Aluminum powder and magnesium were then added to the conflagration in order to approximate the instant blinding flash that accompanies a nuclear blast. It's getting it closer to the camera, and doing it as big as you can in the environment.'Īs for the pyrotechnic side of things, the intense blaze was 'mostly' a combination of gasoline and propane 'because you get so much bang for your buck,' Fisher said (we're gonna assume the pun was very much intended). 'We do them as big as we possibly can, but we do reduce the scale so it's manageable. 'We don't call them miniatures we call them 'big-atures,'' he explained. Oppenheimer: 'People Are Allowed to Go See 2 Movies in a Weekend'įor the Trinity Test (the world's first-ever atomic explosion), Fisher and his team used one of the oldest tricks in the Hollywood playbook: forced perspective. We needed it to feel threatening, nasty and frightening to the audience.' And we were presenting the ultimate danger. Even if it's impressive and beautiful, it's difficult to make you feel danger. 'I find CG rarely is able to grab you,' Nolan told Empire for the magazine's issue ( now on sale).

And that was, of course, the Trinity explosion, and some prop builds, and elements of different things that we had throughout the film.' ' said, 'There's not as much stuff for you on this as the other one, but there's a couple of things we do have to cover. 'It was definitely not as rigorous with day-to-day filming,' said Fisher. RELATED: Oppenheimer Star Cillian Murphy On Working With Christopher Nolan 6 Times: 'It Feels Absurd' Given the film's grounded material, the special effects team enjoyed a much lighter workload when compared to the larger-than-life visuals they were asked to create for previous outings like Interstellar and Tenet. Fisher peeled back the curtain on his sixth team-up with Nolan.

In an interview with Total Film for the magazine's June 2023 issue ( now on sale), Special Effects Supervisor Scott R. This led many fans to jokingly speculate that the pioneering filmmaker with an eye toward stark realism had somehow convinced Universal Pictures to purchase and blow up an actual nuclear device in the middle of the desert. Christopher Nolan raised many an eyebrow in late 2022 when he revealed that his upcoming World War II biopic - Oppenheimer(opening on the big screen July 21) - had achieved the effect of a detonating atomic bomb without the use of CG.

Atomic bomb explosion