NEW YORK — Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is one of the most anticipated films of the century so far. Riding the massive success of “Oppenheimer,” Nolan has written and directed a 172-minute, R-rated, $250 million epic adaptation of Homer’s epic poem — the first feature ever shot entirely on IMAX cameras. For Chicago area audiences, that boundary-pushing ambition carries a particular resonance: The city and suburbs are woven into Nolan’s youth, as he and his siblings spent their summers in Evanston.
After experiencing the film — which stars Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya and Lupita Nyong’o — at New York’s AMC Lincoln Square IMAX, I sat down with Nolan the following afternoon for a conversation at the Four Seasons Hotel.
Richard Roeper: One of the challenges in adapting “The Odyssey” is that it’s essentially payoff after payoff after payoff, but in films we need setups. Can you talk about how you managed that?
Christopher Nolan: That’s the challenge of every adaptation. I loved working on “Oppenheimer,” taking a 700-page historical document and finding the movie in it. “The Odyssey” has incredible payoffs. But the setups aren’t there because Homer’s audience was familiar with them all. It’s almost like a greatest hits collection, because this was a mythology that was really known.
There are two things you have to change from the poem when adapting. You have to put the setups in, and you have to eliminate the repetitions. Because repetitions in the poem that work with the rhythm of everything, they don’t work for a film.
Roeper: You made it very accessible, though, which is an impressive feat when we’re dealing with something that’s been translated and debated for thousands of years. But some of the audience might be only vaguely familiar with the material. They know maybe the fractured fairy tale, cartoon version.
Nolan: It’s always a consideration. So if you make a Batman film, you’re making a film for comic book fans, and you’re making a film for people who’ve never opened a comic book in their lives. It’s got to appeal to everybody. You make a film about Oppenheimer, you make a film that physicists and historians are going to watch, but also people who know nothing about it.
I wrote out a list of all the things that I wanted to see in a film version of “The Odyssey” before I over-familiarized myself with the text. Put that to one side, and then start diving into different translations. Then coming out the other side, you go back and say, okay, do I have the things in there that we all feel we know a little bit about? Because I think most people’s experience of “The Odyssey” actually is a little bit of knowledge. A little bit of a feeling of the Sirens, or the Cyclops… the Trojan Horse.
Roeper: Is that always a touchstone for you when you’re starting to make a movie? “What is the movie that I would want to see?”
Nolan: Absolutely. I mean, I’m the audience. That’s my job. It’s very difficult to pin down the job of the director, because I don’t photograph the film. I don’t act in the film. I don’t record the sound. I mean, I have done different bits of those jobs on smaller films, but what does a director do?
You can say it’s the conductor of an orchestra. But really, what the director is, is the audience. I’m there on set going, “Does this move me? What is this shot? Okay, now what’s the next thing I need to see?” So you really are making the film for yourself, and then in a paradoxical way you kind of never get to watch it that way because you’re very familiar with it.
Roeper: You also do such a great job of acknowledging that Odysseus is kind of a duplicitous jerk at times. Is it extra important then to have somebody like Matt Damon in that lead role because he brings such goodwill with him from the start?
Nolan: It’s exactly that. If you’re taking on a complicated character — and the adjective most commonly associated with Odysseus is “wily” — that’s not a traditional attribute of a movie hero. I like to say Odysseus makes a really great supporting character. In “The Iliad,” he’s a wonderful supporting player. If you’re looking at “Star Wars,” he’s Han Solo. He’s going to have the smart remark, he’s going to have the trick up his sleeve, he’s going to find the angle.
That was what I found toughest about the adaptation. The character — how do you move that character to center stage and have him take you on that journey? Casting Matt Damon is a huge part of that. I mean, everything starts script-wise, but a lot of it is about, okay, who’s going to take you on this journey? Who can the audience invest in? Matt is an amazing actor, but he’s also a terrific movie star. He has that empathetic openness to an audience. We just go with him. We want to believe in him, and we want to see where he can go.
Roeper: You spent a lot of time in Chicago growing up. Were you a Museum of Science and Industry guy? The IMAX there?
Nolan: My early formative IMAX experiences were going to the Museum of Science and Industry and seeing “Ring of Fire,” a wonderful documentary about volcanoes in the Pacific and Indonesia. And going to Great America and seeing “To Fly.” The Museum of Science and Industry was an IMAX dome, which was incredible. But the IMAX at the Great America Pictorium back then was a flat IMAX, and “To Fly” was there.
Nolan (left) with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema. “My early formative IMAX experiences were going to the Museum of Science and Industry and seeing ‘Ring of Fire,’ a wonderful documentary about volcanoes in the Pacific and Indonesia,” Nolan says. “And going to Great America and seeing ‘To Fly.’”
Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
At that point I wanted to be a filmmaker. I was making my own little Super 8 films. But I thought, why on earth isn’t Hollywood embracing this? Why aren’t we making dramatic features like this? So it’s very apt that I went back to Chicago many years later and shot the first IMAX sequence for a theatrical film, which was that introduction to the Joker and that opening scene in “The Dark Knight.”
Roeper: So you go from the museum and Great America, where it was more like, “Look what this can do,” and then with “The Dark Knight” it became, “Look how this can be used.”
Nolan: What we did, because no one had ever done it before, was actually parceled it off as a week-long shoot during pre-production … We came to Chicago, shot all of that, went back to London, cut it together, and then came back to Chicago to shoot the Chicago unit. It was just a thrilling thing to discover how that format could integrate with Hollywood filmmaking.
Roeper: One of the themes in “The Odyssey” that struck me is the passage of time, family and trying to get home. Would this have been a different film if you had made it years ago?
Nolan: It would have been. Yeah, a very different film. “The Odyssey” is about family. It’s a story of middle age. A middle-aged love affair. I brought my experience of life and my experience of work to it and found a lot in it.
Roeper: You’re finally going to get to share [the film] with the world. Do you still have that moment where it’s hard to let go, or is this an exciting time for you?
Nolan: It’s neither of those things, honestly. It’s just terrifying and always has been. One of the reasons it’s terrifying is it’s very important to me how the audience receives the film. You make the film for the audience. It goes out there into the world, and the audience tells you what it is. I can’t sort of hide behind, “People didn’t get it,” or something. I don’t really have that defense mechanism.
You hope for the best. You do your best. It’s not really letting it go, and it’s not really exciting. It’s just utterly terrifying.
Richard Roeper is the Sun-Times’ former movie critic and a current contributor.