. so we need it to visualize these quantum mechanics that what's going on. and you do that so well early on when you getting inside his mind of kind of these incredible concepts that he's grappling with exactly those things. then there's a thread that leads those things all the way to their ultimate outward expression with the destructive force of the first atomic bomb demonstrated in the trinity test. so that imagery needed to be made from very, very microscopic things that serve to represent things that are much larger, but also some huge, large scale explosive events. you know, we were out in the desert the way they were for the real trinity test. we built the full size tower. we recreated the circumstances of it, obviously not

using it as an atomic weapon, but we we did as far as we could really try to reproduce the the circumstances of it. and i think it was a great help for the actors. a lot of the tension of the sequence comes from the process, the safety protocols of leading up to the bomb, the switches that are thrown, the keys that are turned, those kind of things, the nervous glances that are exchanged. now, having all of that build up, having all of that detail was essential because what we're trying to portray is this moment of absolute beauty and absolute terror, you know, and where computer imagery could feel visual effects in movies, can feel a little bit anodyne, a little bit safe. we wanted it to be extremely frightening and extremely threatening whilst it's still being still being beautiful. and this is the moment that really changed the world. so it was very important to to drill down into it as far as possible. and i wanted to ask you about cinema. you're clearly a lover of cinema. you're steeped in it as an art form. do you have a message for people? because in the uk, for example, we've recently seen

the empire cinema chain collapse, leaving sunderland and wigan with no cinemas. cineworld has fallen into administration. audiences aren't going to the cinema. well, i mean, ithink audiences are coming back to cinema in good numbers, post—covid. i mean you have to bear in mind that in a world in which, you know, production was very much slowed down, but also the doors of cinemas were literally closed. in some places for an entire year and other places they open and shut. hollywood stopped releasing its movies. you know, the recovery from that is complicated, but i think it's actually going well. and i think we're seeing a lot more films being released now, which is certainly a good thing. should the theatrical window be longer? i think the average at the moment in 2023 is 30 days. yeah, it should absolutely be longer. the idea that the theatrical window needed to be made shorter is a fallacy. it was a fallacy. it was a short term thinking. it is short term thinking to appeal

to wall street and appear to be innovative. but it's actually that well, if you if you say to wall street, we're going to smash the theatrical window and we're going to give the consumer what they want and blah, blah, blah. it sounds good. and maybe the share price goes up, but it's not good for the health of cinemas. every other business will and every other business understands that the restriction of supply to tune it to demand. whether you're talking about the publishing industry, where the hardback comes out a year before paperback, etc., etc.. the diamond industry to be as famously controlling the supply of diamonds. you don't just throw your products out willy nilly and allow everybody to choose how to view them. that's not it's not the best business model. if you're interested in making money for a film maker, it's not the best model because we make films for the big screen and we want to maximise the length of the run that they get on the big screen. we want as many people to be able

to try and find them in that form as possible, and then they very naturally go onto all these ancillary formats that are wonderful. i've grown up in the home video age, starting with vhs and all the rest. and the access that that gives you to movies from streaming these days is incredible. it's absolutely wonderful. but the theatrical experience is what we're aiming for as filmmakers and the theatres. they need to be helped in that regard. and there's an irony here in the uk, i think that cinemas are closing, as i said, but the film industry in the uk is exploding in terms of studios being built and films being shot here. but you barely come here to shoot. i think, i know you shot the odd thing in the uk. the odd bit of a film. why is that? you know, it'sjust about what the particular demands of the film are. you know, when we were making dunkirk, you know, the film set in france. we wanted to be there on the real beach and then the bit set in the uk, we filmed those parts, but most of it takes place

in france. so, you know, it's sort of horses for courses, but i don't really like being in the studio. the uk has wonderfulfilm studios. it's a great place to come and shoot a film if you're going to be on soundstages. i like to be on real locations. so in the case of oppenheimer, we built our exteriors of los alamos on a mesa very similar to the one. the real town is on very close by, and then we shot the interiors in the real place. and so the actors were able to tread the floorboards of the real house that oppenheimer and his wife kitty, where they live for those those three years, the manhattan project, we were able to stage the scenes in fuller lodge, which is the sort of meeting hall that they used in the real place. and i think itjust adds authenticity and texture to the film. so generally, i try to go where the film is set. so you need to set a film in the uk and then maybe we'll get you here. i mean, sitting herejust ahead of your premiere tonight here in london, there's a threat of actors joining the writers strike, which some people are reporting

might mean that if that happens this afternoon, your actors won't turn up for the film because for the film premiere, because they'll be going on strike. i wonder how you read the situation as it is now. that's about pay. it it relates to your earlier question about cinemas, actually, and about the theatrical window. you know, we're in a time right now of great upheaval financially in the film and television business. and a lot of this is driven by television. and we're dealing with companies, very, very wealthy companies who chose, in order to appeal to to wall street and have their share prices go up, they chose to radically reinvent the way in which they sell their products with some success and some failure. but in doing so, they have not paid attention to the way

in which our contracts need to work as writers, and the actors have other issues. so you as a writer part of the strike? absolutely. yeah. and it's perfectly timed because you've already written it and it's come out. exactly. so, yeah, now i'm very, very fortunate with the timing and it's very important to bear in mind that there are people who've been out of work for months now at this point as part of the writers strike and with the actors potentiallyjoining. a lot of people are going to suffer. so you will not be writing another film while this strike is on? no, absolutely. and it's very important that everybody understand that it is a very, very key moment in the relationship between working people in hollywood. and this is not about me. this is not about the stars of my film. this is aboutjobbing actors. this is about staff writers on television programs trying to raise a family, trying to be able to keep food on the table. and these companies have not yet accommodated how they're going to in this new world of streaming and a world where they're not licensing their products out

to other broadcasters, they're keeping them for themselves to grow subscriber base. they have not yet offered to pay appropriately to the unions working members, and it's very important that they do so. and i think you never want a strike. you never want industrial action, but there are times where it's necessary. this is one of those times. and we have three blockbuster films coming out right now. we've got mission impossible, yourfilm and barbie. and much is being made of barbie and yourfilm going head to head. i think there's even a term being used that you might not want to hear barbie—heimer or or something, but how do you read that? i think any of us who care about theatres and i mean, it really speaks to the earlier question. you know, we've been desperate for a crowded marketplace for the years since covid, and it's finally happening. and for all of us who care about the cinema experience and movies, it's wonderful. fortheatres, it's a great, great thing. we haven't spoken about cillian murphy, but he clearly is so key to so many of your films and now

a lead in your movie. did it feel i think you've compared him now to al pacino. he is such a star and such a talent. he's one of the greatest actors of his generation or any other. and i've known that for 20 years. i've been lucky to work with him for 20 years, but never with him as a lead. this was one where i got to pick up the phone and say, "you know, you're going to take centre stage, you're going to carry the audience and that was a thrill for me. and then the added thrill, wonderful working with him, obviously on set every day. i'm seeing what he's doing and i'm loving it. but you get in the edit suite, you put it together. that's where you see the layers. that's where you see what a brilliant actor really done in terms of the arc of the character, the layers of the character. this is a very, very complex man. and the performances, i think, genuinely remarkable. i would second that.

well, oscar material. oscar worthy, i'm sure. thank you so much. christopher nolan. thank you.

live from london. this is bbc news.