Although La odisea ceded the throne to Spider-Man: Un Nuevo Día at the box office, director Christopher Nolan remains in the news, this time for an interview he gave during a press tour in China, in which he delved into deep philosophical topics about art, history, storytelling, modern film criticism, and the appearance of Christian conceptions in his current production, which has taken over screens worldwide.
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In an interview with Chinese podcaster and political philosophy professor Zhong Shu in Beijing, originally broadcast on the Chinese video platform Bilibili and spoken in English, the British filmmaker departed considerably from the usual interviews he has given during the global press tour of La odisea, almost all based on promotional and anecdotal aspects of the story. Zhong’s interview was one of the few that explored his personal philosophy and worldview, and how these influenced the making of La odisea. The conversation even went viral.
With some grandiloquence, Zhong began the interview by describing Nolan as a bard of the modern era, just as Homer was of Ancient Greece, then described the ancient poem as a celebration of war and victory, while Nolan’s adaptation established it as the opposite, reflecting more the present and current times. Zhong continued by asking the director, due to the tone of his film, if he considered himself a “bard of a declining civilization.”
“I think that’s a very interesting point, a very interesting question,” Nolan said with a laugh. “I mean, the main underlying idea is this gap of about 400 years between the events Homer describes and when his story was written, or first received by readers and audiences. That’s quite an interesting gap, and for me, I don’t think I completely disagree with the way Homer tells the story. When viewed from a historical perspective, and the reason is — and what interested me in adapting it — is that Homer writes about an era before his own, he writes about an era hundreds of years earlier. His audience considered it more advanced than theirs. They were a rising civilization, but they were trying to return to where they had been 400 years before. That idea of a cycle, that idea of, as you say, a civilization in its decline. I think it’s present in the poem, it’s subtle. But if you also look at history… when they unearthed these walls of ancient ruined palaces, they called them cyclopean. They built walls because they believed only a giant could have erected them. They had that idea of the greatness of that past civilization. And that’s how I became interested in that collapse, what they call the catastrophe, the collapse of the Bronze Age. 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 terrifying and interesting, and I think partly because I worked before on Oppenheimer, which is a film about the end of the world, about the end and collapse of civilization. So yes, I definitely brought that sensibility to this adaptation of La odisea.”
Zhong then moved on to the concept of “atonement” in Nolan’s film, stating that such a concept does not exist in the culture or language of Ancient Greece, nor in Homer’s poem. He directly asked if the filmmaker had “Christianized La odisea” and, furthermore, why atonement was so important in the film.
“I wasn’t very aware of how I was approaching it philosophically, other than that I really focused on the idea of what is called ‘xenia’,” Nolan said.
“In the film we call it the Law of Zeus for simplicity, but it’s that idea of mutual respect: that you treat me as I want to be treated. And in its theology it’s because you could be a god in disguise. I really delved into that, and I began to realize that for me much of what’s interesting about the interaction between history and mythology is this idea of the ‘sea peoples,’ the idea of the sea people who were believed to have precipitated the collapse of the Bronze Age. It’s one of the great mysteries of history: who were they? But the idea that really a violation of xenia, a violation of the Law of Zeus — which is what the suitors are doing in the palace — is really the (breaking) of the Law of Zeus that is causing this difficulty and this harm.”
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“I think the idea of atonement is, in a way, what we as viewers bring to the story,” Nolan added. “I don’t know if there really is atonement in the film, or if we simply feel that catharsis or if that’s the process we see in the long-awaited final encounter between Odysseus and Penelope. But I think, in a way, perhaps we bring our more modern sensibility to that. To the extent that (atonement) is present, it’s not a deliberate attempt to Christianize it, but it’s a consequence or a natural conclusion of delving into this philosophical idea of what happens when the Law of Zeus is broken.”
Returning to Homer’s poem and how it celebrates the great men of history, Zhong asked Nolan if his adaptation “apologizes” for this sense of greatness to fit modern sensibility. “Is (La odisea) a story of apology that demands repentance, reflection, and self-criticism?” Zhong asked.
“I think when it comes to storytelling, you’re always in dialogue with the audience’s expectations,” Nolan began his thoughtful response.
“So, actually, it’s an energy that comes from the audience, as well as an energy that emanates from the story itself. When you characterize someone, and the clichéd version of this, or the criticism often directed at films in general, is: ‘oh, the character has to be likable,’ so the character is manipulated or changed in different ways. And that is, in a way, a fundamental flaw of film criticism, or narrative criticism, because being able to identify the mechanism doesn’t invalidate the mechanism. And that’s a real problem in current criticism because people have this idea that: since I can understand why the story affects me the way it does, 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 take into account the energy the audience brings to that story and the interaction between our intention and how the audience receives it. And the fact that that mechanism is identifiable to people doesn’t invalidate it. Part of that mechanism is asking: ‘Are we going to treat greatness as something absolute or as coming from a democratic or more idealized philosophical state in which we live, in the current world, where we want to see people as equals? Do we have to apologize for that greatness? And the answer is yes, or the audience rejects it, and that’s part of the mechanism. Again, the fact that the mechanism is identifiable doesn’t mean it’s invalid or shouldn’t be used.”
Later in the interview, Nolan revisits his views on modern “amateur” film criticism.
“When I talked about film criticism, I was referring more to amateur criticism than professional, because professional criticism tends to understand the need for mechanisms. So we’re talking about a lingua franca of storytelling created by Hollywood over the last 100 years that is very effectively universal and, therefore, its own language, and that language is understood by people all over the world, which is the amazing thing about it. And it’s a very accessible modern storytelling language 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 at all times. As I say, I think more about amateur criticism when I say that people who, because they feel they have identified the mechanism, feel they invalidate it. That may be true for certain elements and film grammar, and film language evolves with that.”
“When a narrative device becomes too familiar to the audience, it has to be changed. But we, as filmmakers, rely on that common language. We assume our audience has seen many films and understands that language. So we play with it. It’s the language of genre, the language of audience empathy, the language of clarity, of narrative direction, and how to guide people through a story.”
