But he’s probably not going to make them. Nolan got his start with indie productions like Memento, but he’s now famous for assembling blockbuster productions with huge sets and big budgets. He’s likely never going back to a more subtle production style.

“I’m drawn to working at a large scale because I know how fragile the opportunity to marshal those resources is,” Nolan said about sticking with big productions. “I know that there are so many filmmakers out there in the world who would give their eye teeth to have the resources I put together, and I feel I have the responsibility to use them in the most productive and interesting way.”

“It felt like a $100 million indie,” De Jong said last year. “Chris wanted to shoot all over the United States…just plane tickets alone and putting crew up all over the place [is expensive]. Not to mention I have to build Los Alamos, it doesn’t exist. That’s where I really felt like it was impossible. Chris said, ‘Forget the money. Let’s just design what we want.’ So that’s what we did, and when construction first budgeted my town it was $20 million. Chris was like, ‘Yeah, no. Stop.’”

Nolan did “the most incredible thing to achieve all of the desired looks and designs,” De Jong said. The filmmaker told her, “I’ve got to go do my homework,” which she later realized meant re-organizing the film’s shooting schedule in order to consolidate days and free up the budget for the production design. De Jong said “Oppenheimer” was originally set for an 85-day shoot, perhaps even more, but Nolan cut it down by at least 30 days.

“We made the movie unbelievably quickly,” star Cillian Murphy said on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast. “The pace of that was insane.”