We Rewatched Oppenheimer And It’s Completely Different Now

Within its staggering three-hour runtime, «Oppenheimer» covers an impressive amount of the titular physicist’s life. And while Christopher Nolan’s predilection for sweeping montages and exhaustive exchanges of dialogue is on full display in the film, some of the story’s foundational elements are captured in less than a minute. One such example of this storytelling comes early in the film, when Nolan and Cillian Murphy manage to simultaneously express Oppenheimer’s growing confidence and expanding influence on the scientific community by having the character deliver a lecture in fluent Dutch.

If the scene doesn’t ring a bell, it might be because it takes up less than 30 seconds of the film, with Murphy’s Dutch monologuing in particular lasting a mere eight seconds. Yet for this relatively tiny moment, the actor needed three months of daily preparation. «It’s a small scene, but I remember talking to [Nolan] in preproduction and saying, ‘Chris, what do you want to do about this Dutch scene?’ And he said, ‘What are you going to do about this Dutch scene,’» Murphy recalled in «Unleashing Oppenheimer. «It’s very much that he works at the top of his game, so he expects everyone else to do their work, to do their due diligence.»

Hearing his director’s veiled warning loud and clear, Murphy asked the production’s Dutch-Swedish cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, to record the dialogue multiple times at different speeds so he could practice along with it daily as the shoot progressed. And though he didn’t understand much of what he said (describing his fluency as «purely phonetic»), Murphy remained committed to Nolan’s vision and rose to the occasion.