TGIF — Thank God it’s Finally time for a Christopher Nolan movie to be out in theaters. It’s Fran Hoepfner back at the wheel (or should we say “helm”?) of this week’s newsletter. Happy The Odyssey weekend, one and all. In the belabored metaphor I’ve been working on today, you, the reader, are Odysseus, who, having survived the Trojan War (trying to buy Imax tickets to see The Odyssey), can finally go home (go see The Odyssey in theaters). Here’s hoping your journey is a little less eventful than his.
I had the fortune of seeing The Odyssey on Monday night. I went in a little apprehensive, having been quite cool on Oppenheimer despite liking Nolan’s work most of the time. The Odyssey, however, really bowled me over. There are obvious comparisons to Oppenheimer or even Interstellar, but I found the most striking parallels in Inception, which is also, in a way, about a man’s journey back to his home life in the wake of destruction and deceit.
I spoke to our film critic Bilge Ebiri, who interviewed Christopher Nolan as well as a number of his collaborators on The Odyssey about the making of this epic feat. Given how few people have seen the movie at the time of our talking, we’ve kept things mostly spoiler-free, though Nolan enthusiasts may want to wait until they get out to dive deep in full.
Where does your excitement for this movie come from?
One of the reasons why I'm so fascinated by this movie is because I grew up with The Iliad and The Odyssey. My grandfather was an archaeologist in Turkey who specialized in ancient Greece, and he was obsessed with it. The last book he ever wrote is called — well, it's in Turkish, but the translation would be A Visual Iliad. So when I was growing up, he didn’t tell us fairy tales. He would tell us stories of Hector and Paris and Achilles and Odysseus. So I've always been fascinated by this stuff. It’s been funny hearing people complaining about anachronistic armor designs and stuff like that. I'm the offspring of an archaeologist who specialized in this, and I'm just like, “Are you insane?” Not only is it myth, but it's also completely lost to history. Homer is composing 400 years after these events; he's imagining things from this basket of collective myths and legends and memories that all the artists of that period and beyond have borrowed from and changed and shifted. There's absolutely nothing that is fixed in stone as it were.
One of the first questions someone asked me was if I was distracted by the armor looking out of place, and I was like, “No … I was watching the movie.”
I talked to Christopher Nolan about this and I mentioned John Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur when we were discussing the scene with the Laestrygonians, these big-ass knights who show up. They’re completely anachronistic, but it’s not Nolan trying to imagine what they’d be like. In Homer’s “original” Odyssey, the Laestrygonians are man-eating giants, but that sequence comes right after the Cyclops, who is also a man-eating giant. Nolan instead imagines something totally different, both to avoid the repetition and create something that is so obviously not of this world. I told Nolan that it was like those guys walked right out of Excalibur, and he said it was a good reference point for the movie in general. The characters in that movie are not wearing armor that’s out of Arthurian times. Like The Odyssey, the stories of King Arthur are total myths, legends. No one can say for sure, “This is what they would have looked like.”
Agamemnon's armor is one of my favorite things in the movie. We do have some evidence that they could blacken bronze back then. He was the king of kings; he had absolute power. He would look intimidating. When people saw it in the trailer, they were like, “What the fuck is this? He looks like Batman.” Like, yes, exactly, he looks like Batman. There’s a through-line between superheroes and myths. Something Nolan said when we spoke is that both are a collection of references. You know when you watch a superhero movie and some random guy shows up and 50 percent of the audience goes crazy? That’s kind of what it’s like when Homer mentions Argos the dog.
Getting a moviegoing audience excited about the mere concept of Agamemnon from that somewhat intimidating character poster feels pretty wry and self-aware.
I think it's a very savvy movie in so many ways, especially in the way it's been structured. This really comes up, like with many of Nolan’s movies, on rewatch. I’m lucky enough to have seen it three times now. Composer Ludwig Göransson told me that one of their very early ideas was to have the alarm bells of Troy become a musical motif over the course of the film. That's so poetic I could die.
I love this Ludwig Göransson score. It’s great to see him, especially after Sinners’s big win, go for something that’s a bit earthier and grounded but just as audacious.
Something Göransson said to me that unites his work with Nolan and Ryan Coogler’s work is one, they’re both writers, and they bring him in very early on in the process at the script level, and the other is that neither works with temp tracks, which is almost unheard of in Hollywood. People will film something epic and put the Last of the Mohicans soundtrack in and tell the composer, “I want something that sounds like Last of the Mohicans.” Without the temp track, Göransson has so much freedom and versatility to do what he wants. He goes around recording crazy sounds and puts them back into the score.
I felt like Inception was the clearest parallel to me while I was watching, but I’m curious how you’d situate The Odyssey in Nolan’s filmography.
It starts off like Interstellar, it ends like Oppenheimer, and it's Dunkirk in the middle. One of the things I really admire about Nolan is even though he has all this power as a filmmaker, every film of his feels like he's still developing as a filmmaker. He couldn’t have made this movie after The Dark Knight.
As with many of his movies, this cast has quite a deep bench. There’s guys in there I didn’t even realize were in there. Do you have any favorites in the supporting cast?
They’re all good. The performances in this movie are excellent. I’m delighted there’s so much of Himesh Patel, especially because what he’s doing is so subtle as Eurylochus [Odysseus’s second-in-command] — sometimes he’s a sounding board; other times, a conscience. I mean, Anne Hathaway is not a supporting performer in this, but I think this is some of the best work she’s ever done. It’s great to see John Leguizamo have such a meaty part. Elliot Page is really good.
I think Elliot Page is my favorite of the minor players.
Many of Nolan’s films are about delayed consequences, and it’s through Page’s character that we start to see it finally dawn on Odysseus what’s been happening.
Is there a preferred format you think people should seek out?
I mean, look, Imax 70-mm. is amazing. All three times I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it in Imax. I'm always a fan of seeing that format, but I actually think this movie would work really well, if not even slightly better, in just regular 70-mm. I'm a person who sits close to the screen, so I love to just be completely enveloped by the movie.
