Adapting Robert Oppenheimer’s Story to Film, Plus Greta Gerwig on Becoming a Director
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. This week, the conversation about movies is all about the phenomenon known as Barbenheimer. First, there's Greta Gerwig's film Barbie. And we're going to hear from her about her path to becoming a filmmaker later in the show.

And then there's Oppenheimer, which is about the father of the atomic bomb. Its director, Christopher Nolan, worked on science fiction movies like Interstellar and Inception, as well as the World War II epic, and I think his best movie until now, Dunkirk. To make Oppenheimer, Nolan relied on the astonishing biography American Prometheus, the triumph and tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

written by Kai Bird and the late Martin Sherwin. American Prometheus won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize. Nolan took some artistic license, as you might expect, but Kai Bird is credited as a co-writer of the film, and he told me that Nolan stayed pretty faithful to his book. I spoke with Kai Bird last week.

Now, Kai, Christopher Nolan, the director of the film, is called Robert Oppenheimer, the most important person in the history of the world. And as his biographer, along with Martin Sherwin, of course, is Nolan right? Or is he just kind of hyping the film? Well, when I first heard him say that, I thought that's a little bit of a hype, quite frankly. But, you know, the more you think about it, and the more I revisit my 18-year-old book...

You know, it's true. Oppenheimer gave us...

the atomic age and we're still living with it and it's a it was a revolutionary thing what really makes it a an incredibly fascinating story is the arc of you know his triumph in 1945 and then nine years later his humiliation tragedy of his downfall exactly both in your book in the film Oppenheimer's role at Los Alamos is if anything the narrative midpoint at the story almost exactly in the book

The prosecution of Oppenheimer as a person too suspect to hold a security clearance suddenly, and then his horrific ruin in which we see him almost...

Waste away is in many ways the heart of things. Why was he prosecuted? Why was he persecuted the way he was? Well, he had a sketchy background. And Marty and I debated amongst ourselves about what does the evidence show? And we concluded that he was pink, but not red. Yeah.

For the younger listeners who aren't used to the vocabulary, what does that mean? That means that he was a fellow traveler, that he was a man of the left at Berkeley in California in the 1930s in the midst of the Depression. Not surprisingly, you know, capitalism seemed to be failing. The Spanish Civil War was raging. Fascism was rearing its head in Europe.

And he met a young woman named Jean Tatlock, who was a member of the Communist Party. He fell in love with her and she railed at him for being a nerdy, apolitical university professor and urged him to become more politically involved. And so he did. But

But we examined the evidence very carefully and argued amongst ourselves, and we concluded that he never became red. He never joined the party. He never had a party card. He did contribute money to the Communist Party-sponsored causes, like integrating the public swimming pool in Berkeley and raising money for an ambulance to send to the Spanish Republic.

But that he was not the kind of man to submit himself to party discipline. But surely the authorities, the military establishment, the national security establishment, before they installed Oppenheimer as the head of Los Alamos, a job of immense consequences. Remember, he's only in his mid to late 30s.

They must have known about his political background then when they installed him. Absolutely. When General Leslie Groves hired him as the scientific director at Los Alamos, he had read his FBI file. He knew that Oppie had all these associations. So why was it okay in 1943? Well...

They needed him, and this was quite common. Many of these university professors that they were recruiting into the Manhattan Project had been politically active, had been on the left. And what changed

was after the war, Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, begins to go public with his criticisms and his worries and warnings about relying. His ambivalence, yeah. His ambivalence about the bomb. I have been asked whether in the years to come it will be possible to kill 40 million American people in the 20 largest American towns by the use of atomic bombs in a single night.

I am afraid that the answer to that question is yes. I have been asked whether there are specific countermeasures against the atomic bomb. I know that the bombs that we make in Los Alamos cannot be exploded by such countermeasures. I do not think there is any foundation for the hope that such countermeasures will be found. You know, he gives a speech three months after Hiroshima in which he says in Philadelphia that

You might think that this is an expensive weapon because it costs $2 billion. It's actually cheap. And any country, however poor, anywhere in the world that decides they want to build this thing will be able to do so. And you may think that it's a weapon for defense. It's actually a weapon for aggressors. It's a weapon of terror. And then he goes on to even say it was a weapon that was used...

on an essentially already defeated enemy. That phrase is key, the already defeated enemy. He came to believe, and I don't know if he believed it while it was at Los Alamos or said so, but that perhaps the bomb should have been used as a demonstration weapon to scare the Japanese government into submission rather than dropping it on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki.

Well, before Hiroshima, this was debated. And Oppie actually took the position that it could not be demonstrated on an uninhabited island or in the Bay of Tokyo. That he feared and he believed, actually, that it had to be demonstrated in combat. Why? I mean...

because otherwise no one would understand the terrific horrendousness of this horrible weapon. And this is precisely the argument that he used in the spring of 1945 when he faced a near revolt among his own physicists at Los Alamos. There was a public meeting inside the barbed wire facility

in which they discussed why are we working so hard to build this thing when Hitler is dead, Germany is defeated. And he stepped forward at the end of the meeting and said, "Well, I want to remind you that when Niels Bohr arrived in Los Alamos on the last day of 1943, he had one question for me. He said, 'Robert, is it big enough? Is it big enough to end all war?'"

Oppenheimer had convinced himself that this was a necessity. To end all war. All war. His hope was that this weapon was going to be so terrific that it would convince people that we could never have world war like they were engaging in at that moment. A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy.

That bomb has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. There's a remarkable scene in the film, and it's certainly elucidated at length in the biography. Oppenheimer is invited to the White House, and he's brought to see Harry Truman.

And Oppenheimer expresses words of remorse. He says he has blood on his hands and he uses the word sin. And suddenly Harry Truman, who thought he was going to be congratulating him, is disgusted, calls him a crybaby and tells his aide he never wants to see that guy again. Never wants to see him again. And what are we to make of Oppenheimer's ambivalence? On some degree, you think it's almost as if he wants the glory of

And he also wants to express this ambivalence in a very public, moral way. How do you assess his moral choices there and the way he behaved? Well, he's very complicated. And he's highly intelligent. So he's capable of understanding and holding in his head contradictory ideas. So let me answer your very good question with this anecdote. I discovered...

late in our research that Oppenheimer's last secretary at Los Alamos was still alive. Her name was Ann Wilson. She was living in Georgetown. I tracked her down. We had a terrific interview, at which point, at one point, she told me that she was walking to work one day with Oppenheimer. It was just after the Trinity test. The great test of the atom bomb for the first time. Right. On July 16th, 1945.

And suddenly she hears Oppenheimer muttering to himself, "Those poor little people, those poor little people." And she stops him and says, "Robert, what are you talking about?" And he says, "Well, you know, the test, the gadget was successfully tested. It is now going to be used on those poor little people, a whole city, because there is no other target. There's no military target large enough. It has to be a city."

When I went back and told Marty Sherwin about this interview and this story, he remarked, well, look at the chronology. This happened, had to happen in the week, the very week that Oppenheimer was meeting with the bombardiers that were going to be on the plane. And he was instructing them at exactly what altitude the bomb should be detonated to have the maximum destructive effect and that it should be dropped immediately.

on the center of the city. So here he was doing his duty, presenting this weapon of mass destruction to the politicians in Washington for them to decide how to use it. But he knew it was going to be used. And yet he was also capable of extreme empathy for the victims.

And yet he feared, I think he just felt that, you know, the world would not understand unless it had been demonstrated on a target. And he feared that if it was not used or the war ended without the use of this weapon, the next war was going to be fought by two nuclear armed adversaries and it would be Armageddon. But he also fell in love with the notion that

his status as a celebrity scientist after Hiroshima, that he should use it. Use it to educate people about the dangers of this weapon and to educate the politicians. And of course, that's why he began speaking out more and more. He came out against the building of the hydrogen bomb after the Soviets tested their own atomic bomb in 1949.

And by then, he was saying exactly the opposite of what everyone in the national security establishment wanted to hear. All the, you know, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, they all wanted to spend more money on more of these weapons. And here, the father of the atomic bomb is saying, no, no, we should be talking about international control and disarmament.

and regulation of this new technology, he was a threat. So he had to be brought down. In the words of Edward Teller, he had to be brought down, defrocked in his own church. And this is what happens with the security hearing in 54. So on the very eve of the 1954 hearing coming to that, he has to go down the hall

to Albert Einstein's office at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and explained to Albert that he was going to be absent for a few weeks because he was being hauled before this security hearing and his loyalty to America was going to be questioned. And Einstein just reacted viscerally and said, Robert, you're Mr. Atomic. Why should you

subject yourself to this witch hunt. What were his options? Could he have walked away, as Einstein was suggesting? He could have walked away. In fact, ironically, his security clearance was expiring in just a matter of weeks, and he could have just let it expire.

And gone on leading the Institute for Advanced Study in relatively tranquil circumstances. Right. But Oppenheimer was being foolish and naive. He had no idea what he was walking into. And Oppenheimer always, you know, he never regretted, he never said that he regretted what he had done during the war. He thought that the atom bomb was going to be discovered someday. And his fear was that the Germans were going to get it first. So that motivated him to work hard to...

to get it in 1945. But he argued that, you know, you can't stop the science, but you can try to figure out how to use it, how to integrate it, how to live with it, how to... And in this case, he and Sakharov both believed that it was insanity to rely on these weapons as weapons of defense. They're not defensive weapons. And we see this now with the war in Ukraine,

where loose talk is made about using tactical weapons as if they were really military weapons. Tactical nuclear weapons. Tactical nuclear weapons. They're not battlefield weapons. They're simply weapons of terror. And if Putin ever used one, he would use it in a psychological fashion to try to

change the dynamics in the halls of Congress and the White House, but it wouldn't change anything on the battlefield. You've talked about Oppenheimer as a public intellectual and a dissident. Do you see any parallels in the contemporary world of a figure like Oppenheimer and how scientists do or do not speak out?

Well, this is one of the lessons that's very current about the Oppenheimer story. What happened to him in 1954, I believe, sent a message to several generations of scientists here in America, but abroad, that

that scientists should keep in their narrow lane. They shouldn't become public intellectuals. And if they dared to do this, they could be tarred and feathered. If they dare to speak out about politics, that would somehow muddy their integrity as scientists. And this is odd because we live in a very complicated society, drenched in science and technology, and yet

You'd think that we would have well-respected scientific figures who are speaking out and debating in a civil manner the way forward, how to make rational decisions about artificial intelligence, for instance, or some of the biomedical breakthroughs that are happening. And yet, you know, we seem to leave that conversation to

non-expert politicians. It's kind of, it makes no sense. And yet I think this happened because partly of the seeds that were planted in the 54 hearing against Oppenheimer. At the screening we were both at the other day for this film, at a conversation afterwards, the name Tony Fauci came up

Explain what the context there is in the comparison. Well, it's just, you know, the same thing that happened to Oppenheimer in a sense happened to Tony Fauci. Tony Fauci is a dedicated public health official who, in the midst of the pandemic, was trying to give scientific advice to the average citizen on how to cope.

And of course, his advice had to sometimes change because new facts became available. And of course, this is what happens in science. We're constantly testing our theories against experimental facts. And it's a shame that Fauci's sort of integrity was questioned by our politicians. Kai Bird, thank you so much. Thank you.

Kai Bird is the co-author of American Prometheus, the triumph and tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The book won the Pulitzer Prize. And Bird is credited as a writer of Christopher Nolan's film Oppenheimer, which is just out. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around.

I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I've rarely, if ever, seen as much hype and buzz about a film as we're seeing for Barbie, Greta Gerwig's original story based on the Mattel doll. But maybe the hype is justified. Gerwig's two previous films as a writer-director were really terrific. There was Lady Bird, about a high school senior in California, and Little Women, her adaptation of the classic.

Both of those films, like Barbie, are concerned with how to live in the world as a woman. I talked with Gerwig back in 2019. I want to ask you about the activity of directing. I first became aware of you when you were in movies that were known as mumblecore films quite a while ago.

and then as a writer, so an actor, a writer, and then being a director seems like you've got to be a bit of a Napoleon. How do you learn how to do that when your activity before was being directed or being alone in a room with a blinking screen? Right. Well, to be honest, I think that's who I always have been. I think I...

Even more than a writer or an actor? Yes. Well, writing was always a way to get to that moment for me. I mean, this is kind of, maybe this is too much just personal information, but I think up until I was around 13, I'd say, I was the...

the bossiest control freak you'd ever met. I mean, I remember I went, my dad had a business trip in New York and we all went and we went and saw, we saw, I

I remember we saw Starlight Express, which I just loved. This is the roller skating thing on Broadway? Yes, it's Andrew Lloyd Webber's Starlight Express. It's about trains and it's on roller skates. And I can still recite every single word. But I remember I came back to my kindergarten and I told everyone that I would be putting on a production of Starlight Express and everyone better start working on their roller skating, which I did stuff like that up until...

I was assigned to do a group project, and I completely took it over in seventh grade. And I was explaining how everyone was going to do everything. And I remember some kid made fun of me and said that I was annoying. And I then was considered kind of a bossy person.

An appealing girl. And you tamped it down? I tamped it down. I deliberately tamped it down. But it didn't really, it didn't go away. It just kind of went underground. And then I think in high school and college, it kind of simmered and then it started really coming out again. And I think it's the person who I tried to crush. Well, when did you give you, and how did you give yourself permission to let this thing resurface and set yourself free?

Because I wanted to do it so badly. Just it was the desire that was bigger than my person. And I think actually this is a strange but true thing that happened to me. I met Sally Potter, the director, and I asked her about writing.

And I said, you know, what's your process? How do you write? I cornered her and I was asking her questions. And then she grabbed me by the hand and said, why don't you ask me what you really want to ask me about? And I was like, oh, my God, what do I really want to ask you about? And she said, you really want to ask me about directing. And I said, how do you know that? And she said, it's written all over you.

Like, that's what you want to ask me about. And then I did ask her about it. And then four years after that, she came up to me at an event in London for Lady Bird. And she said, you did it. I was like, oh, my God, you're a mystic.

And I love you. But I felt like there were a number of things. There was also I was given a pair of shoes by not one but two women directors. Rebecca Miller and Miranda July both gave me shoes. That never happens to me. No, no. I know. Nor me. And I was like, I mean, if you were going to send a sign, this is really on the nose. There were like lots of things like that.

And I think, you know, they happened, and also I was looking for them. Nora Ephron, who I was a friend...

used to say that if I have to sit on one more panel... I know, she's... I know. ...about women in directing, I'm going to shoot myself or someone else. She... When she passed, they printed that in the New York Times that she said... She had that list, things I'll miss, things I won't miss. Yeah. And under things I won't miss, women in film panels was one of them. It's difficult because...

Because all you really want is that you're thought of as just a filmmaker. But to get to that point, we need it to be much closer to 50-50. I want to ask you about your own future. In other words, are there a set of themes, is there an aesthetic that you think, I want to really pursue these themes, this aesthetic, and chase it up a tree for quite a while? Is there any sense of...

coherence in that. Right. Well, I will say I am, what I am deliberate about and what I do care very much about is I would like to make a lot of films as a writer and director because there are films I'll be able to make on film 12 that I would not be able to make on film 2. In terms of budget or you're just not ready for it? In terms of budget, well, I mean budget, but sort of in terms of

your development as an artist. And I think I've always been interested in long careers of directors because, you know, making Fanny and Alexander is not a thing he would have done on his second film. In Bergman's film. Yeah, right. But there's a lot of people that I look at their career and, yeah, of course, I'll actually go and I'll say, wait, what was their first film? Oh, and they made that second. And then, oh my God, and then seven later they did this one. And again, I go to the ones who've

made a lot of films for a long time because it's their way of moving through life and moving through the world. I spoke with Greta Gerwig in 2019, and there's more from our conversation, and we talked about her great adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. That's all at newyorker.com. In case you haven't noticed, Barbie is now out in theaters. That's it for the New Yorker Radio Hour today. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

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