Christopher Nolan reacts to fans who assumed he detonated an atomic bomb on the set of 'Oppenheimer'

• Christopher Nolan reacted to speculation that he detonated a real bomb for the film "Oppenheimer."
• Nolan called it "flattering" that people assumed he'd be capable of that, but "also a little bit scary."

Director Christopher Nolan sort of cleared the air regarding speculation that he detonated an actual atomic bomb on the set of his new film "Oppenheimer."

"It's flattering that people would think I would be capable of something as extreme as that on the one hand, but it's also a little bit scary," Nolan told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview published on Friday and conducted prior to the start of the actors' strike.

Nolan, who famously prefers practical effects and analog methods over CGI, didn't elaborate on how exactly the explosion imagery was created for the film. However, he confirmed to THR and Collider that there are no CGI shots in "Oppenheimer."

"CG inherently is quite comfortable to look at," Nolan told THR. "It's safe, anodyne. And what I said to [visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson] on 'Oppenheimer' is, 'This can't be safe. It can't be comfortable to look at it. It has to have bite. It's got to be beautiful and threatening in equal measure.'"

"Oppenheimer," directed and written by Nolan, is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's Pulitzer Prize-winning book "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer."

The star-studded movie centers on American theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), who oversaw the invention of the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s.

Nolan told THR that he became interested in making a film about the intersection of science and politics after Robert Pattinson, the star of his 2020 film "Tenet," gifted him a collection of Oppenheimer's speeches.

"I started to get very excited about, rather than using it as an analogy in a science fiction sense, telling the actual reality of the story, really trying to be there, to give people the experience of what it would have been like to be Oppenheimer in those moments," he said.

Nolan previously told Total Film that recreating the Trinity test, the world's first nuclear weapon detonation, sans CGI was "a huge challenge to take on."

The director said that he and Jackson started working together "early on" to figure out "how we could do a lot of the visual elements of the film practically, from representing quantum dynamics and quantum physics to the Trinity test itself, to recreating, with my team, Los Alamos up on a mesa in New Mexico in extraordinary weather."

In a behind-the-scenes featurette posted by Universal Pictures on Monday, Nolan said that the crew did "a lot of experimentation" and "came up with a lot of interesting analog methods of how to approach this, all of which was leading to the Trinity test, which had to feel nightmarish and terrifying in a way that computer graphics never really is."

"What we were able to get into the finished film, to me, is extraordinarily beautiful but also very frightening," he said.

"Oppenheimer" hits theaters Friday, July 21.