By Garry Maddox
The first atomic bomb blast – the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945 – was such a terrifying experience that one observer thought something had gone wrong, and the whole world has gone up in flames.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist behind the development of the bomb, later recalled thinking of a line from Hindu scripture as he watched the tremendous flash and column of rising smoke: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”.
Christopher Nolan “wanted to do this film without using a CG mushroom cloud simulation”: Andrew Jackson was visual effects supervisor on Oppenheimer.Credit: Steven Siewert
Recreating the blast for Christopher Nolan’s epic biopic Oppenheimer, which tells the story of the lead-up to, and aftermath of, the Trinity test largely fell to visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson, who is currently back home in Australia working on George Miller’s Furiosa.
Jackson has worked on three films in a row with Nolan – Dunkirk, Tenet and Oppenheimer – using the skills he developed growing up on a Cornwall farm to find practical solutions to filmmaking problems.
Such as how to make a building simultaneously implode and explode for Tenet and how to build an atomic bomb for Oppenheimer.
Jackson knew that Nolan would want to recreate the blast “in camera” – filming something real – rather than with computer-generated visual effects.
“He wanted to do this film without using a CG [computer generated] mushroom cloud simulation,” he says. “He wanted it to have a really earthy, gritty feel.”
As Nolan has said, “I’d done a nuclear blast via computer graphics in The Dark Knight Rises, which had worked very well for that film. But it also showed me that with a real event like Trinity, which was well-documented using new cameras and formats developed for recording that event, computer graphics would never give you the sense of threat that you see in the real-life footage.”
Nolan also wanted to film the blast as near as possible to Trinity’s location to make the scene feel real, firstly for the cast headed by Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer then for the cinema audience.
Andrew Jackson on the set of Oppenheimer.Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
While they had permission to shoot at what was then called White Sands Proving Ground, the site is still a military base for practice bombing runs and radar tests. So, the crew built their own version elsewhere in New Mexico, complete with the tall steel tower used for Trinity.
After cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema set up cameras in positions simulating the real-life observation points, the crew set off what Jackson remembers as seven or eight explosions, with high explosives underneath barrels of fuel that were launched skywards to create a mushroom cloud.
“We filmed them from lots of cameras,” Jackson says. “So we had a lot of footage at different frame rates and different lenses. We had close detail of that turmoil inside the roiling flame of the explosion.”
They shot these explosions at high speed, slowed them down then brought layers of footage together in post-production.
“Everything was done very safely and controlled”: Andrew JacksonCredit: Steven Siewert
“They were really just big explosions that we treated in a way to make them feel much bigger than they really were,” Jackson says. “Everything was done very safely and controlled.”
The result is impressive in Oppenheimer, a blast that is both strangely beautiful and horrifying, especially knowing that atomic bombs will devastate Hiroshima and Nagasaki within weeks.
The other big visual effects job on Oppenheimer was representing what Nolan has described as “the thought processes of somebody at the forefront of the paradigm shift from Newtonian physics to quantum mechanics”.
Jackson says he spent two months in special effects supervisor Scott Fisher’s workshop experimenting - “coming up with little devices and trying spinning things and magnets and powders and liquids and flames, looking for things that related to chain reactions and waves and particles and the surfaces of stars”.
They filmed hundreds of clips to create a library of images.
“Some of them could just be cut straight into the film with no work,” Jackson says.
They also had to come up with ways of representing everything from subatomic particles to galaxies, including black holes and stars forming.
Jackson, who was nominated for an Oscar for Mad Max: Fury Road and won one for Tenet, is the creative director of the new Sydney office of international visual effects and animation house DNEG. He describes Nolan as a brilliant filmmaker with a clear vision of what he wants.
“He’s very good at delegating and giving people the freedom to experiment and find solutions,” he says.
Email Garry Maddox at gmaddox@smh.com.au and follow him on Twitter at @gmaddox.
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