Last spring, when Christopher Nolan’s daughter had some time off from college, her father asked her if she wanted to come and visit him at work and have her face blown off in a nuclear explosion.
“Now hold on a minute,” Nolan says, laughing uncomfortably on the phone from Los Angeles. “That’s sort of it, but a little cart-before-the-horse.” Here, the director of the Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar and Dunkirk explains, is how it actually happened: Flora, the eldest of his four children with his wife and producer Emma Thomas, simply came to spend a week on the set of his forthcoming film Oppenheimer, about the man who catapulted humanity into the atomic age.
And it was just on the spur of the moment one morning that he asked her if she might like to step into a still-vacant role: that of a nameless young woman who appears to the title character in a hellish, conscience-pricking vision, in which the flesh is flayed from her face by a piercing white light.
“We needed someone to do that small part of a somewhat experimental and spontaneous sequence,” he goes on, “so it was wonderful to just have her sort of roll with it.” Come on, though: conveying the horrors Oppenheimer’s invention would unleash by staging the death of your own firstborn is, well, a bit of a choice.
“I hope you’re not going to make me sound like Michael Powell on Peeping Tom,” he chuckles again. (In that grisly 1960 picture, Powell cast his own nine-year-old son as the childhood incarnation of a serial killer, and himself as the boy’s sadistic father.) “But yes, I mean, gosh, you’re not wrong. Truthfully, I try not to analyse my own intentions. But the point is that if you create the ultimate destructive power it will also destroy those who are near and dear to you. So I suppose this was my way of expressing that in what, to me, were the strongest possible terms.”
