Why ‘Oppenheimer’ almost didn’t film in the Bay Area

For residents of the Bay Area, some of the most exciting parts of “Oppenheimer” are the local connections. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s time as a professor at UC Berkeley was formative to his personal and professional life, and director Christopher Nolan filmed on location to capture the realism of the campus. But the film shoot at Cal almost didn’t happen.

Variety reported on a recent “Team Deakins” podcast that featured the film’s production designer Ruth De Jong. In the interview, De Jong shared new details about the “Oppenheimer” filmmaking process. Originally, the production schedule was set to include 85 days or more of filming, but the expense of that proposed schedule would have led to sacrifices in terms of set design and locations, including cutting Berkeley from the location list.

“Tom, the executive producer, he said, ‘Ruth, you guys can’t go to Berkeley. You can’t do it.’ And I was like, ‘We have to go to Berkeley. Berkeley is — that is Oppenheimer,’” De Jong said. She said she also shot down a suggestion that they have Pepperdine University in Malibu stand in for Berkeley.

Nolan settled for a shorter filming schedule of less than 60 days in order to accommodate all of the desired locations, including the Cal campus, which was transformed with period-specific vehicles from the years Oppenheimer taught there as a professor (1929 to 1943). According to Variety, this schedule was significantly shorter than several of Nolan’s other films (“Tenet” took 96 days of filming, “Dunkirk” required 68).

De Jong went on to describe the location scouting process in New Mexico and how she managed to recreate the town of Los Alamos on significantly less than the originally $20 million that was estimated for set construction.

Listen to the full episode on Spotify.