Cillian Murphy says Christopher Nolan never messes up his movie endings

The Oppenheimer actor particularly liked the final shots of this biopic.

On the occasion of the DVD and blu-ray release ofOppenheimer (with over 3 hours of bonus), Cillian Murphy gave a long interview to Awardswatch.com. The 47-year-old actor first laughs at the fact that since the major promotion of the film Christopher Nolan this summer – which bore fruit, since the film earned more than 900 million dollars in revenue worldwide – he returned to Ireland, and is enjoying his free time with his family, eating cheese.

Waiting to find the role of Thomas Shelby for the film Peaky Blinders, the actor rests a little. Because 2024 should once again be a busy year for him, now that the actors’ strike is over in Hollywood: in addition to filming this highly anticipated finale of the end of the series, Murphy could well start the year with an Oscar for best actor, both Oppenheimer was praised by the public.

Looking back on his first role with Nolan, after appearing more briefly in the trilogy Dark Knight, Inception And Dunkirk, he explains in particular having reviewed Amadeus to prepare for his confrontation with Lewis Strauss, played by Robert Downey Jr. and a major character in the second part of the film. He then salutes the choice of the screenwriter and director to have offered two points of view to the film, that of the scientist, in color, and that of the politician who tried to bring him down, in black and white. He also talks about his “magnificent ending”without spoiling it.

“I find it’s the hardest thing to do when telling a story, said Cillian Murphy. Not just at the movies, either. When you’re writing, your third act is the most complicated. And Chris has always done great endings. When you rewatch his films, you see how strong his final scenes always are. I remember that while reading the script ofOppenheimerI said to myself : ‘F***, yeah: that’s a great ending!’ Then we filmed it in Princeton on the shore of this lake. I think we didn’t talk about it much when it came out. Maybe because the dialogue is so good that it’s brought to life quite simply? When you’re working from a script of this quality, it’s your job to bring it to life, you can’t dissect it too much, because in a way the words are going to do the work for you.”

Oppenheimer: Cillian Murphy “was dying” for a leading role at Nolan

Warning, spoilers!

Murphy here evokes the final dialogue between his character and Albert Einstein, played by Tom Conti (already in The Dark Knight Rises), about his probable future rehabilitation. In full guilt, the scientist is fully aware that the discovery he made has become a weapon so destructive that it could, after having killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagazaki, literally annihilate the world. He then has this vision of multiple atomic bombs destroying the earth. In the near future ? Unless humanity manages to stop the arms race and this nightmare vision is not prophetic? Nolan leaves a tiny bit of hope for our future with this final shot.

Last June, when the first spectators discovered Oppenheimer in a preview, Christopher Nolan said about his shock ending: “Some people walked out of the film completely devastated. They couldn’t speak. By that I mean that there is an element of fear very present in the story and in its foundations. But the love of the characters, the love that exists in his relationships, is also strong, very strong, like in no other of my previous films.

(…)

The story ofOppenheimer is made up of impossible questions. Of impossible ethical dilemmas, of paradoxes. There are no easy answers in this story. There are just tough questions, and that’s what makes this so exciting. I think we were able to find a lot of things to be optimistic about in the film, really, but there’s always one more important question than all hanging over it. It seemed essential to leave the viewer wondering at the end, to let him shake his brain in order to spark discussion.”

Oppenheimer: an intimate odyssey as astonishing as it is trying (review)