Christopher Nolan. [Source: BBC Entertainment]

Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan has said he “absolutely” will not work on another film until the Hollywood strikes are resolved.

Tens of thousands of Hollywood actors have joined writers in taking industrial action because they want streaming giants to agree to a fairer split of profits and better working conditions.

The Screen Actors Guild also wants to protect actors from being usurped by digital replicas.

Nolan admitted he was “very fortunate with the timing”, as his film’s premieres were held just before the strike began, meaning Oppenheimer would not be affected by industry members stopping work.

When asked if he would write another film during the strike, he told BBC Culture editor Katie Razzall: “No, absolutely. It’s very important that everybody understands it is a very key moment in the relationship between working people and Hollywood.

As more production companies use streaming platforms – like Netflix and Amazon Prime – for their shows, it has changed how actors and writers get paid.

Previously every time an episode was re-run on a TV network, it would tend to involve payment, allowing those who worked on projects to get by in between jobs.

The director said the companies involved had not yet “accommodated how they’re going to in this new world of streaming, and a world where they’re not licensing their products out to other broadcasters – they’re keeping them for themselves”.

Nolan, who was Oscar-nominated five times for the films Dunkirk, Inception and Memento, added: “They have not yet offered to pay appropriately to the unions’ working members, and it’s very important that they do so.

Speaking ahead of the London premiere, where several of Oppenheimer’s stars left the red carpet early to strike, he explained: “It’s very important to bear in mind that there are people who have been out of work for months now, as part of the writers strike, and with the actors potentially joining – a lot of people are going to suffer.”

Despite the row in California, British-born Nolan has no current plans to work more in the UK, his home country, as he prefers to be “on the real locations” where his films are set.

Oppenheimer tells the story of J Robert Oppenheimer, the enigmatic Manhattan Project scientist, who had a leading role in developing the atomic bomb that made him a “destroyer of worlds”.

He “gave us the power to destroy ourselves and that had never happened before”, Nolan said.

Commissioned by the US Government during World War II, and believing themselves in a nuclear race with the Nazis over who would create the bomb first, in 1945 scientists in Los Alamos, New Mexico detonated a test bomb, codenamed Trinity.

Their invention was then used, controversially, to end the war, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to devastating effect.

The film is an exploration not just of Oppenheimer’s story, but of the “incredible decision” the scientists took on that first occasion.

Another existential threat to civilization is AI, which is also part of the Hollywood strike and makes the Oppenheimer movie more timely.

Nolan is one of a rare number of Hollywood directors. His films – Interstellar, the Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception amongst them – are both blockbusters and arthouse fare; critically acclaimed and, Tenet aside, which was released during the pandemic, box office successes.

He’s a champion of the big screen who, famously, left Warner Bros for rival Universal to make Oppenheimer.

Nolan’s known for wanting his films to feel authentic rather than computer-generated.

There was even a rumour doing the rounds on the internet that he had set off a real atomic bomb in New Mexico for Oppenheimer.