Christopher Nolan interview: On defying the gods with ‘The Odyssey’ and protecting movie magic

As if finding yourself in the same room as one of the most venerated filmmakers of the 21st Century was not daunting enough, no amount of mentally preparing to interview the Academy Award-winning mind behind Oppenheimer, Interstellar, Inception and several other contemporary cinematic landmarks could possibly brace you for how mesmerising Christopher Nolan’s steely blue eyes are up close. 

Once I finally snapped myself free from the spell of that impossible blue, it took a considerable amount of steadying the nerves to fully process the fact that I was sitting across from a childhood idol. My mind instinctively raced through the catalogue of wide-eyed cinematic wonder, every memory of witnessing his brand of movie magic on the biggest screen possible rushing back as though I were Cooper stumbling through the Tesseract itself. If only I could reach across that proverbial five-dimensional bookshelf and knock a single book loose, just enough to tell my teenage self that one day I’d be sitting across from the architect of those extraordinary worlds...

But whatever improbable wrinkle in the space-time continuum finally indulged my early cinephilic fantasies, call it fate or qismat if you like, the acclaimed British-American filmmaker too seems to be wrestling with a similar sense of destiny through his long-awaited adaptation of Homer’s immortal homecoming epic, The Odyssey. The follow-up to his 2023 Best Picture winner Oppenheimer sees frequent collaborator Matt Damon stepping into the sandals of the battle-scarred Odysseus as he struggles to return home in the aftermath of the Trojan War, supported by a formidable ensemble that includes Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Himesh Patel and several of contemporary Hollywood’s most recognisable faces.   

The Oscar-winning filmmaker was in Mumbai for his first-ever film premiere in India, along with Damon, Holland, and producer Emma Thomas, drawing droves of fans across the city during the Indian leg of the film’s global promotional tour last weekend. 

Ahead of The Odyssey‘s worldwide theatrical release this Friday, we discussed the formative influences that shaped his latest film, why the story felt like a culmination of his filmmaking journey, and how he continues to protect that first spark of cinephilic wonder while carrying the expectations of millions who now look to his work for that very same feeling.

Excerpts:

Welcome back to Mumbai. It’s been a minute since ‘Tenet’. Has your time here in the city so far brought back any memories since your last here?

Christopher Nolan: Oh, very much. Just driving into the hotel from the airport, seeing some of the locations we shot at... the city’s changed a lot, but there’s so much that’s familiar. It’s such an amazing, vibrant place. It’s wonderful to be back here.

‘The Odyssey’ is perhaps the most epic homecoming story ever told, and after finally getting to watch it yesterday, I was struck by how often your protagonists seem to be torn between this idea of a sense of duty and a yearning for home. Did finally getting to make it ever feel like this is what the Fates had in mind for you?

Christopher Nolan: I mean, at the risk of sounding pompous, I think what you’re trying to get to as a filmmaker when you choose a project, you want to feel that there’s some kind of sense of destiny with that. You want to feel that your past and your past work has led you to the film you’re making. I think I felt that more on The Odyssey than any film I’ve made, partly because the story is a foundational literary epic of Western literature, and so in adapting it, I found all of my previous films. I found the homecoming narrative from Inception and Interstellar. I found the hero’s journey from the Dark Knight trilogy, the war story from Dunkirk. So much of what I’ve been doing in movies, in some way, comes from this story. So yeah, it did feel... It felt comfortable to me. It gave me confidence that I knew how to tell this story.

While you’ve majorly credited Emily Wilson’s translation as your primary influence, I was wondering whether you had any fond memories of a particularly memorable English teacher or a professor, or even your mum, who I believe was also an English teacher at some point of time, who you would credit for stoking your first interest in ‘The Odyssey’

Christopher Nolan: Well, I think one of my earliest memories of anything to do with The Odyssey is being at school at about — I think I was four or five years old — and seeing a play put on by the older kids, and it had aspects of Ulysses, as it was then called, being strapped to the masts to resist the Sirens. There was some version of the Trojan horse. I don’t remember much about it, it was a very long time ago, but that’s the first conscious memory I have of these story influences coming in. But like a lot of people in England and America, over time, through kids’ books, versions of The Odyssey itself, you absorb the things in the culture that have become kind of elemental. And then at school, studying the text for the first time and everything. But I actually found coming to the poem as an adult, with the view of adapting it for a screenplay — that was a very fresh experience for me, and I think like a lot of the audience, I wasn’t as familiar with it as I thought I was.

I knew certain elements. I knew things like the Cyclops, or the Sirens, or these kinds of things. But reading the poem, it’s just this incredible adventure story, and I wasn’t that aware of the specifics of it. So trying to make a film that’ll work for somebody who’s really familiar with the story, and work for somebody who knows nothing about it, who’s just coming to it like any other film that you might only have seen a trailer or something.

Last year, I’m sure you’ve heard that ‘Interstellar’ returned to Indian theatres after a decade, and for a period it was even outperforming local Indian blockbusters, which is quite the feat. As a storyteller, is there any greater compliment than watching your work stand the test of time that way?

Christopher Nolan: No, none. I mean, it really is an amazing thing, a fantastic thing, when something you’ve made years before continues to have a life. And people tell you they’ve got something from it, a new generation of filmmakers who possibly was too young to see it when it first came out, or in some cases wasn’t even born when it first came out. That’s how long I’ve been doing this now. It’s really wonderful to see your work stand the test of time. There are so many different variables when you release a film, and I’m very aware of this right now, because I make films for a cinema audience. And so the film, for me, like The Odyssey, is not finished until it goes to the audience, and the audience sort of tells me what it is. And there are so many variables that go into that process, in terms of how a film is distributed, who it reaches, and when it reaches those people. So it’s been really, really gratifying to see Interstellar continue to have a life for a new generation of filmmakers. It’s really wonderful.

This sort of afterlife also feels analogous to ‘The Odyssey’ itself, and how it’s endured the test of time. Has ‘The Odyssey’ changed the way you think about what it really means for a story to endure?

Christopher Nolan: That’s a very interesting question. I think it has in ways that I haven’t fully processed yet. It’s pretty remarkable to be reading words that are a translation of something that was written down so long ago. And the fact that these words have carried for thousands of years in different ways, and thinking a lot about where the words have come from, how they’ve been transmitted. I mean, the thing about The Odyssey that is incredibly compelling is, you know, words give you a very direct relationship with the author of the piece, but nobody knows who or what Homer was. They don’t know if it’s one person or multiple people or whatever.

The current thinking is that the poem was handed down as oral poetry for hundreds of years before it was even written down. These are incredible mysteries, and they make you think a lot about what endures in human culture, and whether or not film can have that kind of permanence as a medium. I mean, it’s only about 100 years old. Can it have that permanence as a medium, or is it fleeting, like theater? And I think in some ways it’s too soon to say.

There’s a beautiful irony that I noticed in the film’s tagline, which is, “Defy the gods”. Because I think if there’s anywhere in the world where you’ve experienced this kind of almost artistic apotheosis of sorts, it’s India, the people love you here. Does being placed on that kind of pedestal ever feel like something you’ve had to actively defy yourself?

Christopher Nolan: Well, you certainly need to keep in touch with, to do my job, I have to very much keep in touch with the things that drew me to filmmaking in the first place, and the things that I knew when I started out, as it were. If my films have had an impact on people, and if that sort of raises me in people’s estimation or whatever, wonderful though that is, it’s very irrelevant, has to be irrelevant to the craft of filmmaking, in which I’m a representative of the audience, and I have to have commonality with everybody who watches the film, and I have to make the film for the audience that I am a part of. So it’s very important to see yourself and understand yourself as a member of the wider audience.

When you meet someone who tells you that your films made them fall in love with cinema, or your films are the reason that they got into cinema in the first place, do you ever feel a sense of responsibility to protect that first sense of wonder?

Christopher Nolan: I do. And my context for that is the great filmmakers who I was inspired by as a kid, and it’s people like George Lucas, and Ridley Scott, and Stanley Kubrick, and all these great filmmakers that I grew up with, watching their films. And that, as you say, that ‘first sense of wonder’, that idea, you know, you go to a cinema as a child, and the screen is so huge, and it transports you into a world that shows you all these other possibilities. I think the reason I shoot on IMAX is I want to have the biggest screen possible, I want to have the most immersive experience possible, because I want to get back to that feeling that I did have first experiencing cinema.

The Odyssey releases across Indian theatres this Friday