Adapting Robert Oppenheimers Story to Film, Plus Greta Gerwig on Becoming a Director
In making \u201cOppenheimer,\u201d which opens in theatres this weekend, the director Christopher Nolan relied on a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography of the father of the atomic bomb, \u201cAmerican Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,\u201d by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. Bird is credited as a writer of Nolan\u2019s movie, and he spoke with David Remnick about the ambivalence that the scientist expressed publicly about the use of the bomb, which led to a McCarthyist show trial that destroyed his career and reputation.\xa0 \u201cWhat happened to him in 1954 sent a message to several generations of scientists, here in America but [also] abroad, that scientists should keep in their narrow lane. They shouldn\u2019t become public intellectuals, and if they dared to do this, they could be tarred and feathered,\u201d Bird notes. \u201cThe same thing that happened to Oppenheimer in a sense happened to Tony Fauci.\u201d\nPlus, Greta Gerwig talks about her path to directing. Like \u201cBarbie,\u201d Gerwig\u2019s two previous films as a director and writer are concerned with coming of age as a woman. Once criticized as a \u201cbossy girl,\u201d Gerwig recalls, she tamped down her instinct to direct, focusing early in her career on acting and then screenwriting. She told David Remnick how she finally gave herself permission to be a filmmaker.