笔记导读
brain-twisting adj.费脑筋的，烧脑的 brain-twisting films 烧脑的电影
cerebral/səˈriːbrəl/ adj.运用智力的;理智的;冷静的；If you describe someone or something as cerebral, you mean that they are intellectual rather than emotional. ◆ His poetry is very cerebral. 他的诗富于理性。
espouse /ɪˈspaʊz/ v.支持;拥护；If you espouse a particular policy, cause, or belief, you become very interested in it and give your support to it. ◆ They espoused the notion of equal opportunity for all in education. 他们赞同在教育方面人人机会均等的观念。
sequester /sɪˈkwestər/ 使隔离;使与他人隔绝；If someone is sequestered somewhere, they are isolated from other people. ◆ This jury is expected to be sequestered for at least two months.预计这个陪审团将至少被隔离两个月。
双语全文（官方翻译）
对话诺兰：为什么奥本海默是有史以来最重要的人
Christopher Nolan and the Contradictions of J. Robert Oppenheimer
DENNIS OVERBYE
2023年9月6日
With the biopic “Oppenheimer,” due July 21, the writer-director Christopher Nolan, known for brain-twisting films like “Interstellar” and “Inception,” addresses an old childhood dread — one based not on science fiction but on real science, namely the threat of thermonuclear war and human annihilation.
传记电影《奥本海默》(Oppenheimer)于7月21日上映之际，以《星际穿越》(Interstellar)和《盗梦空间》(Inception)等烧脑电影闻名的编剧兼导演克里斯托弗·诺兰，讲述了儿时的一个恐惧——不是基于科幻小说，而是基于真实的科学，即热核战争和人类灭绝的威胁。
The film follows the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the cerebral, charismatic and tortured physicist (played by Cillian Murphy, the star of “Peaky Blinders”) who was tapped to lead the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M., to build the atomic bomb during World War II.
影片讲述了罗伯特·奥本海默的故事，他是一位聪明、迷人、饱受折磨的物理学家，由《浴血黑帮》(Peaky Blinders)的主演基利安·墨菲饰演，奥本海默在“二战”期间被选中领导新墨西哥州洛斯阿拉莫斯的曼哈顿计划，制造原子弹。
The subsequent bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war against Japan in 1945 (Germany had already surrendered) and Oppenheimer was hailed as a hero. But only a few years later, in 1954, his security clearance was revoked in an infamous hearing of advisers to the Atomic Energy Commission that declared him a security threat based on leftist ties at the University of California, Berkeley — among other things, a girlfriend and his brother, Frank, were both Communist Party members — and his opposition to building an even bigger bomb, the “Super” or hydrogen bomb espoused by his colleague Edward Teller.
随后，对广岛和长崎的轰炸在1945年结束了对日战争（当时德国已经投降），奥本海默被誉为英雄。但仅仅几年之后，1954年，原子能委员会的顾问在一次臭名昭著的听证会上取消了他的安全许可，还宣布他是安全威胁，理由是他与加州大学伯克利分校左翼人士的关系——其中包括他的一个女朋友和他的兄弟弗兰克，二人都是共产党员——以及他反对制造更大的炸弹，即他的同事爱德华·泰勒支持的“超级”炸弹或氢弹。
That was the end of Oppenheimer’s career in government circles and of his ability to influence the future of atomic energy in the Cold War. As a result he became a martyr to the scientific community. Many physicists, including Albert Einstein, were disappointed that the United States had dropped the bomb without warning on an enemy that was already defeated, while Oppenheimer hoped that the advent of the bomb would make war unthinkable and lead to international controls on such weapons. Once the Russians had the bomb, however, that dream had no chance with hard-liners like the president at the time, Harry S. Truman, who called Oppenheimer a “crybaby.”
奥本海默在政府圈子的职业生涯就此结束，他在冷战中影响原子能未来的能力也告终结。就这样，他成了科学界的殉道者。包括阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦在内，许多物理学家都对美国在没有任何警告的情况下向一个已被击败的敌人投下原子弹感到失望，而奥本海默则希望原子弹的出现将使战争变得不可想象，并导致出现对这类武器的国际控制。然而，一旦俄罗斯人拥有了原子弹，这个梦想在时任总统杜鲁门这样的强硬派那里就不可能实现了。杜鲁门说奥本海默是“爱哭鬼”。
The film’s huge cast includes Matt Damon as the crusty Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, who was in overall charge of the project, and Robert Downey Jr. as Adm. Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. Strauss led the postwar charge against Oppenheimer, and his nomination for secretary of Commerce under President Dwight D. Eisenhower was killed by the Senate partly because of his role in Oppenheimer’s downfall.
该片阵容庞大，包括马特·达蒙饰演的强硬少将莱斯利·格罗夫斯和小罗伯特·唐尼饰演的原子能委员会主席、海军上将刘易斯·施特劳斯。施特劳斯在战后领导了对奥本海默的指控，艾森豪威尔总统对他的商务部长提名被参议院否决，部分原因是他在奥本海默的失势中起到的重要作用。
The movie, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, is the most recent in a stream of books, features and documentaries that have chronicled the tragic birth of atomic weapons, including another Pulitzer Prize winner, “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” by Richard Rhodes; a seven-part BBC series, “Oppenheimer”; “Fat Man and Little Boy,” starring Paul Newman as Groves; another documentary, “The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer”; and even a John Adams opera, “Doctor Atomic.” (The director is well aware that his film faces another rival, “Barbie,” opening on the same day, and offered a “no comment” on the choice facing filmgoers.)
这部电影改编自普利策奖得主凯·伯德和马丁·舍温的传记《奥本海默传》(American Prometheus)，除此之外，近来还涌现了一系列记录原子武器悲剧性诞生故事的书籍、故事片和纪录片，其中包括另一部普利策奖得主理查德·罗兹的《原子弹的制造》(The Making of The atomic Bomb)；BBC的七集电视剧《奥本海默》(Oppenheimer)；由保罗·纽曼(Paul Newman)饰演格罗夫斯的《胖子和小男孩》(Fat Man and Little Boy)；纪录片《J·罗伯特·奥本海默的审判》(The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer)；甚至还有约翰·亚当斯的歌剧《原子博士》(Doctor Atomic)。（诺兰很清楚，他的电影面临着竞争对手《芭比》的挑战，该片将与《奥本海默》在同一天上映，对于观众将会如何选择，他表示“无话可说”。）
Over tea at his office in a quiet residential neighborhood in Los Angeles, Nolan discussed why he thought Oppenheimer was the most important person who ever lived, choosing between myths and the record, Cillian Murphy’s haircut and how he came to make this movie. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.
在他位于洛杉矶一个安静住宅区的办公室里，诺兰一边喝茶，一边讨论了他为什么认为奥本海默是有史以来最重要的人，自己如何在传说和记录之间做出选择，基利安·墨菲的发型，以及他是如何拍摄这部电影的。以下是经过编辑的谈话节选。
In the production notes you say, “Like it or not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived.” Why?
在制作笔记中你说：“不管怎么看，J·罗伯特·奥本海默都是有史以来最重要的人。”为什么？
In Hollywood, we’re not afraid of a little hype. Do I genuinely believe it? Absolutely. Because if my worst fears are true, he’ll be the man who destroyed the world. Who’s more important than that?
在好莱坞，我们不怕来一点夸大其词。我真的相信这一点吗？绝对相信。因为如果我最担心的事情是真的，他就是毁灭世界的人。还有什么人会比他更重要吗？
Maybe the man who pushed the button that did destroy the world.
也许是那个按下毁灭世界按钮的人。
Got to have a button to push.
总得先有按钮吧。
I think it’s very easy to make the case for Oppenheimer as the most important person who ever lived, because he is the person who facilitated and achieved atomic weapons and indeed the hydrogen bomb, because he let Teller work on it. So he is the individual who was able to marshal the forces effectively.
我认为奥本海默是世界上最重要的人，这是很容易证明的，因为他推动并且实现了原子能武器，事实上，还有氢弹，因为他让泰勒去研究它。所以说他是能够有效调集各种力量的人。
Is there a parallel universe in which it wasn’t him, but it was somebody else and that would’ve happened? Quite possibly. That’s the argument for diminishing his importance in history. But that’s an assumption that history is made simply by movements of society and not by individuals. It’s a very philosophical debate.
会不会存在一个平行宇宙，在那个宇宙里，那个人不是他，而是另一个人，而且同样的事情仍会发生？很有可能。这就是贬低他历史地位的理由。但这只是一种假定，认为历史是由社会运动而不是个人创造的。这是一个非常哲学的辩论。
Apparently within about 15 minutes of hearing that the atom had been split, he was suggesting that you could make a bomb in a chain reaction. But I think a lot of scientists had that same, “Oh, this could be a bomb.”
显然，在听到原子分裂的消息后，不到15分钟，他就提出可以通过连锁反应制造炸弹。但我想很多科学家都有同样的想法，“哦，这可能用来做炸弹。”
His story is central to the way in which we live now and the way we are going to live forever. It absolutely changed the world in a way that no one else has changed the world. You talk about the advent of the printing press or something. He gave the world the power to destroy itself. No one has done that before.
他的故事对我们当下乃至将来的生活方式是至关重要的。它绝对改变了世界，在某种程度上是无人能及的。你可以说还有印刷的出现之类的事情。但是他给了世界毁灭自己的力量。这是前无古人的。
That’s a pessimistic view if his invention actually ended the world. If it didn’t, he’s still the most important man because the bomb would’ve stopped war forever. We haven’t had a world war since 1945 based on the threat of mutual assured destruction.
说他的发明真的终结了世界，这样的看法太悲观了。即使不是这样，他仍然一个是最重要的人物，因为原子弹可以永远阻止战争。自1945年以来，基于“相互确保毁灭”的威胁，我们还没有发生过世界大战。
So there are two ways of looking at this contribution. And we don’t know which one is right. A lot of what he said about arms control and the way in which events would unfold has proven to be absolutely true. A lot of it has also seemed hopelessly naïve. This is a story that doesn’t have an ending yet.
所以有两种方式来看待他的贡献。我们不知道哪一个是对的。他关于军备控制和事态发展的许多言论已被证明是绝对正确的。其中很多似乎也天真到无可救药。这是一个尚未完结的故事。
For better or for worse, I really believe him to be one of the more clearly ambiguous figures in history.
不管是好是坏，我真的相信他是历史上最模棱两可的人物之一。
The burning question that I have is why? Why Oppenheimer now? I mean, this is a story I’ve grown up with my whole life as a child of the nuclear age.
我最关注的问题是，为什么？为什么要到现在来拍奥本海默？我是说，作为一个核时代的孩子，这是一个伴随我成长时期的故事。
There are certain stories that you want to kind of wait until you feel ready to tell them. [This] story is one that I’ve known about since I was a kid growing up in the shadow of nuclear weapons in the early ’80s in the United Kingdom. It was very much in the pop culture. It was the days of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and protests of Greenham Common and about the stationing of nuclear cruise missiles. For me, it’s always seemed one of those stories that I don’t think it’s been told in any definitive movie sense. And yet it’s one of the most important and dramatic stories there are.
有些故事，你想等到准备好了再讲。我从小就知道这个故事，我是在80年代初的英国，在核武器的阴影下长大的。这是流行文化的一部分。那是核裁军运动、格林汉姆抗议以及核巡航导弹部署的时代。我认为这个故事没有通过任何明确的电影手法来讲述过。然而，它却是最重要、最具戏剧性的故事之一。。
So reading “American Prometheus” — it’s such a well-researched and well-told book — gave me confidence. That could be the basis, you know, of a film or a screenplay.
因此，阅读《奥本海默传》——这是一本做了充分研究、内容丰富的书——给了我信心。你知道，它可以成为电影或剧本的基础。
It seems like nuclear dread has come back.
核恐惧似乎又回来了。
I was talking to Steven Spielberg about this recently. He grew up at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the ’60s, high Cold War. It was a period in which there was an enormous amount of fear. And then the wave I described in the early ’80s. A lot of things pop culturally came out of that, including Sting’s song, “Russians,” about global tensions, that refers to “Oppenheimer’s deadly toys.”
最近，我和史蒂文·斯皮尔伯格谈论了这个问题。他成长于古巴导弹危机时期，60年代，冷战最高点。那是一段充满恐惧的时期。然后是我描述的80年代早期的浪潮。流行文化里的很多东西都源于那段时期，包括斯汀的歌《俄罗斯人》(Russians)，这首歌是关于全球紧张局势的，其中唱道“奥本海默的致命玩具”。
I think our relationship with nuclear weapons in pop culture is very complicated, and it ebbs and flows. When I first told one of my teenage sons what I was writing, he literally said to me, that’s just not something anybody worries about anymore.
我认为在流行文化当中，我们与核武器的关系是非常复杂的，时好时坏。当我第一次告诉我一个十几岁的儿子我在写什么的时候，他确实对我说，这件事已经没有任何人还在担心了。
I went to the book to fact-check the movie and was surprised to read that Truman really did call him a crybaby.
我看了这本书，对电影进行了事实核查，惊讶地发现杜鲁门确实说过奥本海默是“爱哭鬼”。
Doesn’t seem very presidential, does it?
听起来不太像总统说的话，不是吗？
Given recent history it sounds very presidential to me. That was an enormous dramatic point in the film for me because it just made it so completely clear how badly Oppenheimer had misled himself.
鉴于最近的历史，我觉得这听起来很像总统说的话。对我来说，这是电影中一个重大的、戏剧性的点，因为它让我彻底明白了奥本海默对自己的误导有多么严重。
That’s a good way of putting it. There are different accounts of that meeting, but these are things that Truman recollected.
这是一个很好的说法。关于那次会面有不同的说法，但这些都是杜鲁门的回忆。
I feel it’s only fair to present things the way he saw ’em. Because in that moment, you’re looking for a huge shift in perception about the reality of Oppenheimer’s situation. Those two men come into that room with completely different expectations about what that meeting is. And I think that was a massive moment of disillusion, a huge turning point [for Oppenheimer] in his approach to trying to deal with the consequences of what he’d been involved with.
我觉得按照他的看法来呈现才公平。因为在那一刻，你对奥本海默现实处境的看法发生了巨大的转变。这两个人带着完全不同的期望走进会议室。我认为那是一个巨大的幻灭时刻，对奥本海默来说，是他面对他参与之事的后果这个过程中出现的一个巨大转折点。
It’s hard for me to not think that Oppenheimer could be accused of taking himself too seriously. All these comments, “the physicists have known sin” and “I am become death.” Do you think he was trying to have it both ways, like, we want to build this fantastic gadget, but then we want to be stopped from using it. It’s kind of like a serial killer saying catch me before I kill again.
我很难不认为奥本海默会被指责太把自己当回事。比如“物理学家已犯下了罪”和“我现在成了死神”等等说法。你是否觉得他试图兼得鱼和熊掌，既要造出这个了不起的东西，但又要阻止它的应用。这有点像连环杀手说“在我再次杀人之前抓住我”一样。
Or like a tech-company scientist saying, regulate me, please.
或者像科技公司的科学家说“拜托来监管我”一样。
I think there is a very high degree of self-consciousness, self-awareness, particularly the way he presents himself to the world. And I think he had an incredible strategic mind. He could be accused of naïveté in a lot of ways, but it’s the sort of naïveté, the mistakes he made were the sort of mistakes that only the most brilliant strategic people could make, because they think they’re smarter than everybody else. They don’t necessarily read the room exactly as they should.
我认为他的自我意识、自我认知非常强烈，特别是在他向世界展示自己的时候。我也认为他拥有不可思议的战略头脑。他可能会在很多事情上被批评过于天真，但正因为这种天真，他的错误都是只有最聪明的策略人士才会犯下的错，因为他们觉得自己比所有人都聪明。他们不一定能做到准确地察言观色。
The film certainly tries to embrace the iconic nature of who the man was but also understand that it’s self creative and self-conscious.
这部电影当然试图呈现他的标志性特质，但也在试图理解这种自我创造和自我意识。
The other thing I wondered: How much of his opposition to the Super was because it had been Teller’s idea?
我很好奇的另一个问题：他对氢弹项目的反对在多大程度上是因为它是泰勒的想法？
That’s pretty harsh, but you put your finger on something really important that I hope is there in the texture of the film, which is how the personal interacts with the historic and the geopolitical. Would this have happened anyway without this individual?
这是个很尖刻的说法，但你一针见血指出了我希望这部电影能够呈现出的层次，也就是人际关系是如何与历史和地缘政治关系互相作用的。如果没有这个人，这一切还会发生吗？
In “American Prometheus,” when you realize that Los Alamos in New Mexico was just a place that he liked to go camping with his brother, it’s just beautiful.
在《奥本海默传》中，当你发现新墨西哥州的洛斯阿拉莫斯不过是他喜欢与弟弟一起露营的地方，那其实是非常美好的。
And the first thing he does as director is sequester the best physicists in the U.S. in a sort of intellectual boot camp in his beloved New Mexico.
作为洛斯阿拉莫斯实验室主任，他做的第一件事就是把美国最优秀的物理学家都关在他心爱的新墨西哥州，那个相当于天才训练基地的地方。
He made that happen. So the manner in which atomic energy was unleashed on the world was certainly very personal to Oppenheimer. And that provides great drama as it applies to his relationships. There’s an enormous amount of camaraderie and a clubbish atmosphere in the scientific community, but huge rivalries and jealousies. It was a very competitive field.
是他成就了这件事。因此对奥本海默来说，原子能向全球释放的方式绝对是非常私人的。这给他的私人关系也带来了巨大的戏剧性。科学界里存在许多同志情谊和某种俱乐部氛围，但也存在巨大的敌对和嫉妒情绪。这是个竞争非常激烈的领域。
With disastrous consequences; the world is now full of H bombs on submarines, missiles and bombers, 45 minutes from Armageddon.
这导致了灾难性后果；如今全球到处都是装载着氢弹的潜艇、导弹和轰炸机，只消45分钟就能制造世界末日。
That’s where you have different spheres of influence and different scientists appealing to different aspects. What you see in the early ’50s is Oppenheimer trying to align himself with the Army as opposed to the Air Force. The Air Force program was all about genocidal hydrogen bombs, and Oppenheimer came up with this tactical new approach, bring battle back to the battlefield. He pivoted to play the Army against the Air Force. The lesson that I think is very interesting is that he was very, very strategic in his thinking and still got crushed and still came across as naïve.
这就是为何会有不同的势力范围和不同科学家在不同领域的呼声。上世纪50年代初，我们看到的情况是奥本海默试图站在陆军的一边，和空军做对。空军的项目全在都关注杀伤力巨大的氢弹，奥本海默想出了一个新策略，把战斗带回了战场。他转而让陆军来制衡空军。我觉得很有意思的一点在于，他的想法已经非常非常缜密，但还是一败涂地，还是被认为过于天真。
I think Oppenheimer’s ambition exceeded his intellect, even though he was one of the most brilliant people. He wasn’t the best mathematician. He wasn’t the top quantum physicist. He was in the top, but he wasn’t the actual top. He hadn’t won a Nobel Prize like a lot of his contemporaries. But his ambition was to be the best, the most famous. I think that quality of ambition coupled with his understanding of scientists, he knew all of them. He was a very charming person.
我觉得哪怕奥本海默已经是头脑最聪明的人之一，但他的野心还是大到超出了智力。他不是最厉害的数学家。他不是最顶尖的量子物理学家。他属于顶级，但不是最拔尖的那个。他没有像同时代许多科学家一样获得诺贝尔奖。但他有成为最顶尖、最出名之人的野心。我觉得他把这样的野心与他对科学家的了解——他认识所有科学家——结合了起来。他的人格极具魅力。
He clicked with Groves, who didn’t even seem to like scientists.
他跟格罗夫斯很合得来，后者看起来一点都不爱跟科学家打交道。
Nobody thought Oppenheimer was the right guy to run Los Alamos except Groves, which is kind of amazing.
除了格罗夫斯，没有人认为奥本海默是管理洛斯阿拉莫斯实验室的合适人选，这本身就有点不可思议。
How did that work?
这是怎么做到的？
I was able to put Kip Thorne [the Caltech physicist and Nobel laureate who was an executive producer of “Interstellar”] on the phone with Cillian. When Kip was at Princeton, he was able to attend seminars at the Institute for Advanced Study, which Oppenheimer ran. So Kip was able to speak to how Oppie would allow a sort of group discussion to take place and then step in at just the right moment to summarize. Apparently he could do this very quickly. He could summarize something very long and complex that a fellow scientist had said, then move the discussion to the next stage.
我安排基普·索恩（加州理工学院物理学家、诺贝尔奖获得者兼《星际穿越》执行制片人）和基里安在电话里交流了一番。基普还在普林斯顿大学进修的时候参加过普林斯顿高等研究院的研讨会，奥本海默是该研究院的院长。因此，基普能描述奥本海默如何允许某一小组讨论的进行，以及如何在恰当的时机介入总结。他随机应变的速度显然很快。他可以总结某位科学家同事极其冗长复杂的发言，然后把讨论推进到下一阶段。
That quality of orchestration was necessary for such a vast project to become a success.
规模如此庞大的项目要想取得成功，这种调度能力是必不可少的。
Is this like what a movie director does? You corralled an enormous number of top actors for this movie.
这不正像是电影导演的工作吗？是你为这部电影请来了许多业内顶尖的演员。
Each actor was coming to the table with research about what their real-life counterpart had been. They had tons of homework to do. [Laughs] They had a great resource with “American Prometheus.” They then did their own research and what it meant for me, which isn’t something I’d ever really been able to do in the past. So, for example, with the scene in the section classroom with all the scientists, we would be able to improvise the discussion. The script is there, but they could come into it with passion and knowledge based on all of their own learning.
每位演员都是带着角色真实原型的研究参加讨论的。他们有一大堆作业要做。（笑）《奥本海默传》已经给了他们非常棒的素材。然后他们还自行做了研究，思考它之于我的意义，这是我以前不太有过的体验。比如在所有科学家聚在教室里讨论的场景，我们就可以即兴表演讨论的内容。剧本是有的，但他们可以带着热情和自己学到的知识投入其中。
Were there any surprises for you in the way the actors played their parts?
演员们的表演方式有让你感到惊喜吗？
It was a continual process of surprise. Sometimes you’d have a really invigorating discussion about what’s really going on, because this is a story where people’s behavior, political or personal, is riddled with ambiguities.
惊喜是持续不断的。有时我们会就现实到底发生了什么进行一番真正令人振奋的讨论，因为在这个故事里，无论动机出于政治还是私人，角色的行为都有很多暧昧不明之处。
For example, there’s a moment where James Remar, who played [Henry L. Stimson, Truman’s secretary of war], kept talking to me about how he learned that Stimson and his wife had honeymooned in Kyoto. And that was one of the reasons that Stimson took Kyoto off the list to be bombed.
比如有一回，詹姆斯·瑞马尔（饰演杜鲁门的战争部长亨利·L·史汀生）不停地跟我讨论他是如何得知史汀生夫妇曾在京都度蜜月的事情。这也是史汀生把京都从轰炸名单上去掉的原因之一。
I had him crossing the city off the list because of its cultural significance, but I’m like, just add that. It’s a fantastically exciting moment where no one in the room knows how to react.
我原以为他去掉这座城市是因其重要的文化意义，但我想，加上这一点也没毛病。那是片中一个非常棒的刺激点，在场所有人都不知该如何反应。
How do you shoot with such a giant cast and so many locations?
如此庞大的演员阵容和这么多的外景拍摄地，你是怎么搞定的？
Anytime you get into myriad locations, a lot of different actors, it’s always going to be a puzzle. I did insist on scheduling it around Cillian’s haircut. [Laughs] Because I’m very allergic to wigs in movies. I really wanted the film to not have any obvious artifice when it came to the way characters presented themselves.
只要你有许许多多的拍摄地点，面对许多不同的演员时，这总是个麻烦。我真的是坚持按照基里安的理发周期来安排拍摄。（大笑）因为我对电影中的假发过敏。我非常希望这部电影在角色的呈现上，不要有明显的破绽。
One of the key moments that really hooked me on the story, which I referred to in my last movie, “Tenet” [2020], was this idea that when the scientists did their calculations, they couldn’t completely eliminate the possibility that they might set fire to the atmosphere and destroy the world. And they went ahead and pushed that button. But my feeling was, what if you could be in that room? What would that be like?
这个故事里真正吸引我的其中一个关键时刻，是我在自己的上一部电影《信条》（Tenet，2020）中提到过的一个想法，就是当科学家进行计算时，他们无法完全消除可能会点燃大气层并摧毁世界的可能性。而他们继续向前推进，按下了那个按钮。但我的感觉是，如果你当时在那个房间里呢？那会是什么样子？
How do they feel about that? You can minimize that and say they thought it was a tiny possibility. But having done a lot of giant explosions on film sets myself, where safety is the absolute most important thing, the tension around those ignitions is unbelievable. It’s very hard for the special effects guys to quantify to us exactly how it’ll sound, exactly how it’ll look. So as that countdown comes, it’s incredibly tense, and extrapolating that to the Manhattan Project, to the Trinity test, I couldn’t even imagine. I was excited to try to give the audience a feel of that, to live in that room.
他们对此有何感想？你可以尽量将其弱化，然后说他们认为这种可能性很小。但我自己在片场做了多次巨大的爆炸，在那里安全绝对是最重要的事情，围绕这些引爆的紧张气氛让人喘不过气来。对于特效组来说，他们很难向我们量化爆炸听起来会是怎样的，看起来会是什么样子。所以当倒计时开始时，气氛异常紧张，由此推断到曼哈顿项目，推断到三位一体核实验，我甚至无法想象。我很兴奋能试着让观众体会那种感觉，在那个房间里身临其境。
In this case, it worked and the world survived. Who did that calculation?
这一次，是成功了，世界幸存了下来。是谁计算出来的？
It came from Teller. One of the few things I’ve changed is it wasn’t Einstein who Oppenheimer went to consult about it, it was Arthur Compton who directed an outpost of the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago. But I shifted that to Einstein.
是泰勒算出来的。这是我做的少数改动之一，奥本海默其实找的并不是爱因斯坦，而是亚瑟·康普顿，当时他在芝加哥大学负责曼哈顿计划的一个工作站。但我改成了爱因斯坦。
And Einstein is the personality people know in the audience. But the calculation came from Teller. And I think he took almost the perverse kind of pride, you know? Those are the nature of the discussions. Horrifying.
爱因斯坦是观众都熟悉的人物。但计算是来自泰勒。我觉得他的骄傲近乎反常，你知道吧？这些就是讨论的本质。很可怕的。
At the time, Oppenheimer and Einstein were on opposite sides of an argument that what we now call black holes could exist. Einstein said no, Oppenheimer said yes.
当时，奥本海默和爱因斯坦对于我们今天所谓的黑洞是否存在的争论中，处于对立的观点。爱因斯坦说不存在，奥本海默则认为存在。
I saw the relationship between them as very much one of the master who’d been supplanted and whose work had been taken over by the younger. That to me is the fundamental thing going on in the film.
在我看来，他们之间的关系就是青出于蓝而胜于蓝。对我来说，这种关系是这部电影中的基本内容。
Oppenheimer does come across in the movie as a tremendously tortured person, and sparks always seem to be going off in his head.
在电影中，奥本海默给人的印象确实是一个备受折磨的人，他的脑海中似乎总有火花闪现。
Well look, the film is my interpretation of his life. I wanted it to be a strong interpretation, a very personal interpretation. I didn’t want to make a documentary. As far as the adherence to the historical record, I think the film is much more accurate than people will imagine. A lot of the things that potentially seem like contrivances turn out to be true.
你看，这部电影是我对他人生的诠释。我希望这是一种强有力的解读，一种非常个人化的解读。我不想拍成纪录片。就其历史真实性而言，我认为这部电影比人们想象的要准确得多。很多看起来似乎是杜撰的东西，其实都是真实的。
A quick question about the Trinity test, when Oppenheimer, Groves and the physicists and engineers set off the first nuclear bomb. How did you get that shot? Was some of it old footage from the test itself?
有一个关于三位一体核试验的小问题，也就是奥本海默、格罗夫斯以及物理学家和工程师们引爆第一颗核弹的情形。那些镜头你是怎么拍的？是否有部分来自当年试验的老镜头？
The way we approached [the] Trinity test was to forgo computer graphic imagery because I think computer graphics are inherently a bit safe, a bit anodyne, so I challenged my effects crew to come up with analog, real-world types of imagery that we could use to pull this off because we knew the Trinity test had to be a showstopper in the film. Some of the things they came up with were extremely small and microscopic that play as bigger. Some were absolutely massive and required all kinds of complicated safety protocols and involved the actors in some very small version of what it must have been like to be there out in the desert at night in those bunkers waiting to detonate that device.
我们拍摄三位一体核实验的办法就是放弃电脑图像，因为我认为电脑图像本质上是不大会错的，比较四平八稳，所以我向我的特效团队提出挑战，要求他们制作出模拟的、现实世界类型的图像，我们可以用这些图像来完成任务，因为我们知道，三位一体核实验必须是电影中的一个亮点。他们拿出的有些东西非常小，非常微观，但最后的效果会很壮观。还有一些绝对是大家伙，需要复杂的安全保障，演员们晚上在沙漠里的掩体中等待核弹爆炸的的场面就是采用的一些非常小的版本。
It’s hard to believe you ginned this up in the short time since “Tenet.”
真不敢相信你在《信条》之后这么短的时间里就拿出了这部片子。
I wrote the script relatively quickly once I started writing, but I had a lot worked out beforehand.
剧本从一开始就写得比较快，但之前是做了大量准备工作的。
Many years ago, I had written a script about the life of Howard Hughes that never got made because I wrote it right as Scorsese was making his own film. [Laughs] But I cracked the script to my satisfaction, and that gave me a lot of insight on how to distill a person’s life and how to view a person’s life in a thematic way, so that the film is more than the sum of its parts. So in some ways, the script, yes, it took me a few months, but it was really a culmination of 20 years of thinking.
很多年前，我写过一个关于霍华德·休斯生平的剧本，但从未投拍，因为我写的时候，斯科塞斯正在拍他的同题材电影。（笑）但我对那个剧本还是很满意的，它让我知道了要如何提炼一个人的生活，以及如何以一种主题的方式看待一个人的生活，这样电影就不会是其人生的流水账。所以，从某种程度上说，是的，这个剧本就花了我几个月的时间，但其实是20年思考的结果。
As I do interviews and the film’s coming out, I’m always asked, do you know what you’re doing next?
当我接受采访和电影上映的时候，总有人问我，你接下来计划要做什么？
And the answer is always the same. For me, I do one thing at a time and I put everything into it obsessively, and the film is not finished. Well, the way I like to put it is, the audience finishes the film.
我的回答总是一样的。对我来说，我一次只做一件事，我全身心地投入其中，电影并非止于我的手中。我喜欢的说法是，完成电影的是观众。
So when the film goes out in cinemas that’s when the film is done and it becomes what it’s going to be in the culture. And that usually has a profound impact on where I go next. It’d be much more sensible to work on three things at once and have the next thing all lined up. A lot of filmmakers do that. I’ve just never been any good at it.
所以当电影在电影院上映的时候，那就是电影完成的时候，它变成了文化的一部分。这通常会对我下一步的选择产生深远的影响。更明智的做法是同时做三件事，然后把接下来事情都排好顺序。很多导演都是这样的。我只是一直都不擅长这么做。
