The 72-year-old actor admitted that it was a bit boring visiting the sets of the film, which won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor.

The same scenes and dialogues were repeated and filmed from different angles “about 15 times”, but then there was the encounter with the reel life Oppenheimer, considered the father of the atomic bomb.

“As he walked up to me, dressed in a baggy brown suit that looked like something out of the 1940s, wearing an Oppenheimer hat from New Mexico with a silver belt buckle, I jokingly shouted ‘Dr Oppenheimer, Dr Oppenheimer, I’ve been waiting to meet you for decades’, and he laughed,” Byrd told PTI.

Bird, who wrote the 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece with the late Martin Sherwin, hopes the massive success of Christopher Nolan’s film sends a message to Hollywood and Bollywood filmmakers.

He said, “I am satisfied with the Oscars, but I hope it sends a message to Hollywood and Bollywood that audiences are eager to see filmmakers working on serious historical and biographical stories. I myself am very happy with this film. I think it is an artistic achievement.”

Oppenheimer was a leading scientist on the Manhattan Project, the code name for a US government research project set up to create nuclear weapons during World War II.

Bird and Sherwin were the first in a long list of people that Nolan, who also wrote the film’s screenplay, thanked when receiving his first Oscar.

Sherwin, who died in 2021, worked on the book from 1980 until its publication in 2005. Bird joined as his writing partner in 2000 after much persuasion.

“Marty kept coming over and over and over again. He knew I was looking for a new book to write … and I didn’t have a job in mind. He said, ‘If you don’t come with me, it will be written on my grave, on my tombstone: He took it with him’. He was very funny,” Bird recalled.

The blockbuster success of the film has rubbed off on readers of the book, which Bird said has been on the New York Times bestseller list for six months.

The book is now available in several editions worldwide, including in Chinese, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

“It’s amazing, this book came out 18 years ago and now it’s found a new life, a much bigger audience. When it came out it got very respectable reviews, it sold modestly, but it never got on any bestseller lists. But now because of Nolan’s film it’s on the bestseller list in the NYT,” Bird said.

He said there were at least “three attempts” to adapt the book into a film over a dozen years before Nolan came to the film industry.

Three parties wrote separate scripts and tried to get the film made by a studio or by a big star. Bird said all efforts were unsuccessful.

He recalled, “Nolan suddenly appeared in the year 2021… He had read the book in March. He wrote the screenplay in the next four-five months and it was only in September 2021 that he called me and said ‘I’ve written the script. I’m optioning it and making this film’.”

In Bird’s view, the film’s controversial intimate scene, in which J. Robert Oppenheimer and his girlfriend Jean Tatlock read the Bhagavad Gita in bed together, was possibly both “unlikely” and “inappropriate”.

Oppenheimer learned Sanskrit and is said to have been influenced by the Gita. The scene, which shows a line from Hindu holy scripture, sparked protests in India.

“My wife said, ‘That was unnecessary’. In the film he was trying to convey two things: to convey Oppenheimer’s interest in the Gita and Sanskrit, and to explain his love for Tatlock. So perhaps it was inappropriate to combine the two,” Bird said.

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