TRIAL BY FIRE

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN DIVES INSIDE THE MIND OF HIS MOST COMPLEX PROTAGONIST YET IN THE TRUE-LIFE STORY OF OPPENHEIMER. TOTAL FILM SITS IN ON THE SOUND MIX TO LEARN ABOUT A FILM AS AMBITIOUS AS THE DIRECTOR HAS YET MADE, WITH A MIND-BOGGLING SCALE, AN INVENTIVE APPROACH AND AN ALL-STAR CAST GIVING A HISTORICAL BIOPIC THE BLOCKBUSTER TREATMENT.

- MATT MAYTUM

If genius is patience, as Sir Isaac Newton once attested, Total Film witnesses genius in abundance on the dub stage at the Warner Bros. lot, Burbank, California, on an uncharacteristically rainy day in January. It’s in here that the sound mix is being finessed on Christopher Nolan’s new film, Oppenheimer – the true story of a tortured genius whose impact on history is hard to overstate.

This room is where Nolan and his producing partner and wife, Emma Thomas, have mixed their films as far back as 2006’s The Prestige; even though Oppenheimer is being distributed by Universal, these facilities are often hired out between studios (Nolan’s Memento was actually mixed on the Universal lot).

Dub stage 1 boasts an enormous screen, in front of which sits a bank of desks 30ft wide, occupied by at least half a dozen people sitting at monitors (many of whom are long-term Nolan collaborators). TF slinks into the back of the room and sinks into a black sofa, as Nolan – alongside editor Jennifer Lame (Tenet) – leads the team through some painstakingly precise soundtrack tweaks over a couple of minutes’ worth of (frankly stunning-looking) footage from Oppenheimer.

The film is the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist considered to be the ‘father’ of the atomic bomb, and, in Nolan’s words, ‘the most important person who ever lived’. A scientific genius who oversaw the creation of the world’s most destructive weapon, Oppenheimer would later lobby against nuclear proliferation, and found his loyalty scrutinised on the public stage when he faced a security hearing for Communist Party connections.