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FILMMAKING www.postmagazine.com 14 POST JAN/FEB 2024 Wakanda Forever, Tenet), who were both Oscar nominated for their work on Oppenheimer, along with Nolan. Despite his career total of eight nom- inations, the director has never won. But this year looks likely to change all that. The film shot in five major locations, with Nolan filming mostly in New Mexico, including shoot- ing most of the interiors at the real Los Alamos. Oppenheimer marks the fourth collaboration for Nolan and van Hoytema, who says, "My biggest chal- lenge with Oppenheimer rests in the way it is very di©erent from the other films I've made with Chris. In Interstellar, Dunkirk and Tenet, there's an emphasis on action. Oppenheimer is more like a psychological thriller; it's reliant on the faces of its characters." Adds Nolan, "It's a story of great scope and great scale and great span. But I also wanted the audience to be in the rooms where everything happened, as if you are there, having conversations with these scientists in these important moments." To this end, Nolan and his DP filmed in a combi- nation of IMAX 65mm and 65mm large-format film photography, including, for the first time ever, sec- tions in IMAX black & white analogue photography. With the large-format film, and di©erent kinds of stock, the challenge of creating Oppenheimer with multiple formats continued into post production, as the film had to be edited, color corrected and printed for IMAX, digital and standard presentation. Nolan and his cinematographer also worked closely with special e©ects supervisors Scott Fisher (a Nolan vet, who won Oscars for Interstellar and Tenet) and Andrew Jackson (who also won an Oscar for Tenet) on VFX, depicting everything from the first atomic test in the New Mexico desert to physical phenomena, ranging from subatomic particles to exploding stars and black holes. As the film's sole VFX partner, Dneg delivered over 100 shots, crafted from more than 400 practical- ly-shot elements, to help create some of the film's most important and explosive sequences, includ- ing recreating the nuclear tests and showing the terrifying scale of an atomic blast. For the Trinity test sequence, Jackson and Fisher captured a wide spectrum of explosions using IMAX technology, including huge detonations, as well as smaller and underwater detonations. For the plasma ball atomic test, featured in the high-speed archive Barbie has two original songs that are nominated for Oscars. Director Martin Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker are both nominated for their work on Killers of the Flower Moon.