Barbie may have won the Barbenheimer box office race, but Oppenheimer looks primed and ready to return fire with what will likely be a fruitful night at the Oscars this year, given the biopic’s leading 13 nominations.
Indeed, the love for Oppenheimer is in the air now just as much as it was during its theatrical run, and while most all of us got to enjoy watching Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus, the filmmaker got to indulge in a very different kind of enjoyment on account of the film.
Speaking in conversation with fellow filmmaker Denis Villeneuve to the Associated Press, Nolan recounted the story of giving the one and only Steven Spielberg a private screening of Oppenheimer‘s 70mm print, which he had received the same day:
“You know when I first got the 70mm/5perf print, I showed it to Steven Spielberg. He had called me about something else and I had just got the print as well and I hadn’t shown it to anyone. I mean, the studio had seen it. But we screened it for him on his own. I sat behind him and watched him watch the film. It was an extraordinary experience.”
By the sounds of it, watching Spielberg watch Oppenheimer has quickly become Nolan’s Roman Empire, especially given that “the great master,” as Nolan referred to him, obviously had only the best to say about the Cillian Murphy-led spectacle:
“He said some very kind things, but really just to watch him watch. I wasn’t even supposed to watch it with him, but seeing the great master watching? It was sort of irresistible.”
Don’t get your hopes up, though; as an owner of the Oppenheimer Blu-ray, it’s with great sadness that I confirm that there’s no special feature in which we also get to watch Spielberg watch Oppenheimer, so this experience will well and truly only ever be for Nolan, but frankly, he deserves to have that be just for him.
(featured image: Universal Pictures)
