Christopher Nolan: “The success of Oppenheimer allowed me to dare to take on The Odyssey”
The director reveals in the new issue of Première that the phenomenal success of his biopic, in 2023, gave him the freedom and the means to properly adapt Homer’s masterpiece.
Three years after the triumph ofOppenheimercrowned by seven Oscars and more than $970 million in revenue, Christopher Nolan dared to tackle a monument of literature: The Odyssey of Homer.
A project that no one had ever brought to the screen with such ambition in all of Hollywood history. In issue 575 of Firstcurrently on newsstands (and available on our online store), the filmmaker explains that the success of his previous film was decisive.
“We’re talking about The Odyssey! Homer’s Odyssey! The wait is enormous. For a story like this, you had to mobilize an enormous strike force, have the confidence of a studio to entrust it to you, and the experience to know how to use it..”
For Christopher Nolan, an opportunity of this magnitude only comes around once or twice in a career.
“Moments like that, you only get one or two in a career. Oppenheimer’s triumph allowed me to have these options and therefore to dare The Odyssey.”
But why did we have to wait until 2026 to see the birth of such a spectacular adaptation of Homer’s poem? The director believes that cinema simply never had the necessary tools:
“It’s a cultural chasm. And that’s precisely what we’re looking for as filmmakers: a gap, something new to offer the public. Ironically, the oldest and most seminal story of all had never been tackled by modern cinema.“
According to him, the great Hollywood epics missed out on the work because technology did not yet make it possible to bring his imagination to life:
“In the great era of peplums, when Antiquity nourished Hollywood, visual effects did not yet know how to bring these creatures, these gods, these monsters into existence; not credibly, anyway. Result: all this marvelous has been confined to the B series…”
For Christopher Nolan, cinema is finally capable of meeting this challenge.
“Today, IMAX gives this very subjective feeling of the world, and the visual effects do the rest. I think the time had finally come to tackle it.“
In other words, The Odyssey is not just the film that follows Oppenheimer. It is also the one that his immense success made possible. Without the confidence gained from the studios thanks to his worldwide triumph, Christopher Nolan believes that he would simply never have been able to bring this titanic project to life.
The Odyssey is currently in theaters.
