American Prometheus

AVI
And now for our disclosures. Films Not Made uses AI to reimagine movies that were never produced. All development materials, pitch decks, trailers and posters are AI generated. Any likenesses of people are speculative and synthetic. No real actors participated in their creation. This is cultural commentary not endorsed by any individual or studio reference.

AMY
Okay. Today our guest is Robert Edwards, a writer / director who over the course of his career has written for studios including Warners, Fox, Universal, Sony and HBO, and for directors including Bennett Miller, Mike Newell, Mark Romanic, Neil LaBute and Antoine Fuqua. His directorial debut Land of the Blind, starred Ray Fines and Donald Sutherland. And he wrote and directed When I Live My Life Over Again, starring Christopher Walken and Amber Heard. And he has a blog that I'm a big fan of called The King's Necktie. Welcome, Robert.

ROBERT
Thanks Amy. Thanks Avi. Thanks for having me.

AVI
It's great to have you on. So, your film-not-made is called American Prometheus: The tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.  I think movies about Oppenheimer seemed like a pretty good call now.

ROBERT
Now.

AVI
I think it definitely has legs.

AMY
The date on your script, the one you gave us is 2019. But, I think this started way before that. So, will you kick us off and tell us when it started and what was going on in your life and career at that time?

ROBERT
Sure. I appreciate you guys having me on Films Not Made because this one actually was made, just not by me. So it started when the book American Prometheus, with that same subtitle, by Marty Sherwin and Kai Bird, was published and won the Pulitzer Prize. And that was around 2006. So it was immediately snatched up by Hollywood.

And my agent at the time put me up to write the adaptation of it. So I read the book and I loved it. I mean, I just devoured it. It's a massive book, like 800 pages, and I just thought it was a fantastic story. It was, to me, like the seminal story of postwar America. And I could see why it won the Pulitzer Prize, and I could see why Dreamworks had optioned it.

So Sam Mendes was attached to direct, and I went and met with him and talked about it, and had, you know, a good meeting. I thought it was a good meeting, but in the end I didn't get the job. He hired Jeffrey Hatcher, the playwright, to adapt it, but I loved the book so much and the story so much that I decided to just keep an eye on it, because often, as we know, films, even the big directors that have big studios attached, don't get made.

And so I waited and I watched, and sure enough, it didn't get made and the option lapsed and it was available again. And so I went to my friend Carol Pollock, a producer, and told her about it, and she read it and had the same reaction I did. And we partnered up, and we optioned the book, and that was the beginning of the process.


AVI
Most of our audience probably does know what it means, but when you option a book, what exactly are you doing? And what exactly did the studio do before you got to it?

ROBERT
So an option in my layman's understanding of it is just an agreement in which the owners of a piece of intellectual property give you, as a filmmaker or filmmaking team, the rights to adapt that work for the screen. And it's usually, you know, there's money exchanged and there's usually a time limit on it. Typically it can be like 12 months, which is very short, or 18 months is very normal. It could be longer than that. And then if you don't make it, usually the contract states that the rights then revert back to the owner. So in some cases there's intellectual property out there, books, video games, whatever, that have been optioned over and over and over again and just never made. That can be a very lucrative revenue stream for the people who own the IP.

So in this case, DreamWorks optioned it. I don't know what they paid. They developed it for whatever reasons that I was not privy to, and decided not to go forward. And they let it revert back to the authors.

AMY
And why do you think CAA put you up for this particular job? Had you written previous historical dramas or what? Why was this a match in their mind for the Sam Mendes version?

ROBERT
I mean, I think I was right in the wheelhouse of this sort of thing because I got hired to do or put up for, political stuff, security issues, national security issues, foreign policy issues. I had this military background, which was more unusual then than it is now among writers. And I had specifically written a script the year before that got a lot of attention about Iraq's pursuit of nuclear weapons. So it's kind of like I'm a nuclear guy. So it made sense.

AMY
The nuclear guy.

ROBERT
I love the nuclear guy. That's my sitcom. Don't steal the idea so fast.

AMY
Fastforward. You finished your first pass at the adaptation? Your script. What did you think at that moment? This is going to be amazing. It's going to be a great movie. Or- what was the reaction from your agent?

ROBERT
Can I tell you a story before that?

AMY
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

AVI
Yeah, please.

ROBERT
When the option became available, I asked my agent or my manager or somebody to reach out to the authors so that I could talk to them and make my pitch and let them, you know, hopefully they would give it to me. We could make a deal and money would be exchanged. So they did that, and a first phone call was arranged between me and Kai Berg. And it wasn't a phone call. It was a Skype. That's how long ago it was. And I was not that familiar with Skype. I probably used it, but hadn't really thought about it.

Kai was living in Kathmandu at the time, they were living in pretty exotic places. His wife, Sue Goldmark, worked for the World Bank and so they happened to be living in Kathmandu. So with the time difference, the phone call or the Skype call was set for really late at night, New York time. It was set for like 11 pm or midnight. And so I was in bed with my wife and getting ready to get on the call.

And just as I connected, it dawned on me that Skype was video. So I wasn't wearing a shirt, I was just wearing boxer shorts and our bed, so, if this was it, instead of a white background, all you could see was the headboard of our bed, which was black leather. So I looked like I was naked in some kind of S&M dungeon.

AVI
Solid move.

ROBERT
Solid right? I had a split second to decide what to do because the call was connecting. I thought I'll just slam my lid down and pretend there was a technical problem. But, for whatever reason, I let it connect. And I think my logic was, you know, how much mileage can I get out of it? Like, I'm an eccentric artist, and this is just how I roll.

So it came on. I never even met Kai Bird before. Pulitzer Prize winner. And he comes on. And the whole time we're talking, he was looking down like that, away from the screen. So I thought oh, my God. But I made my pitch and everything, and we made a deal. We made a deal.

AMY
At that moment, on the call?

ROBERT
No, no. But he went back and talked to his partner, and they agreed to make the deal. And we started working together. And so we became very good friends, the three of us. And then a number of years went by before I got up the courage to ask them about the call. And he said, you know, I don't really remember. I think that I couldn't see you anyway, I think all there was, it was a black screen. I was like, oh, thank God. So anyway, that's my story.

AVI
So how different was the pitch then, than what you had done or pitched previously?

ROBERT
To me, the story was very clear, the story of Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb. I thought then and still now it had been told a lot and had been told well and been told badly, and that wasn't really the part that interested me. The part that interested me was the second half of his story in the 50s, in the aftermath, you know, when he was dragged before this tribunal that was really a kangaroo court convened to strip him of the security clearance and ostracize and humiliate him. That was the part of the story that I really wanted to focus on. And in Nolan's movie, he does that too. Nolan's movie covers everything. I was really focused just on the second half of Oppenheimer's life.

AMY
Did you see that documentary that interviews all of the people who worked with Oppenheimer that was made maybe in the 70s or 80?

ROBERT
Oh, yeah. The Day After Trinity. Yeah, yeah, actually. It was made by John Else, who was one of my instructors and a mentor of mine. And still, a friend of mine to this day, one of the great, great documentary filmmakers of the 20th and early 21st centuries and also a fantastic DP as well. Yeah, that was a seminal film. It was nominated for an Oscar.

AMY
They were running it on Criterion right around the same time as Nolan's release. And I watched it and I I was so much more emotionally impacted by that than the actual [Nolan] movie.

ROBERT
Yeah, it's a great, great film. And it was really cool of Criterion to do that.

AMY
Yeah.

ROBERT
In fact, I stole the opening of John's film for the opening sequence of my script, where he has the 16 millimeter footage of them preparing the gadget, hoisting it to the top of the tower and everything. And that was intercut with a voiceover from Oppenheimer's journal. So I just ripped that completely off of John Ellis's film and put it at the beginning.

AMY
You knew him, so it's okay.

AVI
So the option though comes, you know, and it's like a ticking clock. So talk to us about time. All of us here have optioned stuff before. So, you know, how does that factor into the story here?

ROBERT
Yeah, it was definitely a ticking bomb. I don't remember feeling a ton of pressure in terms of writing, because the story was very clear to me and, you know, it didn't take forever to write. It wasn't something that I was tortured about. It came out pretty quickly. I sent the first readable draft to Marty and Kyle, and they liked it.

And they had a few notes, which were really helpful. So we had a script pretty quickly. Then the time pressure came with trying to shop it around and find producing partners and financiers. And I remember my agent saying to me, you know, "the writing is great," which I realize is not a compliment in Hollywood.

And they say the writing is great, but nobody wants to watch a movie like this. Nobody cares about this guy. He's forgotten. The story's grim, you know, it's just, its period. You know, no offense, Bob, but I just don't think we're going to get money for this. And he was not wrong.

AVI
So who were you working with in terms of producing partners? Did you then make a deal with anybody? Like what's the next step?

ROBERT
Well, Carol was herself a producer. So she was attached and that was a piece of the puzzle. But you know, when we started taking it around to potential financiers- the agent was not wrong. You know, it wasn't considered a commercial property at all. And I would argue to this day it is not a commercial property at all, unless Christopher Nolan or a big, big director like that or a big star attaches himself to it.

But, you know, we didn't want to let that deter us. So we took it around various people. We couldn't get financing. The option lapsed or expired, and we renewed it and we continued to shop it. And I was refining the script all along. You know, we'd get notes sometimes from people, and if they were smart notes, we would implement them and revise the script.

AMY
The book. So you paid for it a second time?

ROBERT
We paid for it twice. Yeah. Carol did.

AMY
Yeah.

ROBERT
So we let it lapse. And I said to Kai and Marty, you know, I'd gotten to know them pretty well by then, I mean so well that my daughter, who was born in 2011, had her first solid food at Marty Sherwood's house for dinner. His homemade matzo ball soup was her first solid food. So I had a good relationship with them.
And I said, listen, here's the situation. We really want to make this. We can't afford to keep optioning it. Will you let us know if another party comes along and wants to do it and give us a chance to match the option? And they said, yeah. And so another guy came along. I don't know if we're mentioning names or not, but another producer.

AMY
Mention names because we can always edit.

ROBERT
His name was Larry Meli and he wanted to option it, and Caroline couldn't match it. So he got the option. And I talked to him at first and said, you know, told him the history, said, you know, if you're interested in working together- but he was not interested in working together. He went off on his own. And then he came back after a while and he offered to work on it together at that point. And we started to work together. We had some conversations at that point. It was going to be directed by somebody else besides me. And Larry, I think, is the one who brought Oliver Stone into it.

AMY
But did he write, have someone write another script, or was he just pitching it as the book, or, how did that work?

ROBERT
I think at first when I was not involved, when Larry said, you know, no hard feelings, but I don't need your help. He did not have a script. He was just pitching the idea. And then I don't really know, you know. Scripts are expensive, right? I don't think he wanted to pay somebody to write one. And here was one that was already written that people liked. So, probably that may have been part of the appeal in him coming back.

AMY
And when he came back, he wanted to use your script?

ROBERT
Yeah, the idea was it would be the script I wrote. Carolyn and Larry would produce it together.

AVI
I mean, your script, I don't mean this in a pejorative way, but it was already exposed, right? People had already gone around with it. So I'm just curious, you know, what his thinking was.

ROBERT
Yeah. I mean, I don't want to speak for Larry. I haven't had any contact with him for many, many years. But I think it could have been that he thought, well, if we attach Oliver Stone to this script, that will change the equation or some other big director. And so we talked to a few directors, including Oliver Stone, who liked the script, and then he reached out to me through Larry, and his question was how much of the dialog in the hearing, the security hearing, which is the center of my version, is actually taken from the real transcript and how much of it is fictionalized, which is a fair question, although I thought it was kind of weird that the director of JFK was concerned about my historical fact.

AVI
Good call.

ROBERT
So in the end, that didn't work out with Oliver, and we were still working together trying to get it set up. And then there was an issue with, it's so long ago I don't remember all the details, but the deal memo between Larry and me was held up by my lawyers. They were just not moving on it and he was frustrated.
I was frustrated, too and I had been calling my lawyers. And then, one of the partners, one of the main partners in that law firm, who I had known for a long time and had been my lawyer and we had a good relationship, he called me up and said, more or less. He said, "listen, Bob, we cannot keep doing these little indie movies for you.It's a lot of work."

AVI
Oh, no.

ROBERT
And so we're dropping you. But if you get a big studio movie, we'll do that for you. We'll do the deal for you.

AVI
How's that feel?

ROBERT
My overriding thought was, I cannot believe the Hutzpa saying what they did. Drop me, I understand how money works, but to say, oh, but we'll do your deal if it's easy for us.

AMY
And lucrative and much more lucrative.

ROBERT
I can't believe it. So anyway, that was the end of my relationship with that law firm. And then I got another lawyer who I'm still with, who's fantastic, who I love. But by that time, Larry was so angry and not entirely wrong to be angry that our relationship fell apart. And that was the end of that partnership.

And then years went by and we heard all kinds of rumors at one point, you know, all kinds of big director's names would pop up and I'd see it in the trades. So-and-so was going to make a movie about Oppenheimer. Every time I saw that, I'd be like, but they never came to anything. And then one day, Marty called me up and they said, hey, there is a new director who's interested in the book. And I said, who is it? And they said, Chris Nolan.

AVI
How did that feel?

ROBERT
In some ways I was like, fine, there's nothing I can do. If it had been some middling director I would be, I can do it, don't give it to that guy, give it to me. But it's like, if you've got a hip hop musical about Alexander Hamilton or a better example, let's say you have a hip hop musical about Ulysses Grant, and then, Ron Chernow calls you and says, oh, Lin-Manuel Miranda wants to do this.

Yeah, what am I going to do?

AVI
But you also had some. Didn't you have a connection to Chris Nolan?

AMY
From an earlier brush.

AVI
Yeah, yeah. Unrelated.

ROBERT
I totally forgot about that. Yea. So also in that same period, maybe it was a couple years before Oppenheimer, another work for hire job that was an open assignment, was the first Batman movie that Nolan made, which I guess is Batman Begins, I think. He had just signed on to do the first Batman movie and the reboot of the franchise, and they were looking for writers, and I was up for that job.

I never talked to him. I never talked to anybody. I pitched a take to somebody like his agent or a producing partner or a development person or somebody at Warners. And I thought it was like a pretty bold take. But I didn't get the job.

AMY
What was the take?

ROBERT
What was my take? My take was that Batman's retired. He's turned the franchise over to Robin, and Robin is kind of, like, struggling a bit. And also, Robin is licensing the brand. Every kind of product under the Robin brand, air fresheners. And he's doing commercials and so forth and so on. And so Batman, from retirement, is a little bit unhappy with that. And then a serial killer gets loose in Gotham City. And my idea was that  it would be like a Silence of the Lambs type serial killer. Like, not a goofy cartoon villain at all, but a really, really grisly true crime type serial killer.

I thought that was a great idea. I was subsequently told by people who really know the Batman business that that had already been done, in comics, by someone else, but it was still a good idea for a film like that. So I pitched that, and then in my version, Batman comes out of retirement, and then that pisses Robin off and they have a contentious relationship and yada yada, yada. But they didn't go for that. And they hired Chris Nolan and then, you know, he went on to make these three giant, hugely successful Batman movies. So that was my only previous relationship with him.

AVI
So interesting. I wonder if there's some, you know, common theme between this Batman pitch and then your Oppenheimer variation that didn't work. But Chris Nolan, who comes in and makes sort of the flip side.

ROBERT
I've never seen any of those Batman movies. It's not my cup of tea. So sure. I don't know, but some people have told me that, in terms of a dark, non cartoonish version, it's not that far off. And then there's also the possibility that Christopher Nolan just hates me.

AVI
Yes it's a secret vendetta.


ROBERT
Secret vendetta.

AVI
We were talking a bit about industry blindness. What do you think might have been there that affected your project?

ROBERT
I mean, I wasn't surprised that we had trouble getting our project going for all the reasons that my agent said, you know, it was period. It was a dark story. It was very cerebral. You know, it was a challenging movie for grown ups. But the difference is when you get the juice of a major, major, you know, arguably the most commercially powerful filmmaker working today behind it.

You know, he could film the phone book and it would probably be good, and it would make a lot of money. So my main takeaway after the phenomenon of Oppenheimer, apart from my own hurt feelings, was that his movie called attention to the Robert Oppenheimer story in a way that my little indie arthouse version never would have had I made it. That made Oppenheimer a household name again. And raised awareness of the issues that are in the film and around nuclear proliferation in a way that mine never could have. And that was an enormous public service.

AMY
I also want to point out, Robert, that the book was called The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer and you eliminated the triumph. And I'm wondering-

ROBERT
If that was like a jinx. Oh, yeah, I should have eliminated the tragedy.

AMY
Yeah.

ROBERT
I think the reason I did that is because I wanted to focus just on the trial portion, which is the Shakespearean tragedy. It's almost like a Greek tragedy, really. What happened to Oppenheimer? And he wasn't blameless in it, you know, he participated in his own destruction. So the movie, my version, anyway, was just the tragedy. We weren't going to show the so-called triumph, the bomb, which is arguably not a triumph either. So that's why.

AVI
Well we took all the stuff that you sent- the script, the character descriptions, the pitch, all of it and we put it into our custom GPT that we created and we asked it to show us what the movie, according to it, might look like if we were going to maybe pitch it now. Nobody's seen it. You haven't seen it. I'm going to show you a pitch deck first. And, for our listeners who aren't experiencing this on YouTube, maybe we can talk through it a bit,  as we move along. So I'm going to share that with you now. American Prometheus. Otherheimer.

ROBERT
Otherheimer.

AVI
That's what chat suggested- all the imagery, even this design for the deck itself. The palette is dark green. There's this a circle with someone who apparently is supposed to be J. Robert Oppenheimer looking off into the distance. I don't know if it's the ocean or the desert behind him.


AMY
Magnified, it's supposed to be a magnifier.

AVI
Like a magnifying glass. Basically, at this point, ChatGPT can create designs as well as come up with prompts for the actual imagery, which was made in Google Gemini.

ROBERT
That, to me, looks like a thumb crushing him.

AMY
I know, now I'm seeing that too.

AVI
Well, next page. We've got a particular valence across the entire presentation.

[reading] Logline- a brilliant scientist who built the atomic bomb becomes a hunted man in postwar America, destroyed by the same machinery of power he once served. And the elevator pitch is- this is a political thriller about the man who built the bomb and was destroyed by it, set in his 1954 security hearing. It's a portrait of intellect on trial, told in the smoke lit world of Atomic Noir.

Think The Conversation meets Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. A story where truth burns brighter than any explosion.

AMY
That's a good line AI, that's good work.

ROBERT
It's a political thriller.

AVI
Okay, again, this is all generative. Does this ring true at all at this point?

ROBERT
Yeah. It's pretty accurate. You know, it's a pretty slick description, but better than my description. This one might have gotten funded.

AVI
Well, if you were in a pitch meeting. The deck gives us a talking point, that it's not about the bomb. It's about the fallout of truth. See what it did there with fallout? For those who aren't watching, Robert just rolled his eyes.

ROBERT
No, it's complimentary! That's good.

AMY
I think it's good. The fallout of truth.

ROBERT
Yeah, it's a smart take.

AVI
A story where intellect collides with power and even brilliance can't survive politics.

ROBERT
Also accurate. Yeah.

AMY
That's interesting. Even brilliance can't survive politics. I think brilliance usually doesn't survive politics.

ROBERT
It's a liability today.

AMY
In the image, it's a back room with fluorescent lights and, there's a, I think it is a magnifying glass because Inside the "thumb" there's some papers with some redaction going on.

AVI
Yeah. The plate behind it is kind of like a hearing room. Definitely 50s. Suggestive. So the style that it came up with, because we ask it to come up with three styles for the film and then pick the one it likes the best out of that. And the style it picked, they call it Atomic Noir, a cinematic language of mid-century realism and moral tension.

[reading] The palette is desaturated cyan brass and cigarette white. Every frame, every frame lit by fluorescence. Desk lamps or projector flicker, smoke glass and paper define the texture. The camera moves slowly, as if the government itself were watching patient forensic unblur, making its beauty corroded by bureaucracy, intellect under surveillance, truth flickering beneath the hum of light.

And we've got, you know, kind of like, I guess maybe it was Oppenheimer's office.

AMY
It's like a chalkboard in the back with scribbles, and his desk is a little bit messy and has a sort of 50s radio or something. And then the magnifying element has a closeup of more papers with redactions.

ROBERT
I just point out the irony of using one apocalyptic, humanity destroying technology, AI, to describe another humanity destroying technology.

AVI
It's meta ironic. To continue in the pitch deck. We ask it to do some casting for us.

AMY
So you didn't have any casting?

ROBERT
I mean, I'm sure we batted ideas around because that's fun to do, but we never got to the point of going out to actors or anything.

AMY
Well let's see, let's see what our friend says.

AVI
Robert Oppenheimer- cerebral, magnetic, brittle. A man who mistakes intellect for invincibility. And the suggestions are Oscar Isaac- disillusion, precision. Jake Gyllenhaal with his fractured charisma or Adrien Brody, elegiac volatility.

ROBERT
Yeah, we're getting into refrigerator magnet poetry territory, right?

AMY
We have an image of, who is that?

AVI
That's kind of a bootleg Oscar Isaac I'd say.

AMY
He's sitting at a desk with a cigarette.

AVI
Yeah, everyone's smoking. Which is probably true.

AMY
What do you think? Who would you cast Robert?

ROBERT
Are we talking about, in a world where everything really did get made, and now we're trying to make another Oppenheimer movie?

AVI
This would be to make Otherheimer.

AMY
A lot of great historical figures get the treatment of two movies. Steve Jobs, Truman Capote, right? Elvis Presley, there's Elvis and Priscilla.

AVI
Jesus Christ.

AMY
Jesus Christ, Richard Nixon.

ROBERT
Maybe one of the reasons mine had such trouble finding purchase was that I thought my vision also was that it would be a modern dress version of the story. Like Shakespeare, right? Shakespeare, modern dress, new Oppenheimer and modern dress. And it would be in the world we're in now, where there's Fox News and there's cell phones and all the technology and the military guys would be in contemporary military uniforms and so forth. So, I don't know. Yeah. I don't know if I ever pitched that to anybody because even I knew we already had an uphill battle and that was even more uphill.

AVI
But everybody told you it was it was period. So that was the problem.

ROBERT
Okay but maybe it's not period.

ROBERT
Who would be in it now? Who would play Oppenheimer? Wow. That's a tough one. I mean, I still like Ralph [Fiennes].

AVI
ChatGP didn't go for Ralph.

ROBERT
Well. Well, yeah. Tom Middleson is another name who came up. Benedict Cumberbatch came up a lot.
But he had done it. The Imitation Game.

AMY
Great film. All right, let's see what else we got.

AVI
Kitty Oppenheimer, sharp tongued, self-medicating realist, loves him too much to pity him for his choice. And in the picture is Carrie Coon.

ROBERT
She's holding a martini.

AVI
Flinty intellect. Marion Cotillard- elegant volatility. Or Rebecca Hall with controlled despair.

ROBERT
They're all good. I love Carrie Coon. They're all really good. John Nelson's idea was to tell the story through Kitty. To make Kitty the main character.

 AMY
Of course I like that.

AVI
That would be super interesting.

ROBERT
You might could, as they say in Georgia, you might could get that film made today as a companion piece.

AMY
It's actually a good idea. I mean, I wonder, are there letters or in the 800 page book, how much, could you deduce from that book to write a story?

ROBERT
She's an incredible character, real life Kitty Oppenheimer- alcoholic, mentally unstable, like a Zelda Fitzgerald.

ROBERT
Also, Frank Oppenheimer, there's a version where it's told through Frank's eyes.

AMY
We've got some casting for Frank.

AVI
Well, here's Jean Tatlock. Brilliant, damaged, politically alive to every contradiction. And the first choice in the picture is Rooney Mara, for icy idealism.

AMY
She's smoking, also smoking.

AVI
And, of course, Jodie Comer, restless passion or Maya Hawke, wounded idealist.

Yeah. We'll move on to Lewis, whom you had called out as being sort of the third strand in your project.

ROBERT
He's a huge character, but he didn't have his own, you know, he had a completely different timeline.

AMY
Like in the Nolan film.

ROBERT
Robert Downey, you know, I think he won the Oscar, right? Did he win? He deserved it.

AMY
Yeah. He was so good.

AVI
Well, in this version, it's, Paul Giamatti smiling, cruelty. Bob Balaban for, polished malice or Christoph Waltz, and his refined menace for this bureaucratic zealot who sees himself as the nation's conscience.

AVI
And then we have Chevalier, the friend whose loyalty ruins them both. First choice is Mark Ruffalo and his earnest loyalty.

AVI
Toby Jones- moral fatigue or John Turturro- haunted sincerity.

ROBERT
The picture looks like Guy Pearce in Memento.

AMY
Maybe they put a young Mark Ruffalo's head on that. We have slatted window shades, light streaming through. I guess the smoky room, even though he's not smoking. But he does have an espresso cup.

AVI
Yeah, he's in a cafe. When I ask it to create these, when it's asked to create the image prompts, it's pulling from your material. So there must be a scene in there where they're in a cafe in Berkeley or something.

ROBERT
Yeah. But in my modern dress version, it's a cafe with a no laptops policy.

AMY
I love those cafes. In the backdrop, we have some film boxes. It says Project Trinity.

AVI
Next slide, we have you. It's Robert Edwards.

ROBERT
Nice. Am I smoking?

AVI
You're smoking big time.

ROBERT
But not on the screen. My hair is just on fire.

AVI
You're in the style, right?

AMY
But there's a twist of smoke, I don't know where it's coming from.

AVI
Robert Edwards is a writer and filmmaker. Known for Land of the Blind and One More Time, blending political insight with emotional intelligence. A graduate of West Point and Oxford, he brings a soldier's precision and a poet's conscience to every story he tells.

ROBERT
I'm not a graduate of West Point or Oxford. And I don't bring a soldier's precision, or a poet's conscience.

AVI
So consider that a field promotion.

AMY
I think you should use that as your headshot now. It's pretty good.

ROBERT
I'd like to have an Oxford and West Point degree.

AVI
Well, we will happily ship you all of that as a reward.

ROBERT
You know, kidding aside, that will now be on the web and it'll show up in my web profile.

AVI
Well that's true. We are going to make this available in the Substack. So, you know, enjoy the accolades.

ROBERT
Thank you all. Might as well make me an Oscar winner while you're at it.

AVI
Well, apparently it's going to make you the director of Oppenheimer, so.

ROBERT
Yeah. That's right.

AMY
We have some posters.

AVI
There's two posters here. The first one I like.

AMY
It went to South by Southwest.

AVI
I did ask it to put some laurels, to to throw some laurels on there.



AVI
I said just pick and I said to please pull a press quote for each of them and a studio also. So one of them, it's an A24 and FNM, which is us, Films Not Made.

AMY
I didn't know we were, you know, producing movies now. But sure.

AVI
You know, everybody gets an upgrade.

AMY
We're not producing. The goal of the podcast for me is to not produce anymore.

AVI
We're not, not producing. So, just for the listeners, why don't you describe them Amy.

AMY
So the one on the left has the bomb. The big bomb, even though that's not a feature of Robert's' script. And it says in big font. American Prometheus. Otherheimer. And it has a shadow of Oppenheimer, I guess, in a hat looking out at the bomb. And you know, the billing block. Kind of a billing block, not a full billing block. The one on the right, the A24 one has again, a silhouette of Oppenheimer's head in front of, a chalkboard with, you know, mathematical equations and, an atom drawn in chalk.

AVI
And the pull quote from IndieWire says it's a masterwork of moral tension. That's pretty good. And the other one, the pull quote from The Hollywood Reporter says it's riveting, restrained and quietly explosive.

ROBERT
Just what you'd expect from an Oxford and West Point graduate.

AVI
We have one last page, which just came up. Sometimes ChatGPT or any AI model hallucinates. And so, this came up, not immediately as an image, but it did come up as some text. So I just ran with it for a second and made a third hallucinated poster and it's...

AMY
Otterheimer.

ROBERT
Otterheimer.

AVI
Where we have, instead of Oscar Isaac, there is actually an otter sitting at a desk.

AMY
It's a good idea. It's a solid idea to really differentiate. It would really differentiate the film from the Nolan version.

ROBERT
Kidding aside, the AI language is pretty good. It gets a few things factually wrong, but it did a good job of capturing key elements of the story that I think would appeal to studios and financiers and buyers in some ways better than I could.

AMY
We love Otherheimer. In the vein of Coco Chanel or Eve Saint Laurent having two films at approximately the same time come out.

ROBERT
Usually one of those films completely crushes the other one.

AMY
Well you're already crushed, right?

ROBERT
I'm pretty crushed. So, yeah.

AVI
We have one more asset we made, which is the trailer. So, again, using the same assets, kind of the same methodology. We said, give us an outline for a trailer and then give us the prompts for each shot, and then, we put those into, in this case, we were using Sora. I put it into Premiere. I did a little editing, and we'll show you what we got.

[TRAILER]

We built it. To end war. Doctor Oppenheimer, are you loyal to your country?
State your name for the record.

You can't have a country that doesn't love you back.

They call it the hearing. I call it the trial.

Do you ever consider that what you built could not be controlled? Smoking is never the problem.

Belief was.

History doesn't remember who built it. Only who survived. You don't fear power, Albert. You feel what it says about you. You said you'd never name me. You lied. Do you deny your allegiance?

I deny your understanding.

They took everything from, you know, the boat. I gave it to them.

You could walk away. Robert, and leave them the story. They've already written it.

ROBERT
Wow, that is crazy to see it generated like that.

AMY
I mean, what I have noticed now that it's motion, is that when people are smoking, the smoke is not actually coming from the cigarettes. In one case, it's coming from someone's arm. Even if they don't have a cigarette, there's just this cigarette smoke.

AVI
The second shot of the woman talking to Robert there's this huge cloud of smoke but you never see her with a cigarette.

ROBERT
That was pretty terrifying. I mean, yeah, it's cool to see it, but I'm really worried about the future of filmmaking.

AVI
Say a little more about that. I mean, you're a working screenwriter. How are people talking about it? Who's using it and not talking about it? You know, what's your sense? What's your temperature on all this right now?

ROBERT
I'm more worried about the production end of it, having seen that. It's a little bit uncanny valley, and a little bit not quite human, but pretty damn close. And soon it will get better and better than even stuff that's made by humans. Like, that's how it works, right? It looks at what's out there and then mimics it.

So, soon it will be able to do all those things and make mediocre C plus or B minus television and movies as good as humans can. And that will be presumably the majority of the entertainment that we consume. Because it's good enough.

AMY
Cultural flattening. Right. It's just it's flattening everything down to the middle.

ROBERT
Now there's still space for something different and human made. Idiosyncratic and real and unusual and weird to break through. And that's good. And that's the good news. But yeah, the flattening of, of the culture and of art is very apparent right there.

AMY
Why don't we just talk to an executive and see. We have a Hollywood executive that joins our meetings, and we can talk about this. In this case, it's Finn.

ROBERT
I can pitch Oppenheimer to Finn?

AVI
I mean, you can do whatever you want with Finn. I got him everything you sent me.

AMY
I don't know if he read the script. Maybe the development executive read it.

AVI
Do you get the sense that basically any script you send out, it's just going to get run through ChatGPT for coverage?

ROBERT
Yeah.

AMY
Oh, that's already happening.

ROBERT
It's unemployed an entire generation of college graduates.

AMY
Yeah. Someone sent me that software, and I tried it.



ROBERT
I'm not sure that's worse than some kid who just graduated with a B.A..

AMY
Exactly. I'm just saying it was actually pretty useful.

AVI
All right, let's talk to Finn. Like I said, I've sent him everything that you gave us, Robert. And, let's see what he has to say. And we can really talk to him about anything.

FINN
All right, so before we get too deep into the weeds, I want to make sure we're talking about the same movie in our heads. I've gone through the materials, and there's a strong core here. It's got emotional stakes, a visual identity that could stand out in just enough mystery to keep the audience leaning in. The question I keep bumping up against is, do we want to lean into the intimacy of the story, or blow it out to match the bigger genre elements you've hinted at?

Because right now it's straddling two tones. It could be a smart, contained character piece, or it could aim for a broader, more commercial scope. That decision will ripple through casting, budget and ultimately how possible this is to get made. So where's your instinct? Which version of this do you actually want to chase?

ROBERT
Finn? Are you asking me if I want to make the commercial version of this movie, or the uncommercial version?

FINN
Yeah, that's basically the question, though I'd frame it a little less like a binary. What I mean is, are we chasing the stripped down, intimate portrait of a mind under pressure? Or the fully staged epic with all the political and historical machinery around him? Those are two very different production paths, and they each require different compromises. So I'm asking Robert where this creative heartbeat really sits.
Because once we know that, yeah, the rest of the decisions get a lot clearer.

ROBERT
Yeah, I would take issue with that characterization of it, because I don't think it's exactly either of those. I think it is more like the intimate character film that you're talking about, but it isn't. The stakes aren't just for the individual character. The stakes come from the second version.

FINN
You're talking about a giant, epic geopolitical plot. The stakes are enormous and geopolitical. Okay. That actually helps a lot. So you're talking about something that plays in close with the emotional lens, tight on the character, but the consequences of his choices still feel massive. That's a tricky but potent combination. You keep the budget leaner because you're not staging every battlefield, but you still get the tension and scope through implication and smart use of a few big moments. The key will be making sure the audience feels that weight without constantly cutting away the spectacle.

ROBERT
Well, yeah.

AVI
What do you suggest we do now, then, Finn?

FINN
If that's the lane you want, I'd say start by locking the script into that point of view. Everything filtered through your central character. No wandering into scenes he doesn't touch emotionally. Then think about a handful of well-chosen, high impact sequences that can suggest the larger stakes without blowing the budget. Once that's clear, you can build a lookbook and casting ideas that match that intimacy, so potential partners immediately see how it plays. The next step after that is finding a producer or financier who loves contained weighty dramas.

AVI
I mean, Robert's got all that and he's gone down that road. I think, you know, look, Christopher Nolan came out with his Oppenheimer. So, I mean, do you think there's space for a twin film? Essentially.

FINN
That's a tough one. When a filmmaker like Nolan plants a flag on a subject, especially with something as high profile as Oppenheimer, the market tends to feel saturated for a while. But here's the thing. If Robert's version is genuinely different in tone and scope, it can still live. You wouldn't sell it as a rival. You'd position it as the intimate counterpoint.

Think of it almost like a chamber piece that illuminates sides of the man and the story the epic didn't have room for. The challenge is making that distinction crystal clear for audiences and buyers, so it doesn't feel like deja vu. What unique angle does Robert have that Nolan never touched?

ROBERT
That is a pretty savvy assessment, like from a marketing point of view. So I would pitch it as a film that drills down on a sliver of the epic story that Nolan told and, stylistically, is boldly different because it's done in modern dress.

FINN
That's interesting. By putting it in modern dress, you sidestep direct comparison with Nolan's film entirely and turn it into a thematic echo rather than a historical retelling. That also gives you freedom with location, costume, even pacing. You're not bound by period accuracy and the stakes can be reframed for today's world. The trick will be making the audience feel the resonance without it becoming too on the nose. Done right, it can feel fresh and urgent. Instead of like Oppenheimer light.

AMY
Oppenheimer light. Is that what he said?

ROBERT
What do you think he means?

AVI
You mean Oppenheimer light? Finn, is that what you mean?

FINN
I just mean you don't want it to feel like a scaled down copy of someone else's movie. If you anchor it fully in a modern context, make the themes speak to current dilemmas, and give the characters their own identities, it stands on its own. The audience shouldn't be thinking about Nolan's film while watching yours. They should be caught up in this story, this world, and only afterwards realize the historical parallel.

AVI
Well, what do you think this is? Is this like an indie thing, or do you think we could go studio?

FINN
Given what you've described? Small scope, modern setting, intimate character, focus, it naturally leans indie. Studios tend to look for broader hooks or spectacle to justify the spend, and this is more about nuance and performance. That said, if you can attach a high profile actor or director who sees it as an awards caliber piece, you might get a specialty division or prestige arm of a studio interested. But I'd start by thinking indie, where creative control is usually stronger.

AVI
Now about budgets, let's talk money.

FINN
All right, so if we keep it modern, dress, limited locations and focused on a small core cast, you're probably in the low to mid seven figure range for a proper indie, maybe up to 10 million. If you've got name talent and want some breathing room for production value, push past that and you're in territory where you need bigger commercial elements to justify it. The real cost drivers here will be cast.

AMY
The conversation ended.

ROBERT
He left.

AMY
He just hung up. I want to know what indie divisions of studios he's talking about. Like from the 90s?

ROBERT
It's not wrong. He's pretty smart. I just wish he didn't sound and look like he just got here from CPac.

AVI
Well, you know, there's others like him.

ROBERT
The AI that created him kind of captured a certain aspect of that smarmy, you know, Hollywood executive pretty well.

AMY
All right, well, thank you, Bob, for coming.

ROBERT
Guys. That was so fun. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. It was great to revisit this.

AVI
It was great to hear about it. And thanks for being such a good sport, because I know that exposing stuff that you've worked on for such a long time-  a labor of love, to then dig it up again can be traumatic, but one thing that Amy suggested is that this be about is some kind of closure which, you probably already have, but maybe this this is another type.

ROBERT
It was. Yeah. Now, I made my peace with this thing a while ago, and, Yeah, it's it's it's fun to revisit it at this point and not painful. So I enjoyed doing it.

AMY
Good! Thank you.

AVI
Oh, one last thing. Robert, if there's anything you want to talk about that you're working on now, any place people can find you, online, have at it.

ROBERT
Sure. Thank you. Yeah, I have a couple of novels in the works, but mainly you can find me on Substack. I have a weekly political blog called The King's Necktie. Just search Substack and you'll find it. It's mostly politics, culture. Whatever else is on my mind that week. Amy's been a long time supporter and patron of it, and I really appreciate that. So that's my plug.

AMY
We'll talk to you soon.

AVI
You've been listening to Films Not Made, but if you want an even better experience, check us out on YouTube where you can see all the new materials, including the pitch, deck and trailer.

AMY
And subscribe to our Substack for show notes and more about our guests.

AVI
And please follow us on Instagram and TikTok.

AMY
And of course, we have merch. Check that out.

AVI
Thanks again for listening and watching. We'll see you next time.