Christopher Nolan was in an admitted state of anxiety. “It’s very nerve-racking,” the writer-director said, of the period before a film opens. “You work on something a long time, you care about it a lot, but movies belong to the audience. So it’s kind of in the eye of the beholder.”
His tension was particularly acute a few weeks before the July 17 debut of “The Odyssey,” his latest high-stakes adaptation after “Oppenheimer,” his 2023 biopic, won a slew of Oscars. “It was a big undertaking, unquestionably,” Nolan said of translating Homer’s monumental poem for the screen. “I don’t think I would have felt ready to take on this film until now.”
The first commercial feature filmed completely in IMAX, “The Odyssey” is a three-hour sword-and-sandals epic the likes of which are hardly made anymore, shot in six countries with a cast and crew of thousands, and practical effects in lieu of full CGI. It stars Nolan stalwarts like Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as his wife, Penelope, as well as new and sometimes unexpected players — Tom Holland as their son; John Leguizamo as a blind swineherd; the rapper Travis Scott as a bard. IMAX screenings began selling out almost a year ago.
“I wanted to make a very accessible movie,” Nolan said. But the challenges were immense, requiring new engineering and choreography. For Nolan and his cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, IMAX invented a “blimp system,” Nolan said, to encase and maneuver its enormous, and enormously loud, camera; castmates used mirrors to see each other around the equipment. “Halfway through the shoot, Hoyte and I kind of looked at each other and realized, ‘Yep, this is gonna work,’” Nolan said.
In a recent interview in the SoHo offices of his publicist, Nolan, who will turn 56 in July, side-eyed the color-coordinated bookshelves — his collection at home, he said, is “a legitimate mess,” driven especially by his college-sweetheart wife, Emma Thomas, who is also his longtime producer and the mother of his four children. “She reads five books to every one that I read,” he said. “I wish I could read that fast.”
Developing “The Odyssey,” he “read more translations than I care to remember,” he said, and realized “it is the ur-text. It’s in everything I’ve done before.”
With a reputation as one of cinema’s great purists — he doesn’t even use a thesaurus (“it doesn’t help my writing”) — he might give off an intimidating aura. But in person he was genial, spending extra time to talk as he sipped tea from a refilled thermos; punctuation to his thoughts. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
You’ve been interested in making this film for a long time. What was your initial connection to the material?
NOLAN It’s a story that’s always been in the back of my head, received in a lot of different ways. One of my first memories of receiving the story is being at primary school in London at probably 5 or 6 and seeing the older kids do a stage production. I remember the horse — I’m sure it was some cardboard concoction on a trolley — and the sirens, particularly.
It’s not something I ever sat down and read. A lot of young people in this country seem very familiar with it. Which is great, but a little daunting.
How many versions of the script did you write?
NOLAN I tend not to write that many. Adapting a very academic history of Oppenheimer — beautifully written, but 700 pages, very dense — the approach to “The Odyssey” was sort of similar, in that I read it, then wrote a lot of notes from memory. I tend to think in geometric terms, mathematical terms. I do a lot of diagrams, a lot of scribbles and doodles for months and months, before I let myself write. Then — I suppose ironically for somebody who’s associated with nonlinear approaches — I write in a very intensely linear way. I start on Page 1 and just go forwards.
If I looked at your desk, would it be littered with things?
NOLAN Yeah, it’s like “A Beautiful Mind,” covered in paperwork and pin boards, timelines and looping arrows and shapes. There’s a Venn diagram approach to point of view. I like to do that before I start writing, because I find writing very difficult. When I’m actually writing the words, I’m trying to discover the characters through that.
Were you a world-builder as a kid?
NOLAN A lot of time spent in my imagination, certainly, and I always loved that aspect of cinema, a movie that would just take you somewhere completely different. George Lucas’s first “Star Wars” — as a kid, I think I saw it 12 times in the cinema. That, for me, was just the essence of this medium — create an entire world that you can understand and live in, that’s absolutely different from everyday life. That’s the great joy of movies.
And that is the appeal of IMAX, right?
NOLAN My memories of cinema as a kid are of this so much larger-than-life screen, and for me as an adult, you’re trying to get back there. Trying to put the audience on the deck of the ship with Odysseus or be in the cave with the Cyclops. IMAX gives you this grand canvas. I love the format for that.
Landscapes are amazing, but faces are just remarkable. I would mercilessly put Cillian Murphy [who played Oppenheimer] under the gaze of that camera, but there’s something so rich and tactile and rewarding about seeing human faces shot close up that way.
Do other filmmakers ask you how to make IMAX technology work for them?
NOLAN Ryan [Coogler] called me before he committed to IMAX [for “Sinners”]. I think “Dunkirk” [2017] was the first time I dragged him to a screening of an original-made film print of IMAX. I love to show filmmakers the potential of the format. So he called me when he was prepping, but really I think he was sort of looking for someone to tell him it wasn’t crazy to shoot his vampire film that way. I was like, no, I’d love to see that.
One of the great satisfactions of my career has been being part of an evolutionary process of a [filmmaking] system. My excitement for having finished the film entirely in IMAX is: what other filmmakers might want to do that. I just want to go see somebody else’s film when they do it this way.
What movies did you watch as inspiration?
NOLAN Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev” [1966] made quite an impression on everybody — the textures are pretty remarkable. One of the films I screened as a bit of a flier, like I didn’t really know whether it would be relevant, was Kurosawa’s “Ran” [1985]. It’s shot very differently, but there’s this relationship between the environment and the wind. Now that I look at [our] finished film, I think it was a huge influence.
Were there images you had in your head before you started?
NOLAN Two that have carried me a long time — the horse about to be swept away in the tide, kind of listing over, like the last thing you think anybody [would be] inside, or that it was intended to be pulled into the city.
I don’t tend to think of images for purely imagistic purposes. Rather than doing the, kind of, horse on a roller skate, that was all about wanting to present the horse in a way that an audience who’s completely familiar with the story could see how it would work in a realistic sense.
And also — I don’t remember my original inspiration — the idea of a soldier decapitating a statue. That became very important, narratively.
You once described Oppenheimer as someone who knew how to motivate others “through the theatricality of his persona.” You could say the same for Odysseus. There seem to be a lot of parallels.
NOLAN When I finished the film I was quite struck by that. Every film I do, I like to leave it with questions or unanswered themes that I might carry through to the next film. There’s a lot of ideas of leadership, of mixed motivations, the flaws of people, that idea of where the best of intentions can go horribly wrong. Odysseus is a very complex character — a trickster, somebody who’s smart and wily. In “Star Wars” terms, it’s Han Solo — but Han Solo is not the hero of “Star Wars,” it’s Luke Skywalker.
You also don’t shy away from depicting his hubris and impetuousness.
NOLAN [laughing] This is where you arrive at Oppenheimer.
How would you characterize your own approach to risk?
NOLAN I’m very, very cautious. I see all things that will go wrong all the time. I’m one of those kinds of people.
An outsider might look at your body of work and the ways you have innovated in the same way that the character in the movie wants to be the first to experience something, even if it’s brutally hard. I’ve seen your producers describe you as risk-averse and responsible. And yet, onscreen, you’re making these enormous leaps.
NOLAN I think your question is probably more about creative risk. If you’re really interested in movies and the history of movies, the one thing you see absolutely is that you have to take risks to succeed. The biggest risk of all is to play it safe.
That’s what, consistently in mainstream movies, doesn’t work. The audience is looking for something new. What I’m saying is, I don’t see it as risky.
I remember a conversation with Emma when I first showed her the script for “Memento” [Nolan’s breakout film in 2000] structured backward and everything. She responded well with the script, but she felt like it was taking a lot of risk — a high burden. And I was able to say to her: No, I can do this. There are a lot of filmmakers who can do it in a more straightforward way. Actually having something new to bring to the table mitigates the risk, it gives you a way to distinguish yourself.
Then we tried to sell it to people who didn’t get it, so she was completely right. But eventually it got to an audience and the audience appreciated that. The risk is the intermediaries — the financiers, the studio. If you can get to the audience — I mean, I’m not making any predictions for this movie, but in the past we’ve been well rewarded for having faith in the audience.
Watching the movie, I thought a lot about the classical origins of hospitality, or “Zeus’s Law” in the story, and how it functions in our current, divided era.
NOLAN The greatness of the poem is such that you approach these things as if they’re foreign and ancient, then as you explore them, they suddenly become stunningly relevant. Zeus’s law, it’s the Golden Rule — treat as you would be treated — and with a theological underpinning in their world, that you might be a god in disguise.
For that world it’s very clearly basic survival. You leave the house for more than a couple days, you are by definition throwing yourself at the mercy of strangers. It’s the only way society can function. That became very important to the film, and as soon as you start drilling down on it, you realize nothing’s changed. That’s everything in terms of holding civilization together, or even defining civilization.
Is there a moral lesson that you wanted people to see? Especially in presenting it as a big, commercial movie?
NOLAN Absolutely, 100 percent. But I don’t want to articulate it. I want people to experience it in the film. I have strong feelings about how the story moves me in ethical terms. I’m hoping that people have that feeling the way I did.
Is that a reason that you were so attracted to it at this point?
NOLAN I think so, but I didn’t know that going in. As a filmmaker you have to move in impulsive ways. I was looking to challenge myself with a completely different type of storytelling and I was looking for a gap in the culture. I’m looking at Greek mythology, “The Odyssey” itself, why hasn’t it become part of modern cinema? That’s very exciting as a filmmaker. Then as you drill down — what is there to get your teeth into? “The Odyssey,” as with “Oppenheimer,” the reason these are great stories is they have these resonances, these knotty problems, ethical dilemmas. It’s about impossible situations. That’s what makes for a terrific story.
When you’re in production on something, do you dream about it?
NOLAN I tend to dream about the process more, which is horrible. These terrible anxiety dreams about, you know, the day’s almost over and we haven’t got a single shot. They’re not very useful dreams. When I’m writing, I tend to dream about the story itself more.
It’s kind of startling to me that of all filmmakers, you are still waking up in a cold sweat.
NOLAN Well, it’s part of seeing all the things that can go wrong. But one of the functions of dreams is that — anticipatory. It’s warning you about something, your subconscious is telling you. Quite often if I can’t sleep before a shoot — I have a lot of bad Sunday nights — it’s because I haven’t worked out the week’s work properly. You stay awake all night processing things that maybe you didn’t have time to process the week before. So I see the utility of it, increasingly, and I’m calm about the tension, if that makes sense.
To change gears a little bit, to the real-world tension of your industry, which is going through a moment of contraction. Last year you were elected president of the Directors Guild of America. What do you think of as your main mission?
NOLAN To help DGA members — directors, A.D.s [assistant directors], U.P.M.s [unit production managers], stage managers. Most of them work in television. And it isn’t a moment of contraction — television production peaked in 2016. This has been a long contraction. Episodic TV directors, we are dealing with 50 percent unemployment right now. It’s horrifying. What’s really needed is a federal tax incentive. And my intent is really to try and engage the studios and lobbying that from a business point of view. We need to get production back into the United States. It’s very, very important.
You have historically not been a smartphone user. Do you think of yourself as a technophobe?
NOLAN: No. I think of myself as a techno-skeptic. The reason I still shoot on film is because it’s better in terms of representing the way the eye sees the world than any digital imaging system I’ve seen, and I’ve looked at all of them very carefully. Analog color is different to digital color, so for me what’s important is that you have the choice. But I’ve always edited my films digitally, we absolutely use computer graphics as [part of] our visual effects pipeline.
I embrace new technology all the time, but it tends to be sold to people at the expense of systems that might still be valid and viable. That’s what I saw in my industry — throwing the baby out with the bath water. We almost lost film!
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