THE BIG BUILDI

BY DAVID CROW

For decades he stood at the bleeding edge in his field of study, an undeniable prodigy whose aptitude for drilling down to the theoretical essence of things was only matched by an ability to apply that theory to technological innovation. For better or worse, his has been a talent that shaped worlds. This could easily describe J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist widely credited as the “father of the atomic bomb.” It’s not a bad fit either for the filmmaker bringing the scientist’s story to the biggest movie screen imaginable.

Christopher Nolan has spent nearly a quarter of a century pushing the envelope of cinematic spectacle to its most audacious and overwhelming. He is the ambitious director who first introduced the concept of using 70mm IMAX photography in Hollywood blockbusters, and he’s the one who developed a surprisingly accurate approximation of a black hole in Interstellar shortly before the real thing was photographed by the Event Horizon Telescope.

And for much of this journey, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema has been there beside Nolan, trying to crack the code for the next big one, beginning with Interstellar

Perhaps that’s why van Hoytema’s chuckle is so knowing when we point out these similarities between artist and subject. As Oppenheimer’s director of photography admits, the comparison is tempting.

“They’re both very brilliant minds that do see the world in an alternative way that’s not necessarily, on a conceptual [level], graspable for the people around them,” van Hoytema says. “But they have the power and language to convey it and to make people look at things, to look at the