Can "The Odyssey" Survive the Long Journey to Best Picture?

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1:17Hello and welcome to Little Gold Men, Vanity Fair's podcast for film, TV, and awards lovers. I'm Rebecca Ford. And I'm John Ross. Today we're going to be talking about a little movie that's coming out this weekend, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. The film opens tomorrow and early tracking is predicting that it'll bring in nearly$100 million in the first weekend. Critics are loving it. It's getting Best Picture buzz already. And it stars basically everyone in Hollywood. Matt Damon is the lead as Odysseus. Anne Hathaway is his wife Penelope. Tom Holland is their son, Telemachus. but there's also a ton of incredible performances from Robert Pattinson as Antinous, one of Penelope's suitors, Lupita Nyong 'o, who plays both Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, Zendaya as the goddess Athena, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Samantha Morton as Cersei.

2:10It's a long list and it goes on and on. You're only giving us half of the cast. There's so many people in this movie. But we have some help to dig into the Odyssey, the conversation around it. It's Oscar chances. We are very lucky to have Vanity Fair's features editor and our BFF, Hilary Busis, on the pod. Hi, Hilary. Hi, everyone. I'm so excited. Rebecca, do you want me to tell you some more names that you could try to pronounce? No, thank you. Hilary's just been walking around the office with the books just on her shoulders. Agamemnon we can do. Agamemnon I can do. But thank God you're here, Hilary.

2:49So John and I have both read The Odyssey in school. At some point, I remember seeing the cover. I remember the basics of the story, but I wouldn't say I remember all of it. And I'm sure we're not alone here. But do you think people need to read The Odyssey to understand or enjoy this movie? I don't. Were you guys confused at all? Not at all. No, I didn't think it was confusing at all. Yeah. Even things I didn't remember, like the moment it happened, I would remember. And I thought that was actually kind of fun. because it was like bringing part of my mind back that I'd kind of buried. Okay, so the sirens and the cyclops are the thing that everyone remembers.

3:28And the Trojan horse. Well, the Trojan horse is not actually in the Odyssey. That's the other thing. Like we open on him coming home. We don't actually see the end of the Trojan War. Yeah. That's in the Aeneid, which I had to translate for AP Latin. All right, we'll get there. It's fascinating that the film, as you're watching it, there are touch points that I think everyone will be like, oh, yeah, I do remember this. Personally watching it, I was like, maybe I did read The Odyssey, and I just don't remember it. But I think we should give everyone a refresher, and I think it'll be really helpful for our audience going into watching the movie this weekend.

4:08Hillary, give us your credentials. You were an English major in college? I sure as hell was. I did take Latin. I loved mythology. I got Dahlia's Book of Greek Myths when I was in, like, I don't know, third grade and read it obsessively. So, yeah, I mean, the basics are his name is Odysseus and it takes him a long time to come home. An L.A. story. Yes. Yeah, he got caught on the 405 trying to get to the 110. Get to the Californians. If at the end of this movie Matt Damon had thrown up his hands and went, the Californians. Okay, that's good serious. I'm so sorry. We have to get very serious. This is the foundational text of Western literature, of the Western canon, this and the Iliad.

4:53So Homer writes this in the 8th or 7th century BCE. It's very old. It comes from an oral tradition. So it's, you know, stories that have been passed down from generation to generation. It is, in fact, about a guy named Odysseus. He's taking the titular odyssey. He is the king of Ithaca, not New York, but Greece. And he would imagine he like went to Cornell.

5:23So Odysseus is known for his cunning and his cleverness. He designed the Trojan horse. It was his idea. He helps the Greeks to win the Trojan War, which is the war that begins after Paris, the prince of Troy, either kidnaps or like seduces Helen, who is the wife of a different Greek king named Menelaus. And the Greeks come to Troy. They are stuck outside the city for 10 years because the walls are so good. Odysseus has the bright idea of building a big horse, hiding Greek soldiers inside of it and leaving it outside of Troy. The Trojans think that it's a gift, so they bring the horse inside. And you know what happens next.

6:01So after this, the Greeks finally head home. It's been 10 years of war, and it takes Odysseus 10 years to get home. He has a variety of adventures along the way. He runs into a bunch of different mythological figures that you've heard of, like the Cyclops and the Sirens. There's a witch named Circe. There's a different witch named Calypso. Basically, he keeps landing on an island and screws a bunch of stuff up and then leaves and gets back on his boat and goes to a new island and does the same thing. So it's an episodic story. And as this is happening back at home, his wife Penelope is besieged by all these suitors who have come to Ithaca hoping to marry her because they think that Odysseus is never coming back from the war.

6:40And meanwhile, Odysseus and Penelope's son, Telemachus, has grown up. He was just a tiny boy when Odysseus went off to the war. It's been 20 years. And so he is also kind of stuck in this purgatory, not really sure what to do with himself. Is his father alive or dead? So this is the setting. And it's actually kind of perfect for a Christopher Nolan project because there's already all these different timelines and all of these different interwoven storylines that you can cut past in between. The problem with all of Greek mythology is that you can say, and he's the son of him who did all of this stuff.

7:11And he in turn was that, yeah. So it's very possible to go back and back, but. I think you've got the plot. The thing I had forgotten about until I was pretty, you know, into the movie was Zeus's law, which is like such a big part of this story. I don't know, Hilary, if you want to explain it. Yeah. Nolan teases this part out a lot. It's basically the law of hospitality. So Zeus is the main god in Greek mythology and the ancient Greek religion. And the way that they explained it in the movie is that the rule is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you live in this pre-modern society and nobody can ever trust anybody, if you welcome somebody into your home, they might kill you, like then it's not possible to build a society.

7:49So the foundation of their society is being welcoming, welcoming in the stranger, treating them well, and then sending them on their way. And you trust that people will do this for you and you will do this for other people. And that is the foundation of Greece. I think that that's kind of one of the more interesting things that Nolan does with this story is he comes up with a way to kind of put a modern spin and like make it feel very contemporary by integrating this theme into the movie. Yeah, I was really shocked and like so pleasantly surprised with the way he makes this feel so modern. But I think we'll get more into that in a little bit.

8:23The last question for my English Lit teacher here is why is the Odyssey so important? Like, why does it remain one of the most important texts? I think that the canon is kind of determined by consensus and just the fact that people keep returning to it, like, it's sort of a self-reinforcing system. Like, people have decided that the Odyssey is important. So, we keep reinterpreting it, we keep adapting it, we turn it into Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? and Percy Jackson and all this, I mean, much older things as well, not just modern reinterpretations, but it feels easy to kind of translate into different times and different contexts.

9:02And it is a story about a really interesting character. Like Odysseus is a hero, but he's also tricky and he lies a lot. And in the Greek tradition, he's kind of valorized. And then in the Roman tradition, which follows the Greek tradition, like in the Aeneid, which is by Virgil, takes a different spin on these events. He is like this cruel, like manipulative bad guy. It's possible to interpret him both ways or as both at the same time simultaneously. So, yeah, I don't know. John, do you want to psychoanalyze culture with me? Yeah, always. I think the search for home is a very universal theme.

9:41But also the action-adventure element of it is still incredible. Mm-hmm. Watching it and, like, Rebecca, remembering the story as it was unfolding in front of you, you're just reminded how many set pieces are naturally in this story. It's an action-adventure story that just happens to be thousands of years old. And I think it's kind of like the first of its kind in a way. It's like the first, like, blockbuster in literature. It's also way better than the Iliad. A lot more happens in it than happens in the Iliad, which is the other big Homer epic. And so I think that it is a better story in that way.

10:24Just there's more to grab onto. I still think if it weren't Christopher Nolan, like this is a very hard thing to adapt into a movie that doesn't feel like homework, that doesn't feel too long. Or that doesn't feel cheesy. Yes. Or like Roy Harryhausen. Yeah. Yeah. So it's really incredible what he pulled off. And I was a little worried about how this would go because, I don't know, I got worried it would feel old, you know. And the adaptation is really incredible because this is not, as Hillary is trying to explain it all, like this is not an easy story to explain. No, and it could easily also feel like a Wikipedia dump where people are like appearing and being like, my name is Athena and I'm the goddess of wisdom.

11:06Like, we don't get that. Yeah, we don't get that. But you also don't feel lost if you don't know a lot about Greek mythology. So we're going to take a quick break. But when we get back, we're going to dig into Nolan's version of the Odyssey. So stick with us.

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13:29Welcome back to Little Gold Men. So we've now all seen The Odyssey. I saw it just yesterday. I'm fresh out of the theater, the IMAX theater, of course. So what did you guys think? John, you want to start us off? I mean, I texted you last week. That was spectacular. Yeah. And it is. I mean, it's just like, wow. There's filmmaking and then there's this kind of filmmaking. We saw it on IMAX 70 millimeter, which is the rarest way that people are going to be able to see it. There's only, I think, about like 30 screens in America, maybe 41 total. Yeah. Yeah. And it's one of the most epic things I've ever seen in a theater.

14:11It's incredibly accessible. I found it to be really modern and smart. I mean and just the visual I mean like there's just scene after scene that you're just like how did they do that you see every dollar on that screen so like you're like yeah like I guess that's why he's Christopher Nolan right you know if there was any question not that there was but if there's any question this is like the end to that although I will say at least for me like the first half hour, 20 minutes was maybe a little rougher. I think that there's so much to do and there's so much to establish and there's just so much ground to cover that at the beginning, I felt a little bogged down in that kind of stuff, especially before Odysseus himself appears on screen.

15:00You get a lot of people talking about him, which also feels pretty appropriate given the material and, you know, the way the oral tradition and you have Travis Scott playing a bard at the beginning, like delivering the story of Odysseus and the horse. I think that once Matt Damon's there, it's just like smooth sailing, har har. I think that he really anchors everything so well. And how many puns you got in you for this? Puns aside, Matt Damon is doing a very good job captaining this movie. Stop. I know. I mean, Matt Damon is incredible. It's unbelievable. He's one of the best. Like, I don't know who else could have pulled this off.

15:42Because, yeah, he's like in every man, but at the same time, he's jacked. He's so jacked. He just has to do so much acting. Because let's talk a little bit about how the movie was made. He shot it on IMAX cameras, which means you can only shoot for two minutes at a time. The cameras are enormous. Evidently, they're very loud. and in order to match eye lines, you can't have the actor stand next to the camera. They created this like mirror system so that actors were not acting across from another actor, but acting to the reflection on a mirror to the other actor so that they can match the eye lines.

16:26That is technically very hard to do. He doesn't do green screen. So like, I think when you hear the actors on the press tour, They were like, we were really angry. You know, like, it felt very real when you're there. I think that helps a lot. But adding this technical element, plus just all the imagination you have to do and everything, is an incredible feat. And I think some actors fare better than others. Damon definitely is great in it. And it's that filming technique is something that only Nolan can do. Yeah, I couldn't get over how strong this adaptation is. You think a movie that's almost three hours, I think it's two hours and 50 minutes, is like I am allergic to movies that are that long usually, and I never looked at my watch once.

17:20No, it flies by. It flies by. It moves so fast because you're moving all these different worlds, and they bounce you back and forth between what his son is doing and what he's doing. And it is so rich. I was just like, how did he adapt this so well? He obviously changed, you know, a lot, I assume, Hillary, from the original text. But... I mean, there's stuff left out. But thematically, it's, you know, a more moderate interpretation. But generally, it's, like, fairly faithful. Like, all the major episodes are represented. It's the Odyssey. He made a movie. It's a movie of the Odyssey. Like, on some level, it's not more complicated than that.

17:55It's really incredible. And the other thing is the action scenes are incredible. The war scenes, I have a tendency to zone out during war scenes sometimes. because they're not for me, but I never did in this film. Yeah. You know, even though there were a whole bunch of them, it just, they all feel unique. I mean, we know Nolan can do that kind of stuff, but just to see these things take shape was just really incredible too. But there is one thing he does in the modernity of the film, which is that he doesn't have them speak in any sort of ancient text. Like there's not, Shakespeare speaks. Telemachus calls Odysseus dad.

18:31Yeah, they're all speaking in an American accent, they speak very plainly. It's not lofty and elevated. Yeah. So I think for some people, they found that a little jarring. I completely didn't care or notice. It takes maybe a minute to get used to it. Maybe, but I thought it was successful and I think it's going to make it much broader for the general audience. Okay, each of us pick a scene that was our favorite scene without spoiling anything. I'm going to pick the Cyclops scene. I could watch that scene over and over again. At first, I was like, I don't know how this is going to go. But the way they created the Cyclops is incredible.

19:10You got to shout out the Cyclops himself, Bill Irwin. I didn't know that. I'm learning new things about this movie every day. But the way it's paced, like it's a horror movie essentially in that section. And I thought the way he sort of embraces horror and genre for that moment is really well done. And I can't wait to see that scene again. John? The Cersei scene with Samantha Morton, if you've read online, there's been a lot of talk about. It's one scene. She delivers a tour de force performance. I just think it's incredible filmmaking. It's incredible acting. It's a great moment in the story.

19:47It's actually one, that was a moment that I remembered almost the least from this story. And I think that that is just one of the best scenes in the movie. Oh, well, you should read Madeline Miller's book, Cersei, which probably a lot of people that you know in your life have already read. But it's like a modern retelling of her. Then you don't know people in my life. I know. You keep telling me nobody in Los Angeles reads. I have to take that and actually believe it. I actually do read. I'm sure you read a lot of books, John. I'm reading Yesteryear right now. Okay, Hillary, what's your favorite scene?

20:23Can I call out a performance rather than a scene? We haven't yet talked about Robert Pattinson in this movie, but he is so good. He's the primary antagonist, I guess you could say, at least in the Penelope and Telemachus scenes. He's playing this suitor named Antinous. And he's just so good as a villain. Like he's got real like, wait till my father hears about this energy in like a very good way. I just think that he seems like he's having so much fun and he's just so slimy that, I don't know, anytime he was on screen, I was excited. But, Hillary, before we jump to box office talk, do you want to talk about the piece you wrote for Vanity Fair dot com?

21:03I'm happy to. Yeah. So it's basically about the themes of this movie and the way that it kind of has been a victim of backlash for weeks, if not months, long before it was released. A group of conservatives led by Elon Musk have decided to wage a war against this movie. It's become a really hot button like culture war issue largely because Nolan's cast is not all white. You know, there's not really any real reason to object to that because it's a myth. It's none of these people ever existed. There can't be historical accuracy when you're talking about mythology. That's just stupid. There's no such thing as a cyclops.

21:45There's no actual like hot mermaid who sings to you from the rocks. There's no sirens in Greece because I've been and I looked. I didn't find. Well, were you on Mykonos? Because maybe in that case. I was. And there was a type of siren, but not the one described in Homer's tale. But yeah, so they're upset about, I mean, as has been the case in so many modern adaptations of things or reinterpretations of things. They're very mad when everybody isn't white. They're mad that Elliot Page is in the movie because he's trans and they don't think that trans people should be allowed to do anything. But the point of the story that I wrote is that I think if they see the movie, if they don't boycott it, then they're going to be even more angry because the movie is about them and like what Nolan thinks of them, which I like.

22:36It's about xenophobia, a lot of it, and about, you know, once you break this law of hospitality, yeah, then you have doomed society forever. Like and there's a thread that goes through the movie about people in Greece being afraid of, quote unquote, people from the sea coming and destroying their culture. And that seems like a very obvious call out to anti-immigration voices on the right, especially. And, yeah, I think that you could call it woke if that word meant anything anymore, which I don't really think it does. And I'm sure they will. But it's it's just a progressive movie in a way that you wouldn't necessarily expect.

23:14adaptation of something this old to be. I'm glad you wrote about that because I was like very emotional towards the end when you realize that he's exploring this thing that I think we're all carrying, this sort of sadness about the way people are being treated today. And I didn't see that coming. And like the guilt for like everybody, like all of us being kind of part of that and being kind of our fault. I thought it's such an intelligent, smart, thoughtful way to tell this story that I'm so glad you wrote about that. Yeah. And they are going to get so mad. Yeah. So mad. So let's transition into what we think that will mean for the box office.

23:57It's going to mean nothing. This movie is going to make so much money and these guys are not going to be able to stop that. That is my prediction. Agreed. Yeah. Yeah. And I also think they're going to want to hate watch it, even if they I mean, listen, a hate watch ticket is the same as a regular ticket. You know, so I think that these people online, these trolls that want to continue the conversation, they're going to have to see the movie in order to do that. Well, yeah. And if a lot of people like it and a lot of people see it, then that completely destroys their thesis, which is that everybody hates woke media.

24:33Like when you when you force this contemporary stuff onto like the classics, then that is a bad thing. And as though I don't know, as though anything is static, it comes from an oral tradition. Like that means it was changed by every single person who ever told it. Like there is no such thing as like one canonical version. Well, let's see. Oppenheimer made$975 million worldwide. I feel like this— And that's about a famous communist. Yeah, right. And I feel like this— I mean, I like this better than Oppenheimer, but I feel like it gets to a billion. Am I being crazy? I mean, yeah, that's Dark Knight money, but I don't think it's crazy.