Oppenheimer According to Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt & Robert Downey Jr.

By the way, Matt Damon is generally included in,

He is. the homies,

but I think he's shooting

a Dunkin' Donuts commercial right now.

[Emily laughs]

[cheerful music]

Hi, Vanity Fair, I'm Emily Blunt.

Hello Vanity Fair, I'm Cillian Murphy.

I'm Robert Downey Jr.,

And we're going to give you the entire oral history

of the cinematic masterpiece, Oppenheimer.

[film reel clicking]

Chris, he generally tends to just call me out of the blue,

or Emma Thomas, his wife and producer,

calls me because Chris doesn't possess a phone,

or a computer, or an email.

What he always does though,

I think that people know this now,

is that he flies to wherever you are

and gives you the actual script himself in person.

And it's always printed on red paper with black ink.

And it's a, like, it was a tome,

it was a door stopper of a thing.

In the Marvel days, everything was watermarked,

and they had dummy scripts, and phony things,

and you remember all, all those days to keep you from.

And then Chris is just like,

I want to just make this impossible

for anyone to ever read,

except the people I'm asking to read it.

Yeah. By the way, it's so hard

to read a script on red paper with black type.

I suggest any of you try it.

So private in a lovely way.

It's just the coolest.

Just usually everything,

you know, everyone's in the know and your agents,

and your team, and you know, all the producers know.

And you know, you are being discussed by people.

There's sort of the chatter

and the noise around putting a project together,

and this feels really distinctive, and calm,

and private, and peaceful.

And reasonable. Yeah.

Yeah, and the thing I should say as well is

that every time Chris has called me, I've always said yes

before I've read the script.

So it's a sort of,

it's just a formality reading the script, you know.

When we discuss it on the phone, I knew it was,

it was a huge part.

Well, I've always said this,

I need to feel intimidated by work.

It needs to feel dangerous or impossible for me.

If it feels like I know how to play that I'm not,

I'm not really interested.

It needs to feel like a huge leap.

And this was one of the biggest leaps.

It's a sort of wild combination of like,

abandonment working with him and also knowing

that you're gonna have the screws tightened on you

as an actor to such a degree that it becomes one

of the most thrilling experiences of your life.

We had a long prep period.

We had like, we had six months.

I was going from the outside in,

which was trying to get the physicality,

and trying to get the walk,

and the voice, and all of that.

And then there was an interior thing going on,

which was all this sort of research

and the, the sort of, I suppose the

intellectual sort of side of it.

[Interviewer] What was the thing

Chris told you about David Bowie?

That was just some little thing he just,

he just dropped in the mix at one point.

He sent me a picture of him,

I think it was during the Thin White Duke era,

you know, and he was so cool but so slim.

And he had those beautiful high-waisted,

pleated tailored trousers.

And he had the coat, and the jacket, and the hat.

And it was just, 'cause Bowie is always creating

his own iconography and his own aura.

Do you know what I mean?

And he struggled to figure out how

is he going to break in.

He felt very much like an outsider.

Yes. Yeah.

And he went from the outside in and then the inside.

Totally. Yeah, yeah.

Totally.

And I think that's probably where

there was some sort of crossover.

It doesn't seem logical or obvious in any way.

He began to find himself and design his own sort of aura.

And you see it in the movie, you know, when we do that,

it's a little montage, he puts put the hat and the pipe,

and he just becomes this character.

You want to talk about a story where the stakes are high,

the stakes are the future of western civilization.

And so that a lot of my prep was just recognizing

that all these people are taking place in a story

where the fate of humanity-

Yeah.

rested on the decisions they made.

So when there's these complicated relationships,

I'm reading the script and I'm going,

man, their marriage has to work, broken as it is,

because we won't survive.

It was just all that stuff.

So it was so implicit in his writing.

It's always a bit scary.

Like I remember the first time

we read a scene in front of him,

and I was so scared because I, you know,

we both decided to do quite a specific voice for them.

I remember finishing the scene,

he went, yeah, great, okay.

And that was it.

And you're like, oh, thank God!

You know, that means I think he really likes it.

[film reel clicking]

And I think every single crew member,

every single actor wants to be on a Chris Nolan set.

We were discussing this, it's a little bit of a letdown

when you go onto another set.

No disrespect to every director in the world.

But that efficiency, you know, that that like real,

rigorous efficiency that happens.

And like Robert was saying,

that just there's a lot of wasted time,

wasted money that build, that surrounds our industry.

Like everybody knows that it's a legendary, legendarily so.

But with Chris it isn't.

And you just go straight to the work.

And I think the reason he re-collaborates a lot with people

is that he likes to do that thing where it's just the work.

[Interviewer] There are all these legends about

what it's like on a Christopher Nolan set

and you've hinted at some of them like lack of chairs.

Is that a real thing?

I mean, there's an apple box around now and then.

Occasionally there's an apple box.

Just park your booty on an apple box.

Human resources are scarce.

[Emily and Cillian laugh]

And the idea is that this is a Spartan endeavor.

And also I think that Chris, from all the films he's done,

he deplores waste. Yes.

He's a conservationist of the highest order.

Like all this stuff is, this kind of convention

has developed around film sets that is kind of crackers.

Like, that people are on their phone.

Why would, why would you be on your phone on a film set?

Doesn't make any sense.

There's no video village, there's no monitors.

All of these things that just are the norm now.

But why do we need them

if the director knows exactly what he, or he or she.

It's what Matt said, every,

not everything's happening in front of the camera.

Everything is happening in front of the camera.

There is no budget for anything

that's not happening in front of the camera.

Yeah. Yeah.

So the other thing is, if I see Chris Nolan,

I throw my phone.

And this is even when we're not shooting.

Still to this day, Yes.

If you see him, just put your phone down.

And he doesn't even really like it when you go

to the bathroom, but he understands you have to.

Yeah. And I asked him,

dude, when do you go?

And he goes, 11:00 AM and 6:00 PM.

[Emily laughs] I was like, are you,

are you fucking with me?

And he drinks so much tea.

I know, but he's- How does he not,

how does it not go right through him?

It's not a diuretic tea.

No, it's not.

Clearly. Because he won't

do anything, he won't ask anyone to do anything

that he's not a thousand percent willing to do himself

twice as hard. That's it.

I remember we were doing a scene on Dunkirk.

Do you remember that scene where my character's

found on the bow of this sunken vessel?

Oh yeah. I remember

all the Marine guys and all the stunt guys

were very unsure about me getting up there,

it was very kind of bad weather.

And Chris was like, okay, I'll get up there.

So he got up there, did it all,

and they checked it out with him doing it.

And then he was like, okay, put Cillian up there then.

That's just one example.

There's so many of them.

I love our scene. Yes.

Where you find me. Yes.

By the rocks, yeah. Yeah.

[gentle music]

You pull yourself together.

You know, people here depend on you.

That scene- It's also because

we kind of knew we were losing the light.

Like it was just that, that sort of simmer of tension on set

where you're like, ooh.

And you see it was, it was just.

We shot it so fast. So fast.

Yeah.

And Chris wants to keep that at bay,

but you could kind of feel it.

Yeah. Just sort of,

we needed to get it.

He'd already shot five scenes before it.

But I, the way it's important for me,

or significant for me is I suppose,

I knew that we had to get to a place

in that scene just emotionally for the story,

for their story together to work particularly.

To ratchet it up so intensely, and so fast.

But I could not have done it

with anybody else other than Emily.

There is no, there is no way that I could have got

to that place without you in that scene, you know?

And to be able to lock into that-

Is it 'cause I slapped the shit out of you?

And he cut it out. Exactly.

He cut it out.

But it, but it was just one of those,

it was one of those scenes where, you know,

you need to have that level of trust

with the actor you're working with

and with the director, that you can go straight to it.

There's a scene after he doesn't get his,

his appointment. Oh, it's my favorite.

I'm denied, yeah?

I'm afraid so, sir. All right.

All the veneer has to come down.

You have to see who's kind

of been running the show the whole time.

And I'm there and it's me, and Alden, and Scott Grimes.

We blocked, we blocked it,

and then it kind of made more sense

and he gave me a little more room.

And then we did it, we did it, we did it.

And I like thought I had it,

and I was like, all right, now I'm getting tired.

I think we had it.

And he goes, we may have it or we may not, but,

no, I know I may have got something else in you.

And I was like. Yeah.

No you don't. He did!

Oh my gosh! And I don't!

And I was like, oh!

Anyway, it was one of those things where he was like,

I'm sorry but we didn't come this far

for me to let you off the hook,

even if there's nothing left to find, we still have time.

I'm not rushing.

And by the way, I'm not trying to shoot tomorrow today.

I'm just trying to shoot today, today.

So you are fucked until we're done.

Until you bring it.

No, it was great.

And I feel like it was a big moment of like,

I have to break through this inherent,

whatever our own lazy meter is, it's in there somewhere.

And that's the thing you have to find and erase to grow.

That scene is masterful. Stop my heart.

Stop my heart.

[film reel clicking]

It feels more like a celebration of the work.

You know, than, you know, when you're promoting something,

it's a three hour R-rated picture

about a physicist, you know.

Then this phenomenon happens

and it connects with audiences in a way

that we could never, ever, ever have anticipated.

The film kind of went out there and had,

it went into its adolescence and its own maturity,

and we just had to kind of just reconnect with each other.

So, you know, we were trying to hook up,

or FaceTime.

I was going out to see you. It's the best.

And crash at your pad.

We just kind of like,

tried to socially reintegrate in the enormity of the-

I finally saw Cillian like, drink again

in the Cotswolds in England.

Yeah, baby.

I love an indulgent set.

I love choppering into a Avengers back lot.

I just think it's great.

I love the whole conspicuous consumption.

But the Chris Nolan way is not for the faint of heart.

Yeah. No.

So it's nice because you wind up knowing

what you're made of when you're done working for him.

Yeah.

We like making dad proud.

Yeah. [all laugh]

Best dad ever! [Emily laughs]

Thanks for watching.

If you haven't seen Oppenheimer twice, go see it again.

You're gonna love it.

Thanks Vanity Fair.

Thank you!

[Speaker] Wonderful. Nice one.

Wow that was a- It was okay.

That was quite a sesh. Yeah, man!