Doctor Atomic San Francisco Opera’s Production About J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Development of the Atomic Bomb at the Los Alamos National Laboratory

An Interview with Jon Else, documentary filmmaker

I've been doing films mostly about American history and culture and popular culture for thirty years now. I have had one foot particularly in the history of the twentieth century and one foot in music and performance. About twenty-five years ago, I did a film called The Day After Trinity, which is the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb. It's the basic narrative of what happened from the 1930s up through 1945 and through Oppenheimer's security hearing in 1953. I also made a film about Oppenheimer's brother, Frank, who was the founder and director of the Exploratorium. Years later, I became involved in opera projects. I had never been a fan of opera, although I am now, and some years after doing the Oppenheimer film, I made a film about Wagner's ring cycle here at the San Francisco Opera. I had never heard a note of the ring cycle.

I will never forget buying a recording the day I started the project, and I put it on and thought, “Oh, what have I gotten myself into?” I've become a complete ring cycle addict since then. When I heard that John Adams and Peter Sellars were doing an opera about Oppenheimer, it was like catnip. It was too good to pass up. It was too grand an undertaking and too grand a story to let go by. So I called up John, he answered the phone, and it turned out he was familiar with The Day After Trinity. We had a cup of coffee and it seemed like a good idea. I then contacted Peter, talked to him, and he thought it was a good idea. And here we are making a documentary.

The film is a little complicated. At the simplest level, the film stays behind the scenes for about eighteen months, and we show the creation of Doctor Atomic at all levels. We will film Peter writing the libretto, we will film John composing, we will follow the singers, the choristers, the stage crew, the dancers and costumers. We will follow every department that collaborates to make this thing happen. The more complicated way to describe it is that within the backstage story we will interweave the historical story of the real events, both of the Trinity test and of the whole nuclear enterprise that was set in motion by that test.

I've told the story, so I don’t have an interest in merely retelling the story of Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb. What does fascinate me is chronicling someone else struggling to tell that story in a radically new way, and this is a radically new way. I am also interested in those pivotal forty-eight hours at the Trinity site as a doorway that set everything into motion. That was the curtain rising on the entire nuclear enterprise, and we are still living with it today. In the simplest, most elegant sense, this film is a weaving together of history and history making. It's got great people. What attracts me to documentaries is great people doing great stuff. I know enough about the San Francisco Opera that it's going to be a corker – that the opera is going to be great, the people are going to be great, the process of the work is going to be great. I spent a lot of my career fascinated by people who are really good at what they do. And Oppenheimer was certainly good at what he did, John Adams is certainly good at what he does, Peter Sellars is good with everything. The San Francisco Opera and its artists are good at what they do, so I hope I can be up to the task.

Some films are conceived by days and months of sitting around and banging your head against the wall. This film was conceived in about six seconds. I was in my office and someone told me that John Adams was doing an opera about the atomic bomb, and that was the conception – that was it. It took me maybe the rest of the afternoon to figure out that I wanted to weave in the historical story because there has been a lot of archival material declassified since that last film I did.The hard part about conceiving this film was writing a treatment that integrated three timelines. The first is the timeline in the opera – the forty-eight hours leading up to Trinity. The other timeline is the eighteen months to create the opera. And the third timeline is all of the history of the nuclear enterprise from 1933 to 1986 – the height of nuclear weaponry and nuclear stockpiles. So the hardest part is writing a treatment that weaves all these together. Making the film is the easy part. Another hard part is gaining all the permissions and raising the money. I spent twice as much time fundraising as I have so far making the film. It is the non-creative part that is difficult.

The atomic bomb is fascinating, fundamentally because it was the biggest bang of all big bangs, except, of course, the original big bang. It's just a giant explosion, and we forget that if Oppenheimer had invented radar or the Internet we would not be making this opera or making this film. There is some lurid fascination with that mother of all big firecrackers. If Oppenheimer had simply been a military engineer and had cooked up the atomic bomb, I don't think we would have been as interested. What fascinates me about Oppenheimer is that if there was ever a cultured man who knew his ethics and knew the moral history of western and eastern civilizations it was Oppenheimer.

And the great mystery about this man is how did this man make this bomb? What is it about human affairs that led a man that could have become a romantic poet to oversee the development of the most savage weapon in history? What is that? We are also living in the shadow of this. These bombs that responded to the Trinity test lurk in the shadows of every conflict. The potential for Trinity style bombs is in this morning's San Francisco Chronicle and this morning's New York Times and on television. There is very little about the atomic bomb that is not fascinating. Even the physics are fascinating – the physics of these neutrons banging around inside blocks of plutonium is pretty heady stuff.

The goal is two-fold. It's to be an amplifier for the opera and to be a big megaphone for the opera. This opera is going to be seen in the opera house by tens of thousands of people at most. The film will be seen by tens of millions of people. And if we can bring to a big broad audience a sense of how astonishing this work is, then I'll be happy. If we can also seduce viewers into seriously thinking about nuclear war, then all the better. My suspicion is that people forget that these weapons are very much with us. This story takes place fifty years ago and is becoming slightly old, black and white, and like the history channel. But there's nothing anachronistic about atomic bombs. In a simple sense, the goal of every documentary is to keep people watching. In the opera house, it's difficult to walk out when you are bored. In a documentary, it is really easy to just change the channel. And we don't want that to happen.

I've always done films about the unintended consequences of good ideas. Certainly with nuclear weapons, there were a lot of unintended consequences of the Trinity test. People with good ideas seldom see how permanent their good ideas will be. I don't think anyone could have stopped the development of nuclear weapons - it was going to happen. The way it happened and the debates around whether the bomb should have been used or not - that's a different story. I’ve also been fascinated for years with people who are really good at what they do. In some sense this film about Doctor Atomic is about the work of the people who put this opera on. It's also about the work of physicists and their fascinating engineering. Although I was late coming to opera, I've always loved doing music films. I also love the idea of a story within a story. And that's what this is.

I take a very old fashioned and very idealistic view of documentary. I do believe that documentaries are a part of a national conversation, that they are in some sense a form of journalism that people watch to learn about the world as it exists in reality. There is no single role for documentary. Every role of documentary involves some form of telling the truth by putting things on screen that actually happened. This documentary is odd because there are a lot of layers of truth that we are weaving together. The role of documentary in culture is tough because people talk about news as a first draft at history, and I think we are a kind of draft at history.

But we share with news the responsibility to not lie to people, to be truthful. News doesn't need to be entertaining like we do. So we are in a gray area where we have to do the job of The New York Times but in the style of Star Wars. It can get a little tricky.

I have very little connection to music. I've been struggling through the score of Doctor Atomic, and it's humbling to try to crawl through that thing. I can't imagine conducting it. I actually actively disliked opera for many years. I'd done a lot of films about popular music. The thing that changed my perception about opera was when I took my kids to a family matinee of La Traviata. They left the curtain open during the scene change, and all of a sudden fifty construction workers came out and transformed a palace into a cornfield.

I was amazed and thought it was more interesting than the opera. So I called the San Francisco Opera about doing a documentary on scene changes and started my documentary about the ring cycle. I fell completely in love with opera. Opera is so unreal, it is so bizarrely over the top and disconnected from our everyday human experience that it is only appropriate that it takes a little bit of time to appreciate.