No special effects in ‘Oppenheimer’ is “clearly not true”, says VFX supervisor

Oppenheimer‘s VXF supervisor Andrew Jackson has denied claims that there are no special effects in Christopher Nolan‘s latest film.

• READ MORE: ‘Oppenheimer’ review: Christopher Nolan’s mind-blowing biopic hits like a bomb to the brain

In the lead up to the movie’s release, headlines spread after Nolan stated there were no computer-generated images in Oppenheimer, which lead some people to believe that the film didn’t feature any visual effects at all.

“Some people have picked that up and taken it to mean that there are no visual effects, which is clearly not true,” Jackson told The Hollywood Reporter. “Visual effects can encompass a whole lot of things.” That includes computer-generated imagery and “in-camera” special effects created on set.

One VFX moment is the scene re-creating the Trinity Test, in which J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and his team of scientists detonated the first atomic bomb in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.

According to Jackson, who won an Oscar for Nolan’s Tenet, the explosion was achieved by shooting real explosions and smoke, and then layering the filmed elements through digital compositing.

“[Nolan] didn’t want use any CG simulations of a nuclear explosion. He wanted to be in that sort of language of the era of the film… using practical filmed elements to tell that story.”

Jackson explained that they didn’t attempt to make an exact copy of what the explosion would have looked like. Instead, they opted for something in between “a sort of loose artistic interpretation of the ideas rather than an accurate representation of the physics.”

On shooting the practical explosion for the Trinity Test scene, Jackson said they used “four 44 gallon drums of fuel and then some high explosives under that, which sets the fuel alight and launches it into the air.”

He explained how over 400 individual filmed elements were used to create the final explosion seen in the film.

“We had some with really close-up detail of the burning explosion,” said Jackson. “We had a lot of material that we could layer up and build into something that had the appearance of something much bigger.”

The Oscar-winning VFX supervisor also discussed how special effects were used to light the characters in certain shots, including the scene in which they observe the explosion from miles away.

There were some [shots] where there was a [practical] explosion in the background and other ones where we added the explosion. Some of them had like a lighting effect on the actors for the flash as the explosion went off.”

In a five-star review of Oppenheimer, NME wrote: “Not just the definitive account of the man behind the atom bomb, Oppenheimer is a monumental achievement in grown-up filmmaking.

“For years, Nolan has been perfecting the art of the serious blockbuster – crafting smart, finely-tuned multiplex epics that demand attention; that can’t be watched anywhere other than in a cinema, uninterrupted, without distractions. But this, somehow, feels bigger.”

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