As part of the ongoing press circuit for The Odyssey, director Christopher Nolan is speaking his mind on some topics.
First and foremost is the “casting controversy” drummed up by racists and transphobes making a stink online. In the film, Lupita Nyong’o and Elliott Page respectively play Zeus’ daughter Helen of Troy (and her sister Clytemnestra) and Greek warrior Sinon, which has sparked a predictable backlash. To those complaining about the actors’ presence in the film, Nolan’s content to not give these folks any true attention or even hold them in any real regard, since he knows they’re just opening their mouths before seeing the full film.
As he told The Telegraph, those reactions are “always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet. This comes with the territory. Remember, I spent 10 years of my life dealing with Batman.” Doing the Dark Knight trilogy taught him about going into adaptations with the intent of “honoring the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can,” a gambit that’s made him one of the biggest directors in Hollywood.
Greek history isn’t comic books, but Nolan optimistically hopes audiences can leave The Odyssey understanding where he’s coming from. “Even when we did something that wasn’t what [Batman] fans would’ve done, they enjoyed the sincerity of the attempt to put as good a version of it on screen as we could,” he recalled. “All I can do is make the best film I possibly can in the most sincere way. It’s very different from how anyone else would do it, but that’s what adaptation is.”
Speaking of sincerity, he finds the success of Obsession and Backrooms as a good indicator of where filmmaking’s headed. Those films’ focus on practical work over generative AI represent “[he most] rapid whole dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime.” The Gen Z demographic is “utterly rejecting” the technology, and he said his kids have an “immediate and harsh judgement of AI slop” that’s heartwarming.
“They see it for what it is very quickly – and it’s much easier for them to identify it, because it grew out of an online world they know really well,” Nolan continued. “[GenAI] is hitting at exactly the wrong time in filmmaking. After years of driving towards heavily virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling.”
Nolan loves making movies that provide a real, tactile feeling that justify a trip to the theater. All he wants is for people to “see and enjoy the magic” of The Odyssey, which they can in just a few days…provided they got tickets ahead of time.
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