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The script behind Christopher Nolan‘s “Oppenheimer” has jumped to the top of bestseller lists on Amazon following the film’s smashing blockbuster release last month.
The film, based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “American Prometheus,” tells the definitive story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb. The film, starring Cillian Murphy as the eponymous scientist, pulls straight from the 700-page biography, which traces Oppenheimer’s life starting with his time at Cambridge, where he earned a reputation as an intellectual prodigy. As a physicist, Oppenheimer made significant contributions to quantum mechanics and theoretical physics, earning him great respect among his peers.
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The narrative takes a dramatic turn with the onset of World War II, when Oppenheimer was appointed as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, a top-secret government initiative aimed at developing the first atomic bomb. His leadership and organizational skills were instrumental to the project, which culminated with the devastating nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over 200,000 Japanese people.
In his introduction to the screenplay, Bird praises Nolan’s skill in extremely complex life story and miraculously turning it into “visual art that is faithful both to the history and the man.”
When Bird read Nolan’s screenplay, he was “struck by how faithful it was to the book, capturing what was always most important to Sherwin: the paradoxes at the heart of Oppenheimer’s character and the intimate details that dovetailed with enormous plate shifts of world history.”
Buy Nolan’s complete “Oppenheimer” script below:
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