Oppenheimer Had A Little Help From The Creator Of Game Of Thrones And His Dragon Train

New Mexico has never exactly been a hot bed of the entertainment industry. Yes, that was where "Breaking Bad" was made, but when you think about the big wigs in the industry, you aren't picturing them living there. That is not a judgment on the state or its people. It's just not New York or Los Angeles. Well, New Mexico happened to be the central location for one of the biggest films of the year: Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer."

The program to develop the atomic bomb may have been called the Manhattan Project, but the place where it was being created was Los Alamos, New Mexico, as its open desert space made it the perfect place to test a bomb in isolation. Christopher Nolan, being the practical filmmaker he is, wanted to shoot in New Mexico, and shooting at any location poses a myriad of logistical challenges that the production team must solve.

In the case of "Oppenheimer," one of those challenges was finding a train in New Mexico that they were able to shoot in and make period appropriate for the 1940s setting. After all, Nolan isn't just going to build a train car set on a Hollywood stage and green screen in the background out the windows. No matter how well that can be rendered, we would always be able to tell that Cillian Murphy's Oppenheimer wasn't actually trekking across the American west.

Luckily, the "Oppenheimer" team was able to wrangle together some train cars and a railway to utilize during production, and they happened to come courtesy of someone who is probably New Mexico's highest profile creative resident: "Game of Thrones" book series author George R.R. Martin.

George R.R. Martin has been a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico since 1979, and naturally, he became a fixture of the community. As explained in the recently released book "Unleashing Oppenheimer: Inside Christopher Nolan's Explosive Atomic-Age Thriller" by Jada Yuan, one of the ways Martin wanted to display the love of his newfound home was co-founding Sky Railway, which connects a rail line between Santa Fe and Lamy, New Mexico for a variety of different kinds of tours.

Because of Martin's most famous works, the train cars for this particular company have elaborate paintings of dragons and wolves on the outside, which would certainly clash with the period setting of "Oppenheimer." However, the insides of the cars could be redone to fit the period. So, to shoot these train sequences, they would hop aboard Martin's "dragon cars" and shoot for the 40-minute trip from Santa Fe to Lamy, and then they'd just turn around and head back to where they had came form. Because this is a private railway, they had free rein to go back and forth as much as they needed.

Martin's train cars weren't the only ones used, though. They tracked down two vintage Pullman cars in Santa Fe, which were much more appropriate for things like dining and lounge cars, and since they didn't have dragon paintings on them, they worked far better for exterior shots. Having two different sets of cars also meant they could distinguish between different train routes in the movie without actually moving locations. Major props to unit production manager Nathan Kelly for wrangling all of this together, a job that deserves far more recognition than it gets, because a director's vision is only a vision unless there's people on the ground actually making it happen.

Fun fact: Two of Christopher Nolan's sons, Oliver and Magnus, can be seen somewhere on the train as passengers.