IS IT BOLLOCKS?

Film Buff investigates the facts behind outlandish movie plots.

THIS MONTH OPPENHEIMER

Q Did Oppie really meet Einstein, as depicted in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer? Or it is just theory?

J. Robert Oppenheimer did know Albert Einstein for many years; they met at Cal Tech in 1932 and worked alongside each other at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Science in the late 40s and early 50s. Oppie and Einstein began as colleagues but, as the father of the atom bomb wrote in 1966 in the New York Times, ‘It was only in the last decade of his life that we were… something of friends.’ They regularly went on walks together and chatted. Whether the duo discussed the cost of scientific breakthrough while gazing at a pond isn’t known, but the conversation the twosome have (that so enrages Robert Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss in the film) was based on documented sentiments and interactions the eggheads had. During one of their strolls, Einstein told Oppenheimer, ‘When it has once been given you to do something rather reasonable, forever afterward your work and life are a little strange,’ and later disagreed with him about Oppenheimer’s security-clearance hearing in 1954. Einstein did not think Oppenheimer should subject himself to such interrogation, believing that he had served his country during the war, but Oppenheimer ignored his advice and went ahead. Did they specifically discuss whether he had indeed ‘destroyed the world’ in dreaming up so abominable a weapon? No one knows.

VERDICT NOT BOLLOCKS

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The biggest movies… STARRING KEN WATANABE

ON LOCATION

REEL SPOTS BEHIND THE CAMERA

WHAT? The whitewashed church at the top of a rock in Mamma Mia! where Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan trill The Winner Takes It All on their way to Sophie’s wedding.

WHERE? Agios Ioannis Kastri, near Glossa in northern Skopelos, Greece.

GO? There are 110 vertiginous carved stone steps from the pretty beach at the base of the rocky outcrop that this bijou church is perched on, so bring water and walking shoes. Worth it for the stunning views down the coast of Skopelos.

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