Hollywood doesn’t really do sex anymore and they haven’t for ages, at least not on a regular basis. Every time some big movie has nooky, people freak the hell out. So when it turned out Christopher Nolan — a decidedly un-saucy filmmaker who’s barely shown bare flesh let alone characters enjoying the pleasures of the flesh — had slipped some hard-R sauciness into Oppenheimer, his movie about the inventor of the atom bomb, alarm bells went off. But Nolan says they’re necessary.
In a new interview with Insider, Nolan talks about another side of J. Robert Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy. “When you look at Oppenheimer’s life and you look at his story, that aspect of his life, the aspect of his sexuality, his way with women, the charm that he exuded, it’s an essential part of his story,” Nolan said.
Oppenheimer had a long, rocky marriage to his scientist wife Kitty, played in the film by Emily Blunt. While they were married, he also hooked back up with his old fiancée, Jean Tatlock, played by Florence Pugh. The film apparently features some naughty business with both, as well as what’s been described as “prolonged full nudity.”
Tatlock was a card-carrying communist, which later got Oppenheimer in trouble with some petty Republicans led by the hissable Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.). Nolan wanted to make sure his semi-hero’s bedside manner received attention.
“It felt very important to understand their relationship and to really see inside it and understand what made it tick without being coy or allusive about it, but to try to be intimate, to try and be in there with him and fully understand the relationship that was so important to him,” Nolan explained.
Nolan also vaguely discussed doing something he’d never shown onscreen before: graphic nudity and sex. Yes, he was anxious.
“Any time you’re challenging yourself to work in areas you haven’t worked in before, you should be appropriately nervous and appropriately careful and planned and prepared,” he confessed.
Now a ton of people are going to see the fruits of Nolan’s labor, many on the same day they see a movie about a sentient doll who suffers an existential crisis that keeps enraging conservatives. And they say bland franchises have taken over the multiplex.
(Via Insider)