Christopher Nolan was “appropriately nervous” shooting his first-ever sex scenes for his new movie Oppenheimer.

The biographical thriller, which tells the story of atomic bomb creator J. Robert Oppenheimer, is Nolan’s first film to feature sex scenes, and he admitted he was suitably nervous about filming those sequences.

“Any time you’re challenging yourself to work in areas you haven’t worked in before, you should be appropriately nervous and appropriately careful and planned and prepared,” Nolan told Insider in a recent interview.

“When you look at Oppenheimer’s life and you look at his story, that aspect of his life, the aspect of his sexuality, his way with women, the charm that he exuded, it’s an essential part of his story.”

The sex scenes help depict a passionate romance between Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy, and Florence Pugh’s character Jean Tatlock.

Nolan explained, “It felt very important to understand their relationship and to really see inside it and understand what made it tick without being coy or allusive about it, but to try to be intimate, to try and be in there with him and fully understand the relationship that was so important to him.”

Due to the sex and nudity, Oppenheimer was rated R in the U.S., marking Nolan’s first movie to garner that rating since 2002’s Insomnia.

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