Oliver Stone turned down Oppenheimer movie

Oliver Stone turned down the chance to make an 'Oppenheimer' movie.

The 76-year-old filmmaker admitted he believed it would be impossible to make a movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist and 'father of the atomic bomb', in the current climate.

Calling Christopher Nolan's movie a "classic", Stone tweeted: "I sat through 3 hours of ‘Oppenheimer,’ gripped by Chris Nolan’s narrative. His screenplay is layered and fascinating. Familiar with the book by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, I once turned the project down because I couldn’t find my way to its essence. Nolan has found it.

"His direction is mind-boggling and eye-popping as he takes reams of incident and cycles it into an exciting torrent of action inside all the talk. Each actor is a surprise to me, especially Cillian Murphy, whose exaggerated eyes here feel normal playing a genius like Oppenheimer.

"Oppenheimer’ is a classic, which I never believed could be made in this climate."

Meanwhile, 'Taxi Driver' writer Paul Schrader recently called Nolan’s movie “the best, most important film of this century".

He wrote on Facebook: "The best, most important film of this century. If you see one film in cinemas this year it should be ‘Oppenheimer'. I'm not a Nolan groupie but this one blows the door off the hinges.”

The movie is based on the 2005 book 'American Prometheus' by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin and Bird said: "I am, at the moment, stunned and emotionally recovering from having seen it. I think it is going to be a stunning artistic achievement, and I have hopes it will actually stimulate a national, even global conversation about the issues that Oppenheimer was desperate to speak out about — about how to live in the atomic age, how to live with the bomb and about McCarthyism — what it means to be a patriot, and what is the role for a scientist in a society drenched with technology and science, to speak out about public issues."