Christopher Nolan on the Flaws of Film Criticism and the Shared Philosophy of Oppenheimer and The Odyssey

If you have already grown tired of the hundredth interview of The Odyssey team discussing what it was like shooting an entire film on IMAX cameras or capturing everything as practically as possible, then a gift from the gods has now arrived. During the Beijing press stop tour for his box office behemoth, Christopher Nolan sat down with political philosophy lecturer and doctoral student Zhong Shu for the most thorough, fascinating interview yet on the making of his Home adaptation.

For a director who can often be evasive––or perhaps not questioned enough––when it comes to the philosophical decisions behind his moves, Zhong Su does a stellar job in a relatively brief period to get Nolan to open up about his thoughts on “Christianizing” Homer’s poem, the themes of atonement in the film, his thoughts on the flaws of film criticism (be sure to read our less-than-enthused review of his latest), his portrayal of the gods, and more.

In discussing the adaptation, Nolan says, “The main point is this 400-year-or-so gap between the events that Homer is describing and when Homer’s story was written down or first received by audiences. That’s a pretty interesting gap. 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 historical perspective. The reason is—and what I became interested in as I adapted it—is that Homer is writing about an era hundreds of years earlier that his audience viewed as being more advanced than theirs. So, while they were a civilization on the rise, they were trying to get back to where they had been 400 years before.”

“That idea of a cycle—the idea of, as you say, a civilization at dusk—I think is there in the past, but it’s subtle. When you look at the history, and you see that when they would unearth these walls of old palaces that had crumbled, they called them ‘Cyclopean walls’ because they thought only a giant could have built such grand walls. They had this idea of the greatness of this past civilization. I became interested in that collapse—what they call the ‘catastrophe,’ the Bronze Age collapse—and what happens between the events of the Trojan War and Homer. From a modern perspective, that is something that is frightening, interesting, and intriguing. 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 and the collapse of civilization. I definitely carried that sensibility into this adaptation of The Odyssey.”

When asked about adding the concept of “atonement,” which doesn’t exist in Greek culture and what could be construed as “Christianizing” The Odyssey, Nolan responds, “I wasn’t too conscious of how I was approaching it philosophically, other than that I really honed in on the idea of what’s termed xenia. 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. In their theology, it’s because the stranger standing in front of 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 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?”

He adds, “The idea that a violation of xenia—a violation of Zeus’s Law, which is what the suitors are doing in the palace—is what causes this difficulty and damage. I think the idea of atonement, in a way, is what we bring as viewers to the story. I don’t know whether there really is atonement in the film, or whether we just feel that catharsis in the final meeting we’ve waited for between Odysseus and Penelope. In that sense, we may be bringing our more modern sensibility to it. Insofar as it’s there, it’s not a deliberate attempt to Christianize it, but rather an outgrowth or a natural conclusion of burrowing in on this philosophical idea of what happens when you break Zeus’s Law.”

Discussing the ideas of Odysseus repenting for his hubris, Nolan says, “I suppose the question could be asked: what difference would it make if he repented? That’s the interesting thing about these philosophical approaches. His repentance would be purely internal; it would purely be for his own spiritual self. It wouldn’t necessarily affect anything outside of him because the damage is done. Xenia is broken, maybe for all time. I think that is the thing about hubris—it’s tragic because it’s irreversible, essentially. That’s where Christian theology looks at it in a different way, but in a practical sense, it doesn’t necessarily change what’s happened. Therefore, in storytelling terms, it isn’t necessarily relevant. As I said, we bring our understanding to it, so we feel that there’s catharsis because there’s confession, honesty, and intimacy between Odysseus and Penelope. That was very important to me and I’m very invested in that emotionally. But if his repentance has no practical effect and the catastrophe is coming anyway—the collapse is coming—then what difference does it make for the events? Are we concerned with his spiritual well-being or the world that he lives in and feels he’s damaged?”

Following Oppenheimer with The Odyssey, two tales of “great” men who go through an experience of repentance, Nolan opened up about his approach and criticism surrounding it. “When you’re characterizing somebody—the trite version of this, or the criticism often leveled at movies in general—is: ‘Oh, the character has to be made sympathetic,’ so the character is manipulated and changed in different ways,” he said. “That’s a fundamental flaw of film criticism or storytelling criticism, because to be able to identify the mechanism does not invalidate the mechanism. That’s a real problem in criticism today because people have this idea that because they can understand why the story affects them the way it does, it therefore didn’t work. That’s not how storytelling works.”

He adds, “So, when we create a heroic figure in a story as storytellers, we have to be mindful of the energy the audience brings to that story and the interaction between our intention and the way the audience receives it. The fact that the mechanism is identifiable to people doesn’t invalidate it. Part of that mechanism is asking: are we going to treat greatness as an absolute? Or, coming from a more democratic or idealized philosophical state that we live in today where we want to view people as equal, do we have to apologize for that greatness? The answer is: yes, we do, or the audience rejects the greatness. That is part of the mechanism.”

“Once again, the fact that the mechanism is identifiable doesn’t mean it’s invalid or shouldn’t be used,” he clarifies, “For me, as we talk about it—and none of these are things I try to be conscious of when I’m writing—we realize that my attempt to do that is to retain it within the philosophical surrounding of the breaking of xenia that I found interesting in the story. I’m trying to be true to the thematics of the story as I create a character that the audience can invest in and feel satisfied by.”

Speaking to his approach in rethinking the standard structures of cinematic storytelling, Nolan says, “Film itself is its own language. That language is understood by people all over the world, which is what’s incredible about it. It is a very accessible modern language of storytelling, and it has certain rules and 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, we as filmmakers avail ourselves of that common language. We build on that understanding. Our audience has seen many films and they understand that language—the language of genre, the language of audience sympathy, the language of clarity of narrative direction, and how you guide people through a story.”

Opening up about his breakthrough feature, he adds, “You can’t throw everything away. You have to make your choices in terms of how you are arranging the story. For example, one of my first films, Memento, was a story that I structured in reverse [chronological order]. 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 conventional, but the chronology is unconventional. Those are the choices you make. You say, ‘OK, I need this to be extremely familiar underneath so that I can change what’s on the surface.’ That’s a continual mechanism that’s evolving and that you’re working with the whole time.”

Lastly, Nolan discusses his portrayal of the Greek gods in The Odyssey, saying, “To the characters in the story, the gods are reality. What I found interesting about looking at the idea of gods—and how to address it from the point of view of people who would have lived at that time, for whom in a pre-scientific era, evidence of divinity was everywhere—is that the existence of gods is not an article of faith; it’s simple reality. Thunder and lightning are gods speaking to them. The state of the ocean is moved by the gods. They have no other explanation for it. Just as we accept things from science as absolute fact—the Earth is round and we travel around the sun—we take them as faith because they’re presented as facts. The same would be true of the theological structure that explains nature to people of that time. So, for me, the gods are real, but they are inside the people. They are being projected by the people.”

Watch the full interview below from Bilibili (via Nolan Archives).