Amazing way Christopher Nolan created Oppenheimer atomic bomb without CGI as film added to Netflix

Christopher Nolan is at this point a name that is synonymous with cinematic excellence.

Between Interstellar, Inception, The Dark Knight, and Tenet, near all of his films in his career are widely agreed to be stand out hits that leave people talking about them years later.

Until his most recent film Oppenheimer however, Nolan had never won an Oscar in his entire career.

The director, whose next film will be a massive budget adaptation of The Odyssey, won Best Director and Best Picture for the Cillian Murphy-fronted biopic about the man who invented the atomic bomb.

The film, which many argue is the best of his career, has recently been added to Netflix this past weekend, leading to a renewed interest in the movie.

Focused on the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the film follows his journey from a professor at Berkeley to his immortalisation as the director of the Los Alamos project that founded nuclear weapons, and his subsequent demonisation as a ‘communist’ by Lewis Strauss (played by Robert Downey Jr).

The film won Nolan his first and only two Oscars (Jeff Kravitz via Getty Images)

The film, which featured the Peaky Blinders actor alongside a star-studded cast, includes Trinity, the first successful test of an atomic weapon.

As always however, Nolan did not take the simple option and use CGI to simulate an atomic explosion going off, instead filming the scene practically.

Now it’s important to note one very important thing before we kick things off: no, Christopher Nolan did not just set off an atomic bomb in the desert and call it a day.

Much of Oppenheimer leads to the Trinity test (Universal Pictures)

Andrew Jackson worked on the film’s special effects, having previously won an Oscar for his collaboration on Nolan for Tenet and worked with a team of engineers to trial different methods and film them with iPhones as tests as he explained in an interview with the LA Times.

One method they tried was an exploding ping-pong ball which Nolan rejected, however the final method that succeeded was using thermite placed in a flower pot burning at 2,000 degrees Celsius through the bottom and exploding in a sandbox.

For the Trinity test, however, he explained that they filmed explosions as big as they could get away with but at high speed.

By filming multiple explosions and then slowing them down massively he said that they ‘were able to make the explosions feel much bigger.’

He explained that they filmed ‘seven or eight’ explosions in one day which were stitched together to approximate the one atomic explosion we see in the film.

The end result was criticised by some fans as not meeting the scale of the atomic explosion, with some suggesting he should have used CGI to make the explosions closer to the real Trinity.

Regardless of where you stand, the Trinity test scene is now an iconic part of his most critically acclaimed film which also made almost a billion dollars.

Oppenheimer is available to watch on Netflix in the UK and Ireland.