Christopher Nolan, fresh from a seven-Oscar triumph with Oppenheimer, is now facing his biggest gamble yet: a $250m adaptation of Homer's epic poem The Odyssey. Speaking in a London hotel suite, the director admitted to feeling 'sheer terror' ahead of the film's release, but also displayed an unusual openness, perhaps due to his new chocolate labrador puppy, Charlie.
The Challenge of Following Oppenheimer
Nolan acknowledged the immense pressure of releasing The Odyssey, saying, 'It never gets any easier, because I make films for audiences and the audience tells me what it likes. They finish the film. I don't have anything to hide behind.' He added, 'I don't think I'd be doing my job right if I wasn't petrified every time I put a film out, because you're trying to challenge yourself, you're trying to take risks.'
The film, which reportedly cost $250m (£185m), was greenlit by Universal's Donna Langley in the wake of Oppenheimer's success. Nolan said, 'I thought: OK, I've now got an opportunity to make a film that I wouldn't be able to make otherwise.' His wife and producing partner, Emma Thomas, added, 'I don't think there's any world we could have gone to a studio and said: We want to adapt a 2,700-year-old poem, and that be an automatic huge movie. We were asking for a big budget to do it. That would not have happened without Oppenheimer.'
The Long Road to Ithaca
Nolan first encountered The Odyssey in primary school and had long harboured the idea of adapting it. He recalled, 'In the early 2000s, I had spent a lot of time figuring out how do you present that to an audience who all know that the belly of that horse is stuffed with Greeks? How do you make that credible?' The germ of his screenplay came from an image of a beached monument sinking into sand, 'a true Hail Mary, as we say in America, just an act of absolute desperation that shouldn't work.'
The shoot was described by many as the hardest of their careers. The cast and crew crossed deserts, mountains, seas, and Arctic landscapes, often reaching locations only by helicopter or long hikes. Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema's team had to lug 300lb Imax cameras across challenging terrain. Thomas said, 'At the end of each day the heads of department would have dinner and then we'd collapse into a screening room to watch dailies. Every time you would get through one challenge, you'd think: oh my God, we did it. And then you'd think: oh no, next week we've got a whole other thing to deal with.'
Personal Reflections and a New Companion
Nolan attributed his relaxed demeanour partly to Charlie, the chocolate labrador he and Thomas acquired after their children left home. 'They're all off in the world. We've got a dog and then I decided to make The Odyssey because it's the ultimate dog movie,' he said. In the film, Odysseus is recognised by his old dog Argos, and Nolan included a puppy version in the trailer.
Despite the physical demands, Nolan insisted difficulty is not the point. 'It's really not. The more we talk about it, the more it feels like it was a some sort of Herzogian ordeal but that's really not my bag. In truth, it's just about The Odyssey. You need things that you haven't seen before.' He admitted to sleepless nights before challenging weeks, saying, 'I'd go: Oh shit, how the hell am I going to do that week? and that keeps me up often at times all night, Sunday night, just not able to sleep.'
Cultural Impact and Female Characters
The Odyssey has sparked culture-war debates over casting, with Lupita Nyong'o as Helen and Elliot Page as Sinon. Nolan defended his approach, saying, 'In the text, they're icons. The problem is that there's not so much to them beyond these ideals. What I love about what the women in this movie have done is they give you a sense of the person behind the icon.' He praised Nyong'o for conveying 'what it would actually be like to be the catalyst for this huge war and siege – what that would mean, what that would do to a person.'
As the film rolls out globally, Nolan is already feeling the pull towards his next project. Thomas noted, 'The first signs are probably about a week after he's had nothing to do he starts to get really antsy. That's when he'll begin to really home in on: OK, I need to do something.' Nolan himself said, 'I'm so desperate to have a period I have nothing to do. It feels so long since I had a time like that. At the moment, all I can see is just trying to get through this, put the film out and then take a little break.'
