Oscar Winner Jennifer Lame on the Hardest Scenes to Edit Into Oppenheimer

The Oscar winner talked to us last summer about what almost got cut from the high-wire epic, and the experiments and obsessions that fueled it. Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

Last night, Jennifer Lame won a well-deserved Oscar for Best Editing for her work on Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a sprawling and amazingly fast-paced chunk of 20th-century history that somehow also managed to entertain millions. She had previously worked with the director on his bizarrely intricate action epic Tenet, and the editing in both films merges art, craft, and extreme sports — they are ultrastylized high-wire acts that pull the audience along through dense, elaborate narratives. Nolan’s scripts have many of their structural flourishes written into them, but he also gives his editors room to play, which meant that Lame got to spend lots of time trying new things, moving scenes around, inserting flashbacks and flash forwards. She and Nolan also had to make the huge story of Oppenheimer — filled with heavy science, world history, obscure political backstabbing, and all sorts of psychic turmoil — make sense for viewers. Plus, they had to do it while juggling a massive cast of well-known stars in supporting roles. Last summer, I talked to Lame about the awesome process of editing Oppenheimer.

What were your initial conversations with Christopher Nolan like about this project?
I had lunch with Chris, and he said, “Oh, I’m working on something, but it’s a smaller movie. People in rooms talking.� And I slammed my hand down and I was like, “What? I would kill to do that. That’s my thing! Oh my God.� But I’d signed up to edit Wakanda Forever. A couple of months later, he let me read the script. And I just could not stop — it was such a page turner. I didn’t know all the ins and outs of that history, so it read kind of like a whodunit. I’ve never read a script so fast.

A lot of people don’t know that editors start when the shoot starts; they always think you come on after. On Tenet, the previous film I did with Chris, I traveled all around and went to film dailies every day and I was very enmeshed in the filming of it all. But on this one, because I was doing Wakanda, I didn’t go to the shoot. Chris was really kind to let me come on after the shoot, which a lot of directors wouldn’t do. But we’d worked together already, so he let me come on the week after it wrapped. I saw him, we talked for a little bit, he said, “Go through all the footage, try to cut, don’t feel like you have to cut the whole movie, but I just want you to really be familiar with the footage.� And then he went to vacation in England for two weeks! I was just left alone with all the material. I’d never done that before. But I loved it. It was so fun not being a part of the shoot in a way, because I didn’t have any kind of baggage with the footage. I just loved every scene; I loved being alone with it and not knowing what weird stuff happened that day or about any problems. The movie is kind of a mystery, too, so anytime I was confused by something, I wrote it down. I ended up being able to cut a whole version of the movie because I just powered through it.

Obviously, you’d read the script, but how much did you know about the subject by the time you started cutting? Did you go back and read the
book?
No, because I’d gotten to know Chris on Tenet, and I had a feeling that he wouldn’t have wanted me to read the book. It’s funny because two of my best friends are obsessed with Oppenheimer and have always told me to read that book, and somehow I hadn’t gotten to it yet. One of my best friends actually wrote a book, a fiction book, about Oppenheimer. I have so many weird people in my life that are so obsessed with him, but I really didn’t know much about the subject. Thank God, though, because when I read the script and I had the reaction I did, Chris was like, “Oh man, you really get it?� I told him I hadn’t read the book on purpose. And he was like, “I’m so glad. Because a lot of times I find people that read the book don’t get the script as well because they come to it with so much baggage.� He said, “You need to be able to edit an entertaining movie for people that don’t know anything about this subject.�

Nolan does something with editing I find really fascinating. A character might be talking about something, or somebody, or a scene, and we’ll get a flash of that scene as they’re still talking — which then becomes the way that he sometimes transitions into that scene. He does this all throughout. Can you tell me a little bit about the thinking behind that?It’s all very much planned. It’s intimidating when you sit down and you read what was in his head and what he wants, and then you have to make it come to life. But what’s so great about Chris is he’s not set in his ways, even though he is so meticulous. He was open to me coming up with ideas — maybe we put a flashback here, a memory here — even though it wasn’t in the script. He’s open to me trying my version of it or how I imagine it.

Are there any suggestions you made that you’re particularly proud of?
Oh my God, it feels like so long ago that I worked on that movie. I made one suggestion to move a scene. There was one small scene, we couldn’t figure out where it went. At one point I came up with an idea to put it somewhere. Then we all watched it and I was like, “I don’t know.� And he’s like, “That’s exactly where it should go.� It’s hard to do that kind of thing with his scripts — they’re so planned out. It was the second courtroom scene with Edward Teller, Benny Safdie’s character. We were trying to figure out how to play out the Teller betrayal and how to really draw that out. We kept doing passes through the film where we’d pick a character and really fine tune them, just shaping everyone so they were multidimensional. And Teller was one of the later characters, because he always worked great. Then we realized, Oh, he could be even better. So we did a Teller pass, and we were trying to figure out how to really milk that.

Was this when Teller goes into that hearing room where Oppenheimer’s being interrogated? Because his betrayal is split in two. We see the first part of what he’s saying, but we don’t see the second part — the real betrayal — until later. 
Yeah, exactly.

It’s kind of the way the whole movie is. There are so many things that are not explained until the end, or not revealed until the end. Like a series of nested mysteries. The fact that Strauss is behind all this, the fact that Teller betrayed him, the Einstein scene by the pond — you get the sense that everything is building toward a series of revelations. How do you make it clear to the audience that it’s okay if we don’t exactly know what’s happening at a given moment — that it’s all going to come together at the end?
That’s the thing that Chris and I always kept in mind. Chris is really big into that, exactly what you just said — we have to let them know that there is going to be a payoff and that they are going to find out all this information. That’s the other great thing about his movies. Even the tenth time I watched Oppenheimer, I would notice little things. “Oh, that connects back to that.� It’s all in there. And timing wise, how long can the audience sustain until we give them something else? He’s always thinking about the audience. We ourselves, we watch the movie so often with other people, once a week, because you really need to be in a room with someone who’s never seen it before to feel like, Oh God, we’re losing them. And this is the scene where we lost them. So how do we get them back? How do we get to that scene sooner?

The other thing I was going to mention is when you’re talking about different genres, this movie’s just full of genres. I love the breakup story between Matt Damon and Cillian Murphy’s characters. That scene where they say good-bye to each other after the Trinity test to me is one of the greatest breakup scenes of all time. And then when Cillian is sitting at the table at night and he’s like, “I thought they would call.� It’s just so heartbreaking. And then Damon’s the one that doesn’t betray him in the end, which is kind of a twist too. That’s the guy that could have totally fucked him. But he was always straight up with him.

You mentioned yourself going through different passes on individual characters. And there are so many characters to keep track of, whether it’s Teller or Groves or Kitty or Jean. Can you tell me about what changed as you did those passes on the characters?
Oh God, so much. Teller’s a good example. He always played great. People always loved that character. But it’s funny, the more we shaped him toward the end, the more he really came off as a bad guy. He just took on other dimensions for people. He wasn’t just a character. Strauss we did a bunch of times, but with people like Cillian and Robert Downey Jr., they’re just good out of the gate. You could do so many different versions because there’s just so much amazing material. But we worked on shaping Strauss and making sure he wasn’t too villainous too soon. I always wanted to push it even more. I feel so bad for Strauss at the end. I feel like I’m one of the only people that really feel for him when he slaps his leg and he can’t help but ask, “Who are the holdouts?�

The other amazing thing is that the people who came in to watch it really did pick up on all the minor characters right away. Which was actually hard for Chris and me, because it can make you complacent. So we really forced ourselves every week to pick one or two characters and meticulously go through all of their dailies. We did a bunch of Kitty passes to make sure that, again, people didn’t just think of her as the wife who was kind of crazy and a little manic. She took on many kinds of roles, and she became more and more likable as we did more passes through her.

You mentioned that you’d screen the film every Friday while you were working on it, for different people. Was there any one note that you remember as particularly helpful during this period after one of these screenings?
Chris’s big thing is, “How did that feel?� I remember we showed it to some of his son’s friends, who are younger, 14 or 15, I can’t remember. They said that the beginning of the movie felt a little fast or rushed or they weren’t quite sure who Oppenheimer was. It was funny to hear young people say that, because to me, obviously as the editor, I’m like, “Oh my God, this movie’s too long! We have to shorten it!� But it was great to hear people say that. So we were like, “Okay, even though this is a long film and a long script, people are fascinated by it, and we need to make sure that we don’t rush any parts.�

One thing I noticed the second time watching the film was that the way the Trinity explosion is edited, with the sound of the breathing first and then the roar of the explosion coming later. Not long after that, when Oppenheimer gives his speech to Los Alamos after the bombing of Hiroshima, it’s edited in a similar way. He’s watching everyone cheering, but we can only hear his breathing. And then the sound of the crowd comes belatedly, as this explosive roar. That was fascinating, to mirror the way those two scenes were edited. Was it like that in the script?
It was definitely similar to that in the script. I can’t remember if the breathing in the Trinity section was in the script, but I’m pretty sure it was. But yeah, the idea was always to make those two scenes feel similar. How to make that come across? With Chris, sound was the key. The idea was always to do that kind of explosion after the crowd. We spent a lot of time massaging how to feel the silence in that room, and then how to break it with that crazy scream. It’s funny when things are written out and it seems so simple to imitate what’s written out. It isn’t, actually. The Trinity scene came together really, really easily, partly because Chris just had that in his head. But making them feel paired, you don’t want it to feel too exactly the same — you want them to feel like they speak to each other. Because they’re counterpoints to each other in a way: The speech is like the evil stepsister to the Trinity test, soundwise, in how we cut it.

Can you tell me about working with the music? Chris said that you guys didn’t use any temp tracks. 
We never use any temp music, which I love because it forces you to live with the material and get the best out of it and not have any crutches. It’s also nice not to get used to something that isn’t yours or isn’t going to be in the movie.

Ludwig and he had worked for a little bit on some pieces prior to when I showed up. But then, not long after we started, Chris wanted to screen right away, and the first person we screened for obviously was Emma Thomas, the producer. So he did have a couple pieces of Ludwig’s, kind of rough sketches that we put throughout the entire movie. We kind of just edited it together ourselves, temped the whole movie pretty quickly so we could screen it. It was crazy. A lot of it worked great, but it was very repetitive because we only had two or three pieces, which is hilarious! But Emma suffered through it. And then Ludwig started feeding us more stuff. The way that Chris and Ludwig work is so organic and allows for so much experimentation. Ludwig lives down the street and he just comes over and everything feels so mom-and-pop in that way. We never make him write to picture or anything. He just comes up with these ideas, and then we put them in and try them out.

What was the hardest scene to edit for you?
You know what scene? It’s so minor, but one scene that never really fit until the end, when it fit so well, was the scene where Oppenheimer is giving the speech to everybody and saying good-bye to Los Alamos. It’s a very small scene. When he is saying, “Someday people will look back on your time here …� There was a minute where I was like, “Maybe we should cut this scene.� And Chris was like, “Maybe.� It never really fit well. And then as the movie around it grew and shaped, it became one of my favorite moments in the movie, and we extended that dead air. Him seeing everyone’s faces, and we just let what he says hang in the air. And then it became instrumental in that section. Chris would always joke, “Remember when you wanted to cut this scene?�

Then the Casey Affleck scene. I love the weird awkward tension between him and Cillian there, and I cut a really long version of it. Then, as we shortened it, I was like, “I don’t know. It’s not as good.� So I became obsessed with making sure that scene felt as good as it felt to me when I first watched the dailies and cut the sequence. Obviously it comes at a point in the movie where you really can’t spend too much time there. It was interesting to keep revisiting, because you’re supposed to be nervous. Even though he’s just in that one scene, Casey’s character kind of hangs over the film as this person that maybe caused all of this heartache and trauma for Cillian. He might be involved in Jean Tatlock’s death. He represents the worst part of the government. But the other reason I love that scene so much is that I thought Cillian nailed the feeling of being uncomfortable so well, of doing such a good job of being terrible at lying. It’s hard when good actors have to pretend they’re bad actors.

The second time I saw the film, I noticed that in one of the shots where we see Jean’s head go underwater, there’s a flash of a black glove pushing her head underneath. But it’s not necessarily meant to be, “Oh, yeah, somebody killed her.� More like, “Well, somebody might have killed her.� It’s a delicate balance to suggest that visually without necessarily asserting it as a fact.
Exactly. And no one knows to this day. I think Oppenheimer blamed himself for her death either way. Even if someone killed her or she killed herself, he feels like it’s his fault. And I love the idea that he’s not absolved in either version. Usually when you’re trying to absolve yourself with guilt, you find a way out, even if it’s fictitious. He can’t even find his way out in the fictitious version.

When I first saw the film and we end on that Einstein scene by the pond, I thought to myself, Oh, this is reflected in the film’s opening shot, which is the pond with the close-up of Oppenheimer. But then the second time I was watching it, I realized, Oh, no, wait. In this scene, he’s actually younger. This is young Oppenheimer looking at a pool of water that’s not a pond. So the first scene echoes the final scene, but it’s not necessarily meant to come full circle. Was that always there, or was it added later?
Throughout filming, those ripples became very important to Chris. He became obsessed with them and was always trying to catch them and film them. I think a lot of what you see is Chris throwing water into the water and making the ripples. I love the idea of that — he does everything practically, even trying to make these perfect natural ripples himself! So he became obsessed. And then that shot of Cillian looking at the ripples, I think initially it was supposed to be at the end of that montage when he comes into himself in college and starts feeling more confident. But then Chris, very early on, said, “I really love the idea of maybe using it in the beginning of the film, but I’m not sure how.� So we played around a lot with how to move that around and if we should take it out of the montage, to use as a bookend. And the minute we put it at the beginning of the film, it worked so perfectly. Everyone that we showed early on really grabbed on to that right away. It made them think back to him as a young man. And the ripples are … Well, there’s a lot of those in the film.

Or droplets on glass. It’s interesting how that visual motif of the ripples, but then also the sparks inside the fire, the flickers inside the explosion, or the fragmentation of modern art — all these little quantum elements throughout feed into the visual rhythm of the film. It works beautifully.
It’s funny how it infects you, because I started seeing ripples too while we were working on the movie. I think Chris maybe even said he was seeing ripples in the pool one day and was just kind of like, Ugh. This isn’t something I talked to Chris about, but what’s so great about Oppenheimer, which I didn’t know before I worked on the movie, is how beautiful this all is to the character. Science to him is beauty and art and poetry. I didn’t know how rich his life was with all of those things. That’s how he came into science. He was more of a people person who understood all these different worlds, and he could bring people together. It just makes the movie so much more devastating at the end when he realizes, and you realize, what he’s done to all of us in the world that we live in now — that we live in this fucked-up place with all this nuclear shit that we can’t get rid of, and that’s probably going to kill all of us someday. It’s crazy to think this is the person who invented it, but it came out of all these beautiful ideas. It’s depressing and heartbreaking. It makes me emotional to even talk about it.