'A Compassionate Spy' Director Explains Why His Documentary Is a Great Companion Piece to 'Oppenheimer' (2024)

Though the massive event that was the opening weekend of Barbenheimer is now behind us, there is another film that would serve as a rather fitting accompaniment to Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. A Compassionate Spy, the latest documentary from director Steve James who previously made the 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams, takes a look at a man who was also at Los Alamos while work on the bomb was being done. His name was Ted Hall and he was recuited to join the Manhattan Project while only a teenager with little understanding of what exactly he would be doing. Once he found out, he grew alarmed by the potential for mass death and began passing information to the Soviet Union in the hopes of averting this.

The documentary is a delicate one, focusing as much on Hall's life as it does his relationship with his wife Joan, while also grappling with pressing historical and moral questions that extend beyond just a single man. Before the film's release, we sat down with James to talk about his latest work, what it was like having it be released so close to Oppenheimer, what he hopes that this will bring to the shared conversation we are having as it expands beyond where Nolan's film ends, and his perspective on the legacy of his most recent subject.

COLLIDER: Is it strange to have this timing of it so close to the release of Oppenheimer, or are you glad that the timing of it is such that it kind of contributes to the conversation we're having about one of the most life-altering creations of our time?

STEVE JAMES: When we started this project, we had no idea. Christopher Nolan wasn't at all public that he was pursuing this at all. I mean, we started our project in 2019. When we found out that he was doing it, we thought, “Wow, that's really interesting.” We had no idea that he would do it so fast. [Laughs] I think we thought our film would probably have been out before his film was, but when it became clear that it was possible for our film to come out around the same time, Magnolia, who's handling the distribution, just said, “This is what we want to do,” and their strategy is exactly that – the hope that there will be so much conversation going on around the [J. Robert] Oppenheimer movie and what it has to say about the world we live in and that it will make people more curious to see more and learn more. We'll be right there, happy to provide more context.

When I saw the film, I really enjoyed it. He's a brilliant filmmaker. But I was really pleased, in a way, to see that for all of its three-hour length and the detail to which it digs into that story, there's so much in our film that's not even touched on. And that's what I mean, not just Ted Hall's not touched on, but there are just so many aspects to what we talk about and show through Ted's story, that it really is a good complement to the Oppenheimer film.

I was thinking while watching it that Ted is someone who is not just a complement, but a counter to what we see in something like Oppenheimer, where it's not that you have to go along, that there was this different option, at great personal expense, to potentially try and alter this massive trajectory towards violence. What was it that initially drew you to Ted? What was it about him that resonated with you?

JAMES: I knew nothing about Ted Hall's story until Dave Lindorff, who's one of the producers and an investigative journalist, brought it to my attention. I had interviewed Dave in the film Abacus [Small Enough to Jail], and so that's how I got to know Dave. And Dave, unbeknownst to me, had written an article about Ted Hall that appeared in CounterPunch, and Joan [Krakover Hall] read it and reached out to Dave, thanking him for writing this piece. Then, in him meeting Joan, he said, “I really think there's a film here.” So he brought it to my attention, and Mark Mitton, who was also a producer on Abacus. So learning from Dave about Ted, and then reading Bombshell (by Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel), I was just struck by what an extraordinary story of someone who is so, so young. I had no idea that anyone at even the age of 18 would have been at Los Alamos, and by the ripe old age of 19, he had decided to take this hugely dangerous, momentous step and become a spy and volunteer this information to the Soviets. And I just thought, “What an extraordinary act.” I mean, whether you ultimately think what he did was right or wrong, he was someone who acted with great conviction and courage. I just thought, “This is a really intriguing story,” but I don't think I'd have done it if it weren't for meeting Joan, right?

So then we went to Cambridge, England, and spent several days with Joan interviewing her. I just was completely taken with her as a person, with her ability to tell these stories about what had happened, and just this incredible love story. I mean, I came back from that going, “Okay, I know this is a spy story, [but] this is also a love story.” [Laughs] And I really loved the idea of sort of framing this important story of this guy that virtually no one's heard of but through the lens of this 50-year love affair.

There are no similarities other than this, but I had been thinking about your documentary (Life Itself) about Roger Ebert and about how much it was about Roger and Chaz. It wasn't just about Roger, the writer, it was Roger the person.

JAMES: Yes, I think that's true. I'm driven by character in virtually every film I've made. I'm not driven by issues. It's not like I heard about Ted Hall, and I said, “Oh, I think it's time to do a film about the dangers of nuclear warfare.” I mean, frankly, Putin hadn't invaded Ukraine, Christopher Nolan hadn't decided to make Oppenheimer; it was sort of like no one was talking about nuclear weapons. We were all worried that climate change was going to kill us, not nuclear weapons. And so, what really drew me to it was the stories of people, and that's always been a guiding principle for me as a filmmaker. So like with Roger, yes, I admired Roger as a critic, but I needed to read his memoir because I was interested in, “Well, what kind of person was he, and what was his life like?” Because I wouldn't just make a film about a great film critic. I'm not that interested in that. [Laughs]

No, I understand. When it comes to then building that trust—because I often think it's not just showing up and asking the right question, it's having to really form that relationship and begin to discuss things that can be very personal and painful—what was your approach with Joan, with all these people that she maybe hadn't talked about in quite this depth for their entire lives? How did you begin to approach that with them?

JAMES: Great question. I think with Joan, you know, we interviewed her across three days. I had made her wear the same outfit each day because I wanted it to look like one sit-down interview with her, but I knew it would take a while to get through it all, and I didn't want to completely– you know, she was 91 when we interviewed her, so I wanted to be sensitive to that. The first day, she was more skeptical in a way. I mean, maybe skeptical of me, like, “Well, what is this guy really? Why is he interested? What is his angle gonna be?” Also, I think just protective of Ted, you know? She'd always been protective of Ted, and the media that had mostly been done on Ted had been pretty negative. I think she just wondered, “Well, what's gonna become of this?” Like, “Why? Why do you feel like you need to tell this story?”

But I think we bonded, and by the second day, and certainly into the third day, I think she understood how genuine our interest as filmmakers was in telling his story and telling his story empathically. I don't think I would have told this story if I’d decided that Ted was an evil person who had done a really awful thing. I would be like, “Well, why go back into Joan's life to tell a story about someone most everyone has not heard of just to tear him down?” I wouldn't have done it. I knew that there would be people watching the film that would not approve of what Ted did, and I wanted to give voice to that in the film, but it was always going to be an empathic film about this guy and about her and about their relationship and about their kids. I wanted their kids involved, and there was some kind of convincing a little bit of Ruth and Sara, particularly Sara, to be a part of this because she's inherently a very shy, private person, but thank god she agreed to do it.

In every film, there's this element of sort of getting through, I think, to the folks of what your genuine interests are, and that you're going to try to be sensitive in the telling of their story, that that's what you're here to do. Once that happens, I think then people become more open and unguarded because they feel like they're in the hands of someone who is going to do this with some empathy.

Kind of drilling in on that empathy part, I think towards the end, the final interview when he's in his last years of his life and he's being asked if he's proud of this, if this is something he's glad he did, and there seems to be this combination of regret, possibly because it didn't really alter the course of history in the way he had hoped, how did that change you, firstly, in thinking about why to include that, but how did this change you as a person? You're coming to this with your own empathy. What did you come away with from both this man and also the state of the world and how he tried to alter it, but maybe found, tragically, that he could not in some ways?

JAMES: I love those moments where he is asked those questions and you see him grappling with an answer because, as he says in the film, when it became clear to him that the Soviet Union under Stalin was a totalitarian state and that a lot of awful things had happened there, it gave him pause and made him wonder whether he should have done what he did. You know, he speaks to that. But then what he comes to is that ultimately he wasn't doing this for the Soviet government, he was trying to do it because he worried about what could happen to the Soviet people if the US were to preemptively strike them. You have to remember, his family was from Russia, so he had a bond to Russia that went deeper than just a compassion for humanity and a fear of what the US might do.

I think Ted felt proud. He felt proud of the man he was then for the decisions he made then. He didn't start the arms race. I mean, the Soviet Union was going to get the bomb, that was never a question. The US intelligence knew the Soviet Union would eventually get the bomb; they had way too many smart scientists to not figure that out. But what he did was he acted on a fear of what the US was capable of. And since the US was capable of dropping two bombs on Japan, that I think history has mostly shown was not at all necessary, I think his fears were well-grounded. I think we go to pains in the story to show that he was not imagining some ridiculous scenario that would never come to pass that caused him to act. Whether it would have come to pass, no one can know, right? But because the Soviet Union got the bomb more quickly, and the US, if they were gonna do a preemptive strike, was not in a position to do it by the time the Soviet Union detonated their first bomb…

So, you know, no one knows. Historians debate to this day over whether the US would have done that, but the one thing that is indisputable is the US used its hegemony with the bomb in those four or five years after World War II to bully their way with other people. We give the example of the Russians on the Iranian border, but there were other examples too. They did it with China, they did it with Korea. The US threatened to drop that bomb on multiple occasions, and all people had to do was look at the fact that we had done that. This isn't in the film, but the belief was, why didn't we just drop one on Hiroshima? Well, the argument was you dropped the second one on Nagasaki to show that we're serious, that we'll just keep doing it.

All of what you're saying makes me think of Oppenheimer, when he says, “We will do this, and this will end all wars. This will bring about the end of all wars.” This documentary shows, pretty meticulously, that obviously was not the case.

JAMES: That was never the goal. If it was to end all wars, it was because no one would dare defy us.

Right.

JAMES: It's kind of amazing watching Oppenheimer, which, you know, he was such a tortured soul, right? In some ways, he was more naive, considerably more naive than Ted, about what they were doing, and Ted was 19. Think about that.

You’re talking about how Oppenheimer was potentially more naive than this 19-year-old kid who didn't even really know what he was getting into until he saw very clearly what it was that he was getting into. When it comes to the ending of your film, without putting him on a pedestal, do you think, for people like him, that there is the capacity for people to push the world in a better direction, that maybe people willing to step in front of what is perceived as inevitable can make incremental changes that maybe make things better?

JAMES: Absolutely. In many ways, one of the contemporary equivalents of Ted Hall is someone like Edward Snowden, for example. Edward Snowden was a true believer when he went to work for the NSA. He went to work for the NSA because he wasn't fit enough to become a marine – think about that. But he wanted to help his country, so he went to work for the NSA. That's where his skill set could be used. And he walked in the door a true believer in what they were doing, and it was only because after he was there and began to question what they were doing that he was prompted to do what he did. There are a lot of people that look at Edward Snowden as a traitor and look at him as someone who did an awful thing, and then there are a lot of people that look at what Edward Snowden did as incredibly brave and valuable and necessary.

I think that Ted is one of those kind of guys. And I think at the end of the film, one of the reasons I put that very last comment at the end of the film, it's where he's saying his advice to the next generation is to basically not let people in power determine what happens in this world, to stand up to the people in power. I mean, are we not living in that time now, where that needs to happen more? Whether it's climate change or the latest fear at the end of the world, AI, it's the people who are willing to step forward and say, “This needs to be different. We don't have to go down that path. There's something we can do here.” Those are the people we need more of, and I think Ted was one of those kind of people.

A Compassionate Spy is in theaters and on VOD starting August 4.