Hyphens are subject to formal rigidity. Unless you’re, well, Christopher Nolan, you’re not going to dare compose one without using one of the favorite format platforms like Final Draft or Fade In. There are writers who can inject their personality into this limiting framework (no one does it better than Shane Black), but most diligently color within the lines. This in itself is a skill, one that very few people possess, which is why the studios’ current effort to devalue the importance of writers is not only absurd, but downright evil.
Still, those who choose to break free from their restraints deserve praise, and according to Cillian Murphy, Nolan did just that with his “Oppenheimer” script.
In a question-and-answer session between the director and the star for Entertainment Weekly, Nolan revealed that he flew to Dublin to personally deliver the script to Murphy. Nolan asked Murphy if he was impressed by the script’s first-person perspective, and indeed, he was. According to Murphy:
“That’s the only script I’ve ever read in the first person. It took me a minute, maybe a little over a minute, to figure that out. But then it became clear that you wanted it to be completely subjective.” , that everything needed to be seen through the character’s eyes so to speak and again, yeah, that added to the terror tremendously. [Laughs] But when it’s Christopher Nolan, you just have that confidence. You believe 100% in his vision, as I always have. So it was terribly exciting.”