Christopher Nolan wrote Oppenheimer in first-person

Christopher Nolan movies aren’t known for M. Night Shyamalan-style narrative “twists,” but he does love a good structural twist. The storylines building onto each other in Inception, the intersecting timelines in Dunkirk, Tenet going backward and looping back through earlier scenes in the movie. There might not be anything quite so dramatic in Oppenheimer (a movie that’s 11 miles long if you see it in IMAX), but there is something like that baked into the film’s script.

According to an interview Nolan gave with Empire, Nolan wrote the whole script in first-person. And when he says “first-person,” he means god damn first-person: Everything, from dialogue to character descriptions to stage directions, all of it was written literally from the perspective of J. Robert Oppenheimer himself—which, to be clear for anyone who hasn’t read or written a script—is pretty weird. Nolan said that he’s never written like that before, adding, “I don’t know if anyone’s ever done it before.”

The idea was, since the movie is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view, this would stick the screenplay itself into “literally kind of looking through his eyes.” He also explained that he did it as “a reminder to everybody involved” in the film that they need to be thinking of everything from Oppenheimer’s perspective. “I wanted to really go through this story with Oppenheimer,” Nolan told Empire. “I didn’t want to sit by him and judge him. That seemed a pointless exercise.”

So that seems pretty cool, but it’s also hard to imagine what the hell this script actually looks like. It has to function as a script, right? So it can’t be, like, “I see PRESIDENT TRUMAN sit in a chair. TRUMAN looks tired and says he is tired. I am also sitting in a chair. I am also tired. I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”

A whole script written like that would be fun to read, so if Cillian Murphy or Emily Blunt or Matt Damon or Robert Downey Jr. or Florence Pugh (this cast!) are reading this, please send me a copy or two. I promise not to spoil the ending for anyone. (More than 100,000 people get killed, most of them civilians.)