Yesterday, we talked a bit about Christopher Nolan’s Time Magazine cover interview, which he did in support of his adaptation of The Odyssey. One of the big stories was that Nolan finally confirmed what had been widely rumored for months, which is that he cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. He also has Lupita playing dual roles: Helen and her sister, Clytemnestra. Well, the right-wing bros are already losing their minds at “woke Helen of Troy,” because, you have to remember, “woke” just means “Black” to them. Not only Woke Helen of Troy, but Woke Athena, because Athena is played by Zendaya. Nolan really has a bunch of surly white guys sobbing into their Red Bulls about Black folks being included in Greek mythology. Anyway, Nolan also confirmed in this Time interview that he cast Travis Scott as “a bard.”
The punishing conditions were the point. Nolan considered casting actors to play gods throwing thunderbolts from Mount Olympus but settled on something more primal. “I became more interested in the idea that to people in that period, evidence of gods was everywhere,” he says. In Bronze Age Greece, thunder, rain, and the sun rising didn’t have scientific explanations—they represented the will of the immortals. “The wonderful thing about cinema, and IMAX in particular, is that you can take an audience to a place of immersion, feeling close to events like storms, turbulent seas, high winds. You want the audience to be on the boat with them fearing the ocean, fearing the wrath of Poseidon, the way the characters do. That to me is so much more powerful than any individual image you can have [of a god].”
Despite his reputation as a visionary, Nolan still takes notes from the studio. “I think the day we don’t take notes anymore is the day we make a crappy movie,” says Thomas. “There is the creative benefit of having people question you and to really make you justify what it is you’re doing. We also want the studio to be invested in our movie. They have to sell it.” Nolan has never run over schedule or budget, including on this film, which he shot in just 91 days, nine days ahead of schedule. “He’s kind of a machine when it comes to shooting,” says Thomas. “It’s very funny: when he’s writing, we’ll go for a hike, and he’ll say, ‘Stop going so fast.’ The minute we start shooting, his heartbeat speeds up. He’s suddenly a different person completely. He just moves fast.”
In the corner of three-time Academy Award–winning composer Ludwig Göransson’s studio sits a lyre nearly the size of a grown man, one room over from a ping-pong table that, at the push of a button, disappears into the floor. For Göransson and Nolan, the ancient and the modern are not so far apart.
Nolan instructed Göransson not to use an orchestra in the score, if only to subvert expectations for a swords-and-sandals film. “It’s not like the orchestra existed back then,” says Göransson. “It was a challenge and also an opening to try to make something unique.” Instead, Göransson rented 35 bronze gongs of varying sizes, experimented, recorded them with synths, and began sending the director songs.
Nolan also put rapper Travis Scott in the film as a bard. “I cast him because I wanted to nod towards the idea that this story has been handed down as oral poetry, which is analogous to rap,” says Nolan. Even the string instrument plays a surprising role. “Chris had this idea of the sound of the lyre being the pluck of Odysseus’ bow,” says Göransson.
As someone said on social media (and I’m paraphrasing): the Classics professors simply need to understand that this is Nolan’s version of The Odyssey and not “the definitive pseudo-historically accurate Greek myth” version. Like, this is Nolan’s artistic freedom, how he’s interpreting the text, characters and story. I have to say, I’m pleasantly surprised by his casting choices. Lupita as Helen of Troy, Zendaya as Athena and Travis Scott as a bard keeping the oral tradition alive? That’s genuinely inspired casting.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images, ‘The Odyssey’ trailer. Cover courtesy of Time.
