Christopher Nolan Josh Telles/PMC Despite The Odyssey giving up the throne to Spider-Man: Brand New Day at the box office, Christopher Nolan continues to make news, this time for a press tour interview he did in China that got deeply philosophical about art, history, storytelling, modern film criticism, and the appearance of Christian conceptions of atonement in his soon-to-be billion-dollar blockbuster.
Speaking to Chinese podcaster and political philosophy lecturer Zhong Shu in Beijing, which first appeared on China’s Bilibili video platform, the British filmmaker has something of a hard break from the usual interviews he’s done on The Odyssey’s globe-spanning press tour. There were no games, no soft-ball or rushed questions about his favorite moments from the production or anecdotes about the actors, instead Zhong’s interview was one of the rare ones where the filmmaker was probed about his personal philosophy and worldview and how that informed the making of The Odyssey.
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As such, it was perhaps no surprise that the interview has gone viral as it gave us a fascinating insight into the thinking of arguably the world’s most popular filmmaker at the peak of his powers. Here are some key takeaways and highlights.
“Bard of a civilization at dusk.”
Zhong began the interview, which was conducted in English, by describing Nolan as a bard of the modern age, as Homer was a bard of Ancient Greece and then describing the latter’s poem as a celebration of war and victory, whereas Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey is most certainly the oppposite, reflecting more the current day. Zhong followed up by asking the director, due to the tone of his film, whether he was a “bard of a civilization at dusk?”
“I think that’s a really interesting point, a really interesting question,” Nolan said with a laugh. “I mean underlying the main part of the point is this 400-year-or-so gap between the events that Homer is describing when Homer’s story was written down, or first received by readers and audiences. That’s a pretty interesting gap, and for me, I don’t think I’m completely at odds with the way Homer is telling the story. When you look at it from a sort of historical perspective and the reason is — and what I got interested in as I adapted it — is that Homer’s writing about an era before his, he’s writing about an era hundreds of years before. His audience viewed it as being more advanced than theirs. So they were a civilization on the rise, but they were trying to get back to where they had been 400 years before. So that idea of a cycle, that idea of, as you say, a civilization at dusk. I think it’s there in the poem, it’s subtle. But when you look at the history as well… when they would unearth these walls of old palaces that were crumbled, they called them Cyclopian walls because they thought only a giant could have built such grand walls. They had this idea of the greatness of this past civilization. And so I became interested by that collapse, what they call the catastrophe, the Bronze Age collapse. What happens between the events of the Trojan War and Homer.”
He added, “I think [those themes are] something that from a modern perspective is frightening and interesting and I think for me it partly comes out of having worked on Oppenheimer before this, which is very much a film about the end of the world, about the end of and collapse of civilization, ultimately. So I think yeah I definitely carried that sensibility into this adaptation of The Odyssey.”
Concepts of atonement.
Zhong then moved on to the concept of “atonement” in Nolan’s film, saying that such a concept doesn’t exist in Ancient Greek culture, or language, or in Homer’s poem. She asked directly whether the filmmaker had “Christianized The Odyssey” and further why atonement was so important in the film.
“I wasn’t too conscious of how I was approaching it philosophically other than I really honed in on the idea of what’s termed ‘xenia,’ said Nolan. “In the film we call it Zeus’s Law for simplicity, but it’s that idea of mutual respect – that I treat you the way I want to be treated. And in their theology it’s because you might be a god in disguise. I really drilled down on that, and I started to realize that for me a lot of what’s interesting about the interaction of history and mythology is this idea of the ‘sea peoples’, the idea of the people from the sea who were thought to have precipitated the Bronze Age collapse. It’s one of the great mysteries of history: who were they? But the idea that really a violation of xenia, a violation of Zeus’ Law — which is what the suitors are doing in the palace — that really is the [breaking] of Zeus’ Law that is causing this difficulty and this damage.
“I think the idea of atonement in a way is what we bring as viewers to the story,” Nolan added. “I don’t know whether there really is atonement in the film, or whether we just feel that catharsis or that’s the process we’re seeing in the final meeting that we’ve waited for between Odysseus and Penelope. But I think in a way we maybe bringing our more modern sensibility to that. Insofar as [atonement is] there, it’s not a deliberate attempt to Christianize it, but it’s an outgrowth or it’s a natural conclusion of burrowing in on this philosophical idea of what happens when you break Zeus’ Law.”
Modern film criticism, storytelling and tropes.
Circling back to Homer’s poem, and how it celebrates the great men of history, Zhong then probed Nolan on whether his adaptation “apologizes” for this sense of greatness to suit modern sensibilities. “Is [The Odyssey] a story of apology that demands repentance, and reflection and self-criticism?, asked Zhong.
I think that when you’re talking about storytelling, you’re always in conversation with the expectations of the audience,” Nolan began his considered reply. “So, it really is an energy that’s brought from the audience as well as an energy that’s put forward from the story itself. When you’re characterizing somebody, and the trite version of this, or the criticism that is often leveled at movies in general, is, ‘oh, the character has to be made sympathetic’ — so the character is manipulated in different ways or changed in different ways. And that’s a fundamental flaw of film criticism in a way, or storytelling criticism, because to be able to identify the mechanism does not invalidate the mechanism. And that’s a real problem in criticism today because people have this idea that: because I can understand why the story affects me the way it is, therefore, it didn’t work. That’s not how storytelling works. When we create a heroic figure in a story as storytellers, we have to be mindful of the energy that the audience brings to that story and the interaction between our intention and the way the audience receives that. And the fact that mechanism is identifiable to people doesn’t invalidate it. Part of that mechanism is saying, ‘are we going to treat greatness as an absolute or coming from a democratic or… more idealized philosophical state that we live in, in today’s world, where we want to view people as equal. Do we have to apologize for that greatness? And the answer is yes, we do, or the audience rejects the greatness, and that is part of the mechanism. Once again, the fact that the mechanism is identifiable doesn’t mean that it’s invalid or shouldn’t be used.”
Later in the interview Nolan returns to his views of modern “amateur” film criticism. “When I was talking about film criticism, I was talking more about amateur film criticism than professional film criticism, because professional film criticism tends to understand the necessity for the mechanisms. So you’re looking at a lingua frana of storytelling created by Hollywood for the last 100 years that is very effectively universal and so it is its own language, and that language is understood by people all over the world, which is what’s incredible about it. And it is a very accessible modern language of storytelling and it has certain rules. It has conventions, you can break those conventions, you can bend them. You can move them, but you have to be aware of them the whole time. As I say, I’m thinking more of amateur criticism when I say that people who, because they feel they’ve identified the mechanism, they feel that it invalidates it. That can be true of certain elements and film grammar, and film language evolves with that.
“So when a trope becomes too familiar to an audience, then it has to be changed. But we do, as filmmakers, avail ourselves of that common language. We build on that understanding that our audience has seen many films. And that they understand that language. So, you’re playing with that language. It’s the language of genre. It’s the language of audience sympathy. It’s the language of clarity and of narrative direction and how you guide people through a story.”
Nolan then linked his point about “mechanisms” to his film Memento. “You can’t completely have a tabula rasa; you can’t throw everything away. You have to make your choices in terms of ‘how am I orienting the story?’ So for example, one of my first films, Memento, was a story that I structured in reverse chronologically. But what I retained was a very clear and simple three-act structure. So the structure of the film as it’s received by the audience is very very conventional. But the chronology is unconventional. And so those are the choices you make. That’s one example where you say, ‘Okay, I need this to be extremely familiar underneath so that I can change what’s on the surface.’ And that’s a continual mechanism that’s evolving.”
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