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“I am in a very dangerous time,” he says Christopher Nolansitting in a suite at the Corinthia Hotel in London, wearing a slim suit, next to a pot of tea. Outside, crowds of people are running, waiting to see one of the stars inside – Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Lupita Nyong’o. It’s the day before Nolan’s first international film, based on Homer’s poem The Odyssey, and the last day of waiting before the public decides whether the big gamble on Nolan’s career has paid off. The film, which is said to have cost $250m (£185m), doesn’t just want audiences to see it. It takes a whole movie-loving world to do that.
“It will not be easy, because I make films for people to watch and the audience tells me what they like.” “They finish the film. I have nothing to hide behind. I can’t just be like: ‘Oh, people don’t understand.’ These are not videos that I make. What is the audience doing? Is it coming? Do they like it when they come?
“By the way, I don’t think I would have done my job well if I didn’t get frustrated every time I release the film, because you’re trying to challenge yourself, you’re trying to take risks.”
He doesn’t look scared. He seems relaxed and happy as I have seen him in 20 years. I have talked to Nolan many times, and he is a very clever, if infallible, interviewer, who has developed the ability to talk about his films and reveal everything about himself – “the most famous director in America” is how he described himself to me. Interviewing him is sometimes like trying to describe John le Carré’s master spy George Smiley.
But it doesn’t matter because – seven Oscars OppenheimerFatigue to finish The Odyssey, shooting for six months in many countries – something seems to have melted in Nolan. Maybe it’s a new dog, a chocolate lab named Charlie “who can hear the fridge being opened a distance away”, which Nolan and his wife, Emma Thomas, got, after their last children left home.
He said: “They are all gone from this world. “We have a dog so I decided to make one The Odyssey because it’s the last dog movie. I never had a dog when I was a kid, and we never had a dog when the kids were little because we traveled a lot. They are a little upset that we got one right after they left, even though they love the dog. Then I come to the Odyssey, I am not ashamed, but it is a very important part of the story. ” When Odysseus arrives home in Ithaca, 20 years later, he is immediately recognized by his old hunting dog Argos, who appears in Nolan’s trailer as a puppy. “A little taste of young Argos was a pleasure to have and I was glad he did it,” he says.
I met the success of Oppenheimer, the green one with Donna Langley of Universal and laid the stone when the director’s Oscar was presented to Nolan and embraced him from Steven Spielberg – “I fell into his arms like a runner crossing the finish line,” says Nolan – this film is Oppenheimer’s child in every way. “I thought: Well, now I have the opportunity to make a film that I wouldn’t have made otherwise,” says Nolan.
Thomas, his wife and good friend, who I spoke to later, made a very good point. “I don’t think there is any country where we would go to a studio and say: ‘We want to change a poem that has been around for 2,700 years,’ and that would be a big movie,” he says. “We were asking for more money to do this. This wouldn’t have happened without Oppenheimer.”
With nine months on the campaign trail, Nolan couldn’t begin writing until April 2024, but the delay only added more interest to the design that began when he chose a poem he hadn’t read since elementary school. “I’ve spent years in hotel rooms like this talking about the non-conformity of my film as if it’s too tight, and then you go back to the very old script and it has a fixed structure.
It wasn’t his first pass Homer. In the early 2000s, after the success of Memento, Nolan found himself briefly attached to David Benioff’s Troy script, based on The Illiad, which was eventually directed by Wolfgang Petersen, so “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking how do you present this to an audience that knows the horse’s belly is full of Greeks?” He says. “How do you make this believable?” The image that came to him, the bug that he later showed for The Odyssey, was the image of a beach monument, sunk in the sand. “See the real Mary, as we say in America, just being completely desperate that doesn’t have to work. That was the first image I had.”
Almost everyone describes it as the most difficult shoot of their career – like making seven emotional films in one, says Thomas. The athletes crossed deserts, mountains, seas and Arctic regions, often reaching the destination only by helicopter or long-haul flights. Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema’s team had to weigh 300lb (136kg) Imax cameras, the weight of a small refrigerator, crossing a distance where just placing people was often difficult enough. “At the end of each day, the department heads would have dinner and then we’d go down to the movie theater to watch the daily news,” says Thomas. “Every time you face a problem, you think: “My God, we’ve done that.” And then you think: “No, next week we have another big problem.
Nolan has problems with old friends, of course. His preference for real locations over audiostages, for “in camera” over computer-generated content, and Imax – an immersive scene that can be shot in just three minutes and requires a split second to silence the camera – has made the seas of destruction that rocked the shoot of Dunkirk look like just a place for bad weather.
What is the problem? “It’s not like that,” says Nolan. “The more we talk about it, the more it sounds like a Herzogian problem but it’s not my bag.” Of course, it’s about The Odyssey. You need things you have never seen before. I get tired of the sound and installation parts, not because I don’t want it to be difficult. That’s because nature and the real world give you a choice and the real world. achieve it in the studio but yes, it was physically difficult and sometimes I felt like I bit off more than I could chew.”
If he ever doubted himself, it wasn’t set. It was last night. “I sleep well because I’m very tired,” he says, but when Sunday comes, he finds time to re-read the script and look at the schedule for the week ahead. I said: ‘Oh, what am I going to do that week?’ and this keeps me awake most of the night, Sunday night, without sleep. So I came to be frazzled, the next day, but I was ready. I had a way out.
One place in particular stood out to him: the ruined castle of Castello di Santa Caterina on the Sicilian island of Favignana that he and designer Ruth De Jong chose for Odysseus’ home in Ithaca. To get there he had to walk 45 minutes every day along a stone path. “It seemed a bit big for me knowing we were going to be there, but we have a great spirit from the players and staff. Tom Holland building this path like a deer, making me feel very old and tired, but as an example to everyone, he was in it.”
On the last day, after filming at Universal in Los Angeles around 1 a.m., Thomas opened several bottles of champagne as he and Nolan do. “In this case, I think this is the first time we have done this and I felt like no one wanted to leave,” says Thomas. “It was like we were very disappointed. You want to go on, jump on the plane again.”
Prior to its release, The Odyssey has generated the usual amount of culture-war constant, after the manosphere episodes that were planned for the casting of Nyong’o as Helen and Elliot Page as Sinon. Homer’s classic poem, which is thought to be a man’s strength – “Tell me, muse, of man,” it begins – has recently been taken as a kind of Alamo for cultural activists who want to end the “woke” attack. “Homer’s Odyssey is in, gender studies are out,” wrote another activist in the near future. There’s a surprise, then, that Nolan has, in my opinion, written his strongest ensemble of female parts to date. In his film, Helen, Penelope, Circe, Athena and Calypso are not just rewards, temptations or divine intervention, but figures that are well-fulfilled in the actions of great powers.
Nolan said: “In his words and pictures. “The problem is that there is not much to them beyond these feelings in any way they can take.” What I like about what the women in this film have done is to give you a sense of the person behind the picture. Seeing Lupita as Helen you suddenly understand what it would be like to be the cause of this great war and siege – what it would mean, what would make her (Hapeelo, Anne) very strong.
This depth, he says, is created in dialogue with the actors rather than forced by the script. “I’ve been preparing enough to know the scary moment when, as a writer-director, you’re asked a question that you can’t answer. And you have to have an answer. There may be some ambiguity that was planned – the way Anne played Penelope, I almost didn’t want to know what was going on in her head – but yeah, you have to be on your toes.”
If history is any guide, now is the time for Nolan to start pulling together his next project. “The first symptoms are probably about a week after they have nothing to do and they start to get really angry,” says Thomas. That’s when he’ll start to think: ‘Okay, I need to do something.'” Restlessness, that’s what brought him to Ithaca in the first place. But The Odyssey doesn’t seem to be letting him out anytime soon, showing all over the world – from Mumbai to London – followed by what’s sure to be a non-stop campaign for the film, in every category, until next spring.
She said: “I want to have my period and I have nothing to do. “It’s been a long time since I had a period like that. It’s true – I get tired very quickly and that’s one of the reasons I love going back to work. I’m restless.” He pauses. “Right now, all I can do is try to get through this, stop the movie and get some rest.”
