Warner bros

This week, Christopher Nolan’s new picture Oppenheimer began production. Its star-studded cast features everyone from Cillian Murphy as the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to Emily Blunt (as his wife Katherine) to Matt Damon (Manhattan Project director Leslie Groves) to Robert Downey Jr. (as Oppenheimer’s nemesis Lewis Strauss), with Florence Pugh, Rami Malek and Kenneth Branagh in support. Nolan has been granted a $100 million budget by his new studio, Universal, after angrily leaving Warner Bros. in a row over their decision to deny their 2021 pictures an exclusive theatrical release. The implication is clear: Oppenheimer will be a very big deal indeed. Nolan himself possesses a unique level of influence in contemporary Hollywood.

Few filmmakers today have as commanding a presence behind the camera as Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight Trilogy, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet). He’s one of maybe a handful of auteurs interested in telling thrilling big screen stories in the theater. This past summer, while his film Tenet was being used as an experiment to see if people were ready to return to theaters, studios were making other plans for the future. Nolan, however, does not intend to go down quietly.