‘Oppenheimer’ - Interview with Hair Department Head Jaime Leigh McIntosh

Oppenheimer became an unexpected box office hit, close to making 1 Billion dollars. Christopher Nolan’s three-hour historical epic follows J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the man behind the atomic bomb. Nolan and his team, including Hair Department Head Jaime Leigh McIntosh, came together to recreate one of the most pivotal moments in history.  

The film spans decades, locations, and perspectives during its lengthy runtime with over 70 actors in speaking roles and 18 being aged over time, taking the audience into the inner workings of Oppenheimer’s mind. Offscreen had the opportunity to talk to McIntosh about testing and painting hair over decades, working with IMAX, and creating young Oppie.

Jillian Chilingerian: Hi, Jaime. So nice to meet you

Jaime Leigh McIntosh: And you.

Jillian Chilingerian: I'm so excited. This is my favorite film of the year. I have seen it six times.

Jaime Leigh McIntosh: You put in some hours. That's impressive.

Jillian Chilingerian: Every time I tell someone they say "That's about 18 hours of your life that you spent". Last week I talked to Luisa and so now I'm excited to get the other half of it. Every time I watch it, there are so many more details. First I want to dive into the research process for you with so many iconic real-life people and trying to track them over decades and pull like as closely as you can. In this movie, it is not like they have to mirror exactly how they look. I think that really plays into how natural and authentic it feels.

Jaime Leigh McIntosh: Research started with listening to the book. I just spent a lot of time on the freeway listening to the book and of course, reading the script, but at that time, it was like you had to make an appointment and sit in a room and read it as quickly as you could and try to digest all of that at once. We weren't able to have a copy of it on hand, so it was a lot of taking notes and learning for me this entire world because I truthfully did not know who Robert Oppenheimer was just being from New Zealand and not paying attention to nuclear weapons. Then it was getting all these names, researching, seeing what everybody looked like at different times then seeing who was being cast in these roles and thinking okay, they have very different looks or they look quite similar. Then having those conversations with Chris of being like, how far are we leaning in with each of our cast members to make them look like that historical figure? There were certain points and pieces that he'd wanted to replicate to get the feeling but no one was ever 100% we had to do a carbon copy of them. It was more just finding that essence of them making sure that it worked for that cast member and that it looked natural. All the research as well to go into a background world. So getting a feel for the different hairstyles of the different times and the different periods but also their locations and just making sure that we weren't glamorizing everything that not every wife and mother and woman that was at Los Alamos at that time was looking like they were out of a Hollywood movie. I love the research side of it, that's always so exciting for me to dig into because it just helps you with your vision moving forward. Chris is so collaborative that working with him, Luisa, and Ellen, the costume designer, helps you see things so much clearer when you have so much discussion and so much time to collaborate with everybody answering your questions.

Jillian Chilingerian: Oh, yes, for sure. There's a functionality to how these characters look and you don't question it for a second. This is how these people would live and feel through these lives.

Jaime Leigh McIntosh: Yeah, it was actually something that I mentioned in my interview when I first sat down with Chris and Emma. We were 20 minutes into the interview and I just had to say, just so you know, I'm not a hair stylist who naturally leans into everything looking perfect and crisp and Hollywood. I tend to naturally lean into realism and don't mind a bit of fluff and frizz and fly away and. So I said if you want everyone to look immaculate, then I might not be the hairstylist for you. I said I could do it, but I don't naturally lean in that way and obviously, that was what they were after, so that was lucky.

Jillian Chilingerian: Really being able to play to your strengths and skills in this piece.

Jaime Leigh McIntosh: I think it's just good to say from the beginning. Yeah, getting halfway through the job and being like, this really isn't my forte.

Jillian Chilingerian: A lot of the conversation around the hair and the makeup within Oppenheimer is really centered on the aging aspect of it, so I want to talk about those young Oppie beginning sequences. Those are some of my favorite sequences in the movie. After watching the film, I walked away like how do they do that? From the curly hair to the flushed face.

Jaime Leigh McIntosh: Yeah, of course working with Chris on what marks he wanted to hit and that timeline because we found all the photo references that we could have, so when he's younger, he had this wild head of hair and it was just like, you want to see that he's like definitely, is that but I don't want to use wigs. I'm like okay, so we are definitely shooting this younger stuff first, and then he was just like, Yes, I think we can. I think there are a few shots we've shot at the end of the film, and I needed to use a top hair piece to match what we've shot at the beginning of the film, but just really spent so much time, especially with all the other characters as well, just working out that timeline. So knowing where we needed to start where our middle was where our ending would be, and what would be possible with Cillian's own hair. Luckily he had kind of a bit of his hair grow for us. Cillian's natural hair has salt and pepper going on, but I didn't want to color his hair permanently in any way because I wanted to be able to utilize it as aging happens. I was airbrushing his hair to cover that so that's why he has a beautiful brunette coloring going on when he was younger we permed the top of his hair to give it a random curl and also we wouldn't be spending so much time in the morning curling Cillian's his own hair, and there's a fine line of that looking done. It was just like that having that perm in there already to be a spritz down with water and scrunch it up a little bit at the reasonably wild and then airbrush it with temporary color each day. I think he really loved that very rock and roll when he would come in the mornings and kind of wear it down on his forehead. He only got to keep it for like maybe a week and a half and then we spent five hours cutting it off.

Jillian Chilingerian: I remember when they released a still of him with the hair and that's personally my favorite. So for the other characters in the aging and deaging process, did you use that same technique?

Jaime Leigh McIntosh: Yeah, Chris wanted to stay away from wigs. He was just like, I don't want to go down that route and then there was a concern on my end, with painting here to be gray and knowing that we're shooting on IMAX and just worrying that hair could look or appear painted. It has like a translucency to it and if you're just painting white onto it, I was a little nervous on how that would read but we're doing tests and trying things out and just having Chris's look at it and Hoyte looking at it and then understanding how it's going to translate on screen was incredibly helpful and they just guided me through that and it would be you know, a daily that Chris would have a look and he'd bring Hoyte over and be like, I think maybe we just need a little bit more on the temples or whatever it was just having that guidance to help with that. So there was a lot of painting of covering natural grays and then letting them come through slowly and then adding more so there were so many different levels that were happening throughout everyone's timelines and everyone had their own kind of recipe and technique that was being used to get the end result that we that we needed and then of course staying on top of that continuity because we're shooting completely out of sequence.

Jillian Chilingerian: Did you have a tracker for each decade of how you know if someone's hairline was receding or grays are popping up to maintain that continuity.

Jaime Leigh McIntosh: Normally, you always do a breakdown of your script and a character breakdown anyway, but this was just far more detailed, and just always made sure all of my team knew what level they were needed for every scene, and then just made sure we were taking very good photographs, so when we needed to recreate it that we would know what had literally been painted white and gray and what hairlines had been made to appear for all of that type of stuff. So we even had Dylan Arnold, who plays Frank, who has this insanely beautiful lush hair, and we knew that Frank, looking at pictures of him was really quite thin. He started losing his hair reasonably early and to make that believable for us, it was just like, Okay, well, I think they have to adjust Dylan's hairline from the very beginning. He needs to start to look like his hair is not necessarily receding but just a different hairline than what Dylan naturally has because it's very full and Dylan was so awesome that he was just taking Yeah, cool. Let's do it. I saw it, and a week later he was just like, I can't even remember what my hairline used to look like. When we saw him at his oldest age Luisa's team put on a silicone bald plate-like a partial bald cap through the top and then we had a hairpiece made for him that was significantly thinner and then blended into his own sides and lots of hand painting and everything to blend that in, which is just a little bit more believable that he ended up there in that timeframe.

Jillian Chilingerian: Obviously have we have a whole sequence of this film that is in black and white. Did that have any effect on your work with the painting and the coloring as well as maybe the hair texture of like dealing with that tone and like how did you test that?

Jaime Leigh McIntosh: Yeah, I mean, that was for both color and black and whites. It was a lot of testing. Like for instance Benny Safdie's hair is naturally dark like it's like a blue black. As soon as you airbrush on white, onto that it is blue. So if I use the same color on Benny Safdie that I used on Josh Hartnett, for instance, they would end up with a very different result. So White would go great on for Josh's hair because it's lighter to start with. We would put it on to Benny and it would go this really funky, weird white-blue color like really kind of glow so it was working out all those things are going okay, well we actually need to use more of a peach color to counteract the blue that naturally hadn't here. So it was working out all of those things. And then also just that contrast that when we're doing black and white, of what's going to read and that's once again just really leaning on the expertise of Chris and Hoyte to be able to guide me with that I would get it to a point that I thought would be in the realm. More often than not, it was fine. Every now and again it would just be like oh, we think we need to add a little bit more like that's not not quite enough. It's not quite reading and for me, it's always easier to add more than take away. It's about a faster application to add when you're you know last minute on see it rather than be able to take stuff off. The same thing is especially true with Robert Downey Jr. Jr. with his character, Strauss, because we see him in a lot and black and white. When we see him younger, he has a darker gray. Those last lots of scenes with him his his more reasonable white. So for me, it was most of the time focusing on the depth rather than the shade or the tone. It was more than a depth of how dark it was reading because I was bleaching the top of his hair to give me a clean palette to work from so I could make it darker gray or steely or I could have it more white depending on how I airbrushed and hand painted it in the morning. So I had just the option to have that variety.

Jillian Chilingerian: Gosh. That's so fascinating.

Jaime Leigh McIntosh: Robert, that's so much. I feel so sorry for also shaving.

Jillian Chilingerian: There was another movie where someone said they also shaved their head. I thought it was a bald cap and then I heard people actually shave that part of their head and it grew back.

Jaime Leigh McIntosh: I'm so glad that Robert was willing to lean into that. Because then there is no line of I don't know if you want to for whatever reason. You can't kind of get in there and fix and sort something out and all these incredible close-ups that Chris does and then the IMAX and Robert was in so much of that it was nice to be able to just adjust his own here. I'm thankful that when Chris said, Do you have a technique that you can use to do you know how you'll do this, I had a few years earlier had a conversation with Ryan Gosling about it when he was working on Blade Runner and I said how did they thin your hair out on Blue Valentine and he fully talked me through how they did it. It was just like fascinating answers like I have to use that technique one day. As soon as Chris said, Do you know how you think you're going to do it, I was like, Yeah, can't wait. Waiting for years to thrive. That was really exciting. I was so happy Robert was into that.

Jillian Chilingerian: Oh my gosh, that's that's such a great connection.

Jaime Leigh McIntosh: Random chance to show.

Jillian Chilingerian: I want to talk about like the women in the film, Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt. I wish we had more time with Florence because I love her in this film. I'm curious about her hair and the same with Emily's hair over time as we see her getting old by the end of the film.

Jaime Leigh McIntosh: I'd worked with Florence before, and I was very excited to work with her again. She came in with what do we call it? It was so bleached blonde. It was short. It was like sticking up everywhere. I was like, Oh, you're going to be going brunette. Is that okay? And she's just like. I was like, you have to start growing it for me. She went through those growing-out stages where there were just awkward links and all that kind of stuff. I'm forever grateful to her for just really letting it go and I just said to her because it was months from when we were going to be shooting with her and for the camera test. I used like little extensions to be able to create some type of a little bob shape and then in the hopes that that was going to grow by the time we shot. She persevered and I made her promise that at any point she was just like I can't deal with this anymore, before you do something drastic call me and let me do it. I can do it in a way that is going to still work for us and I just knew that there were intimate scenes they would be doing and I wanted it all to be able to be her hair. That was great, and of course, she goes through different levels to be more deconstructive. It was nice to have her as a brunette and she was one that we did quite similar to the historical figure so that was awesome. Emily also came in with beautiful blonde hair, so she knew that she needed to go a bit darker. We didn't take her as dark as Kitty Oppenheimer. We knew that Emily needed to go back to blonde for her next job after Oppenheimer, so it was finding that compromise that it was dark enough that Chris was happy and Emily was happy. So that's where we landed with Emily and then brought her hair length up to something that would work for younger through Los Alamos. I loved being able to do some more natural styles on Emily for a period piece. It was nice to have windswept and not roll a set every time you see her, so that was a lot of fun. When we see her older, we used a hairpiece just through the back, so I could lift that link and cheat it to appear shorter. We sprayed it with L'Oreal temporary colored hairspray, which I wouldn't normally do because it can create a bit of dullness on the hair. You don't use a lot of shiny products with it but that's what we wanted. We wanted it to have a little bit of harshness and darkness to it and for it to look over-processed like it had the color build-up that she had. At the time women covering grays would just continually do the roots but then take it through the ends, so you just get this color build-up. They would just have a dullness to it. She'd come back from makeup I would finish styling her hair and then we would spray it with dark brown. She'd look in the mirror and she'd be like, there she is.

Jillian Chilingerian: I forgot what she looked like with dark hair.

Jaime Leigh McIntosh: Yeah she's lucky she can go either way.

Jillian Chilingerian: Hearing you talk through all this, there's there's such a timelessness. It doesn't feel period-specific, but it going through the different decades without it being overly distracting now we're in the 50s and this is how people styled. They are going through time and I really admire that and the way we get to watch them transition naturally.

Jaime Leigh McIntosh: Yeah, and it's just like that thing of most people are not the height of fashion. It's not like 1950 comes and Kitty Oppenheimer has the latest thin that is on the Vogue. So it's just things lag a little bit in real life and once you find that, women find a color or length or style that at some point in their life they loved and thought they looked good. Well, then they will hold on to that for quite a while. It may change slightly, but not normally drastically.

Jillian Chilingerian: That ties into the iconography of all of these characters over time coming to life. This is insightful because I love this movie. So I'm like as much as I can learn about it from all of you, it is so exciting.

Jaime Leigh McIntosh: Oh, cool. Yes, I'm glad you like that. I'm so glad people love it.

Jillian Chilingerian: I was excited for it. I wish they would bring it back into the theaters because I want to go see it again

Jaime Leigh McIntosh: Yeah, I only saw it once. I'm like, Oh, I might have to try and get to screening at some something.

Jillian Chilingerian: Well thank you.

You can read our review of Oppenheimer, here.

You can read our interview with Production Designer Ruth De Jong, here

You can read our interview with Makeup Department Head Luisa Abel, here

You can read our interview with Costume Designer Ellen Mirojnick, here