Editor’s note: All interviews were done well before the SAG-AFTRA strike.

Christopher Nolanhas never been one to take the easy or straightforward route while making a movie.

He shoots on large-format film with large, cumbersome cameras to get the best possible cinematic image. He prefers practical effects over computer-generated ones and real locations over soundstages — even when that means recreating an atomic explosion in the harsh winds of the New Mexico desert in the middle of the night for “Oppenheimer.”

Though, despite internet rumors, they did not detonate an actual nuclear weapon.

And as for the biography that inspired his newest film, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s riveting, linear narrative “American Prometheus” was simply the starting point from which Nolan crafted a beguiling labyrinth of suspense and drama.

It’s why, in his two decades working in Hollywood, Nolan has become a franchise unto himself — the rare auteur writer-director who makes films that are both intellectually stimulating and commercial, accounting for more than $5 billion in box office receipts. That combination is part of the reason why he’s able to attract Oscar winners and movie stars not just to headline his films, but also to turn out for just a scene or two.

“We’ve all been so intoxicated by his films,” Emily Blunt, who plays J. Robert Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty. “That exploration of huge themes in an entertaining way doesn’t happen. It just doesn’t happen. That depth, the depth of the material, and yet on this massive epic scale.”

In the vast and complex story of the brilliant theoretical physicist who oversaw the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb during World War II, Nolan saw exciting possibilities to play with genre and form. There was the race to develop it before the Germans did, espionage, romance, domestic turmoil, a courtroom drama, bruised egos, political machinations, communist panic, and the burden of having created something that could destroy the world.

Then there was the man himself, beloved by most but hated by enough, who, after achieving icon status in American society, saw his reputation and sense of self annihilated by the very institutions that built him.

“这是这样一个雄心勃勃的故事告诉,”马特说Damon, who plays Gen. Leslie Groves Jr. “Reading the script, I had the same feeling I had when I read ‘Interstellar,’ which was: ‘This is great. How the hell is he going to do this? ’”

It’s not so disconnected from Nolan’s other films, either. As critic Tom Shone noted in his book about the director, “Looked at one way, Nolan’s films are all allegories of men who first find their salvation in structure only to find themselves betrayed or engulfed by it.”

Nolan turned to Cillian Murphy to take on the gargantuan task of portraying Oppenheimer. Murphy had already acted in five Nolan films, including the Batman “Dark Knight” trilogy, “Dunkirk” and “Inception,” but this would be his first time as a lead — something he had secretly pined for.

“You feel a responsibility, but then a great hunger and excitement to try and do it, to see where you can get,” said Murphy, who prepped extensively for six months before filming, working closely with Nolan throughout. “It was an awful lot of work, but I loved it. There is this kind of frisson, this energy when you’re on a Chris Nolan set about the potential for what you’re going to achieve.”

这将是一个requi强烈的作用re some physical transformation to approximate that famously thin silhouette. A complex, contradictory figure, Oppenheimer emerged from a somewhat awkward youth to become a renaissance man who seemed to carry equal passion for the Bhagavad Gita, Proust, physics, languages, New Mexico, philosophical questions about disarmament and the perfectly mixed martini. But Murphy knew he was in safe hands with Nolan.

“He’s the most natural director I’ve ever worked with. And the notes that he gives to an actor, are quite remarkable. How he can gently bring you to a different place with your performance is quite stunning in such a subtle, low-key, understated way,” Murphy said. “It can have a profound effect on the way you look at a scene from one take to another take.”

Nolan wrote the main timeline of the film in the first person, to represent Oppenheimer’s subjective experience.

“We want to see everything through Oppenheimer’s point of view,” Nolan said. “That’s a huge challenge for an actor to take on because they’re having to worry about the performance, the truth of the performance, but also make sure that that’s always open to the audience.”

The other timeline, filmed in black and white, is more objective and focused on Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), a founding member of the Atomic Energy Commission and a supporter of the development of the more destructive hydrogen bomb.

“Oppenheimer” is Nolan’s first R-rated film since 2002's “Insomnia,” which after years of working exclusively in PG-13, he’s comfortable with. It fits the gravity of the material.

“We’re dealing with the most serious and adult story you could imagine — very important, dramatic events that changed the world and defined the world we live in today,” Nolan said. “You don’t want to compromise in any way.”

While somescenes take place in the Bay Areawhere Oppenheimer taught as a professor at UC Berkeley, much of the filming took place in New Mexico, including at the real Los Alamos laboratory where thousands of scientists, technicians and their families lived and worked for two years in the effort to develop the bomb. Nolan enlisted many of his frequent behind-the-scenes collaborators, including his wife and producer Emma Thomas, cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, composer Ludwig Göransson and special effects supervisors Scott Fisher and Andrew Jackson, as well as some newcomers like production designer Ruth de Jong and costume designer Ellen Mirojnick to help bring this world to life.

“It was a very focused set — fun set as well, not too serious. But the work was serious, the sweating of the details was serious,” Blunt said. “Everyone needs to kind of match Chris’ excellence, or want to.”

When it came to recreating the Trinity test, Oppenheimer’s chosen name for the first nuclear detonation, art and life blended in a visceral way.

“We wanted to put the audience there in that bunker,” Nolan said. “That meant really trying to make these things as beautiful and frightening and awe inspiring as they would have been to the people at the time.”

Though no real nukes were used, they did stage a lot of real explosions to approximate the blindingly bright atomic fire and mushroom cloud.

“To do those safely in a real environment out in the nighttime desert, there’s a degree of discipline and focus and adrenaline and just executing that for the film that echoes and mirrors what these guys went through on the grandest scale in a really interesting way,” Nolan said. “I felt everybody had that very, very tight sense of tension and focus around all those shooting nights.”

The weather also “did what it needed to do, as per history,” Murphy said, as the wind picked up and whipped around the set.

“I’m rumored to be very lucky with the weather and it’s not the case. It’s just that we decide to shoot whatever the weather,” Nolan said. “In the case of the Trinity test, it was essential, central to the story that this big storm rolls in with tremendous drama. And it did. That really made the sequence come to life.”

He added: “The extremity of it put me very much in the mindset of what it must have been like for these guys. It really felt like we were out in it.”

Then, of course, there is the experience of watching “Oppenheimer.”

The movie was shot entirely on large format film stock, meaning a combination of IMAX 65mm and Panavision 65mm, that’s then intended to be projected in 70mm. So it’s Nolan’s hope that audiences will be as invested in the details and seek to watch “Oppenheimer” on the biggest screen they can find. In the Bay Area that includes the 70mm IMAX at AMC Metreon 16 and Dublin’s Regal Hacienda Crossings or further north to Sacramento’s Esquire IMAX.

“The sharpness and the clarity and the depth of the image is unparalleled,” Nolan said of shooting for the massive screens. “The headline, for me, is by shooting on IMAX 70mm film, you’re really letting the screen disappear. You’re getting a feeling of 3D without the glasses. You’ve got a huge screen and you’re filling the peripheral vision of the audience. You’re immersing them in the world of the film.”

Chronicle Senior Arts and Entertainment Editor Mariecar Mendoza contributed to this report.