Christopher Nolan Defends ‘The Odyssey’ Armor and Casting Travis Scott After Online Backlash: ‘What Is the Best Speculation?’

Arguably the most hotly anticipated movie of the summer is none other than “The Odyssey,” celebrated filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning “Oppenheimer.”

It is a film the likes of which Hollywood rarely signs off on nowadays — an ambitious sword-and-sandals epic with massive sets, some practical effects, and a cast of thousands. The $250 million-budgeted tentpole, adapted from Homer’s epic and hitting theaters July 17, is the first in Nolan’s career to be shot entirely on 70 mm Imax cameras. It stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, a Greek king who’s embarked on a long journey home filled with one outstanding obstacle after another to return to his fearlessly devoted wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway). The all-star cast is rounded out by Tom Holland as Telemachus, Robert Pattinson as Antinous, Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, Zendaya as Athena, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Jon Bernthal as Menelaus, and Benny Safdie as Agamemnon.

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In a series of interviews with Time magazine, Nolan and his creative team opened up about the making of “The Odyssey” and addressed the wave of online criticism regarding the armor of his warriors, which many online felt resembled Batman’s more modern-looking Batsuit.

“There are Mycenaean daggers that are blackened bronze,” Nolan said. “The theory is they probably could have blackened bronze in those days. You take bronze, you add more gold and silver to it and then use sulfur… With Agamemnon, Ellen [Mirojnick], our costume designer, is trying to communicate how elevated he is relative to everyone else. You do that through materials that would be very expensive.”

Nolan also defended the casting of rapper Travis Scott as a bard, whose appearance in an early trailer caught some by surprise.

“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,” Nolan said.

Anyone who’s been following Nolan’s career knows the British filmmaker is painstaking when it comes to accuracy. On “Interstellar,” he hired a team of scientists to get the physics to be as accurate as possible. He took a similar approach to “The Odyssey.”

“For ‘Interstellar,’ you’re looking at, ‘What is the best speculation of the future?’ When you’re looking at the ancient past, it’s actually the same thing,” Nolan said. “‘What is the best speculation and how can I use that to create a world?’”

He added, “Hopefully they’ll enjoy the film, even if they don’t agree with everything. We had a lot of scientists complain about ‘Interstellar.’ But you just don’t want people to think that you took it on frivolously.”