Nolan's 'The Odyssey': a tale of a hero and trickster retold for modern times

0:00It's Consider This, where every day we go deep on one big news story. With each iteration, a new generation of storytellers gets a chance to portray Odysseus, the complicated man, the man of twists and turns, trying to make his way to his wife Penelope after the Trojan War. No one could stand between me and home. I need the gods. The Odyssey, a tale of resilience, loyalty and homecoming, is resonating big with today's audiences. It's got box office numbers to prove it, emerging from its opening weekend with at least$124 million in domestic ticket sales. Director Christopher Nolan is known for depicting different kinds of heroes, like 2023's Oppenheimer.

0:47The word most commonly associated with Odysseus or Ulysses back in the day was always wily. And that's not a word you traditionally associate with your hero. And he's been thinking about adapting The Odyssey for more than 20 years. Consider this. The Odyssey is a story that's almost 3 ,000 years old. A tale of a hero and trickster that's been retold time and time again. So what does it reveal in Christopher Nolan's telling? One made for a contemporary audience.

1:30From NPR, I'm Adrian Ma.

1:54Explore policy initiatives for retirement savings, taxes, trade, and more. Download the latest episode and follow at schwab.com slash Washington Wise or wherever you listen. One year ago, Congress eliminated over a billion dollars in funding for public media, yet we, the people, haven't backed down. When you donate to the independent nonprofits that make up the NPR network, we hold the powerful to account together. It's the kind of journalism democracy requires that we, the public, must protect. Join the community of people who power this work at donate.npr.org. On our weekly politics series, If You Can Keep It, the focus isn't the horse race, but the stakes.

2:36You're part of the conversation Mondays on the 1A podcast from WAMU and NPR.

2:50It's Consider This from NPR. As if Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, and Zendaya all in the same movie weren't enough of a draw, Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is the first feature film shot entirely with IMAX cameras. And though he allowed himself two hours and 52 minutes, the director said the entirety of Homer's epic was too much for one movie. He told my colleague Scott Detrow that he started by making choices. I did it in stages. And one of the first things I did after I'd reacquainted myself with the poem, I sat down and I wrote a list of what defines the Odyssey. Things like the Cyclops, things like the Sirens.

3:32I think for a lot of people, the Lotus Eaters would be one of those things. And so I was trying to strike a balance between your sort of thoughts on what this thing is before you get really acquainted with it and then the specifics of it. And yet at the same time, you're adding, you know, you're scaling down, but then you're adding. Like I was struck by both Penelope and Circe are present characters in the poem, but they're, for a lot of reasons, kind of more in the background. And you give them both speeches almost talking about their point of view on this world. Look at this great house. Stone's his oldest knowledge.

4:14At the mercy of some greedy, unwanted guests. The structure's nothing without people's respect for its meaning. Zeus's law. So, I mean, I imagine that's a whole different challenge. Like, where am I going to add, where I'm going to put background story and motivations, things like that. Sure. I mean, I don't think of it so much as adding and subtracting as trying to translate your experience of reading the poem and absorbing the poem into the cinematic medium. So sometimes, yes, what feels like adding things, in a way, you're sometimes just looking at the source material with a specific lens, a modern lens.

4:52and in the case of some of the female characters in the poem they tend to be used at times purely as reflection of the hero as opposed to being characters in their own right at least at first blush and when you start looking at the sort of mechanics of who does what to whom you know how does the story play out you actually start to find the necessity of characterization is there in the poem, it's there sort of implied, just as I'm having to get on a real boat in real waves. You know, I know that I've got Anne Hathaway coming to play Penelope. I've got Charlize Theron coming to play Calypso. Sir Matt de Morton coming to play Circe.

5:34They play people, not symbols. What to you were the core ideas that you wanted to build this movie around when you started thinking about what it would look like? Well, there are two concepts that are most often referred to from the poem and one is nostos that's the idea of a homecoming narrative we're coming home changed and home having changed and the emotion of that and the catharsis of that and that's sort of baked into the narrative but the other is a concept called xenia um i don't refer to it by by that name in the film in order to keep things simple i refer to it by its other name which is use as law and that's essentially the idea that when you meet a stranger however humble that stranger might seem, you know, you might think that they're a beggar or whatever, they could be a god in disguise.

6:22So you have to treat them the way you would want to be treated. So it's sort of what other cultures have referred to as the sort of golden rule, you know, treat others as you want to be treated, but with a theological underpinning. And you start to realize the more you work with it, that nothing has changed. We are just as dependent on this mutual respect as we ever were. And so in that way, the theology of the piece and the relevance for a modern day audience, they're not fighting anymore. Suddenly they're all kind of pulling in the same direction, which I thought was kind of exciting. I've read interviews where you talked about the fact that you had been thinking about how to shoot, how to portray the Trojan horse scene for a long time, for more than a decade.

7:04I'm wondering what of the set pieces of the Odyssey you were most worried about or apprehensive about as a filmmaker? What seemed the hardest challenge? Well, from a logistical point of view, I knew the horse would be a hard challenge. But as you said, I had actually more than two decades of figuring it out because I first, I was briefly attached to direct Troy at Warner Brothers, David Benioff's adaptation of The Iliad, and he'd included the horse. So I spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to do that and came up with this notion of it being half buried in the sand, about to be destroyed by the waves, because you're trying to sell it to a contemporary audience who knows that it's stuffed with creeks.

7:46So how would this actually work? How could you sell this? It has to look like the most unlikely thing that you would drag back into your city, that kind of thing. So it was a very difficult sequence to shoot, but I had a lot of time to plan it. I think what worried me the most and what took the most planning in some ways, it's the fantasy elements because the Odyssey you have to embrace the fantasy elements that's a hugely important part of what we're telling here but we've decided that okay our approach is going to be to have a grounded telling we're going to be on real boats in real weather we're going to be in a real cave when we go to meet the Cyclops so how do you then find methods to maintain the tone of the film whilst embracing the fantasy elements that was very daunting And in the case of the Cyclops, I involved my friend Bill Irwin very early on.

8:38Bill puppeteered as well as giving voice to the robot TARS in Interstellar. So he went all over the world with us puppeteering this machine and giving it life. Because that can be high stakes, right? Like a Cyclops could be very frightening. Or if you look at how the Odyssey has been portrayed over there, it could be pretty campy and cheesy and just like ruin it right there. Exactly. And so you sort of go, I knew that whatever methods we were going to come up with would have to be driven by performance. One of the earliest things we showed everybody as well is one of the Goya black paintings that sat in eating his child.

9:14It just has such a sort of chilling character of indifference during this sort of horrible process of eating a human being. So, yeah, that's the thing is finding the kind of things that move you in films, in art, in real life. Instead of saying, okay, how can we give this some weight? How can we make it mean something? There's been so much focus on the decision to shoot it all in IMAX and how it was challenging, but you felt like it was worth it. I'm wondering as part of that, were there any trade-offs you made to shoot it all in IMAX? no and the reason i say that so emphatically is is we were only going to do that if we could do it without compromise and so for me the big the big barrier as it were the thing we'd never been able to do before was shoot dramatic scenes with the actors because the cameras are too noisy imax had built this blimping system for us this this high-tech box that you put the camera in and the silence is the camera but it's massive and it weighs 300 pounds and you can only shoot just under three minutes with it.

10:17So what I was asking the actors to do from a method point of view is start the scene as it's developing in intensity, pause, keep everybody tensed up, reload the camera as quietly and efficiently as the camera could, and then pick up the scene again. And none of us knew whether that would be worth it, whether that would be a compromise to performance, and that was something, obviously, we're not prepared to do. In retrospect, I think what happened was it put such intense focus on the performances, on that moment between action and cut in those dramatic scenes, that even though it feels like it would have been distracting and cumbersome, I think it actually became an advantage.

10:59Would you do it again? Not tomorrow, but maybe once I've had a holiday. I've been trying to give up IMAX for 20 years, and it's just addictive. It's absolutely the most wonderful, beautiful imaging format ever devised. If we can do it, it's going to take the audience there. It's going to immerse them in it. You're at the point in your career where everything you do is scrutinized and analyzed. And I feel like there's always this conversation of, is this a reference to that movie? And are these movies talking to each other? And I'm wondering, do you feel like there are ideas you're returning to and trying to work out movie by movie?

11:39I mean, the way I would sort of best answer that, I think, is to say that if I've done my job right, when I'm fully immersed on a film or on a project, I leave that film with unanswered questions. I leave it with themes that we haven't been able to fully address. And that will often inform my creative process on the next film. But that makes it sound a bit more conscious than it is, a bit more self-conscious than it is. Certainly, I got to the end of making The Odyssey. I saw some very strong connections with Oppenheimer. And that made sense to me. Because, you know, you never fully exercise it with a film, I don't think.

12:15I think you're always slightly carrying it into the next thing. I'm trying to think of how to ask that for people who haven't seen it yet. But I really felt... I know, a little tricky. It feels to me like there's a lot of thinking about the idea that once you take a certain step, you can't take it back in both those films. Very much. And it was, for me, also very interesting to take on mythology as you unpack it and what Homer has written, what's there. You start to realize that there are these massive sort of real world stakes. You know, what were the consequences of the Trojan War, for example?

12:51Suddenly everything takes on this much weightier, much more sort of real world quality that starts to really engage you from a modern perspective. and relate to other versions of those kind of stories. I don't know if you'll engage with this or not, but I'll try. I have wasted hundreds of hours of my life arguing and debating with people what their favorite five movies of yours are. And I'm wondering if that's something you've thought about and you want to share. No, I mean, the answer to how I view my work is, you know, these films are like my children. I mean, you just – you have a relationship with each that's absolute and sort of sacrosanct.

13:31I really try and do one thing at a time and really figure out how I want to spend the next few years of my life and just dive into that. So that at the end of the day, yeah, it would literally be like saying, you know, what's my favorite child? And I got four kids and it's certainly not a question I would ever even contemplate. Certainly not on the radio. No, definitely not. So, you know, the movies are all my favorites. And that's kind of how it works. Well, that's Christopher Nolan, director of The Odyssey, as well as many other movies that he loves equally well. Christopher Nolan, thank you for speaking with us.

14:06Thank you very much. We appreciate it. This episode was produced by Mark Rivers, Zephyr Weinreich, and Henry Larson. It was edited by Mallory Yu and Sarah Robbins. Our director is Elena Burnett. Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dorning.

14:30It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Adrian Ma.

14:54Mike Townsend and his guests explore policy initiatives for retirement savings, taxes, trade, and more. Download the latest episode and follow at schwab.com slash Washington Wise or wherever you listen. This message comes from Workday, the enterprise AI platform with a deep understanding of your organization's context and guardrails. So every AI action is permission aware, giving you the ability to get work done right. It's a new Workday.