Christopher Nolan: "Hollywood had never made a movie like my Odyssey"

Christopher Nolan: "Hollywood had never made a movie like my Odyssey"

The director brings The Odyssey to the screen surrounded by anticipation, turmoil, admiration, and, of course, controversy: "Entertainment is not to be despised or uncultured"

The writer, traveler, and self-proclaimed castaway Sylvain Tesson maintains that The Odyssey is nothing more, nor less, than the instruction manual for a shipwreck. Borges sees in Homer's work - as he states in the poem Odyssey, Book Twenty-Third - the melancholic and ever-open wound of identity, of the displaced man (where is that man/ who in the days and nights of exile/ wandered the world like a dog/ and said that Nobody was his name?). And long before them all, the philosopher Porphyry spoke of the epic poem as a philosophical and cosmogonic allegory of the journey of the consciousness reuniting with the soul.

Let's say that no one, from Stephen Fry to James Joyce passing through the Coen brothers (how can we forget O Brother! (2000)?), has ever managed to avoid the magnetic power of the 24 chants composed eight centuries before our era and dictated perhaps from the Daskalopetra of Chios. Christopher Nolan (London, 1970) is the latest of them all. And as befits a filmography dedicated to gathering crowds (if not consensuses), it could be said that his aspiration is to be the first. The Odyssey arrives in theaters with the undisguised purpose of fulfilling a historical debt, according to the director, between popular but serious cinema and the foundational text of Western culture. It sounds serious, and it is.

The filmmaker welcomes us in a central London hotel right next to the hustle and bustle of the South Bank, with the cheerful noise of the Pride Parade seeping through the window and not far from the IMAX theater where a day earlier, the film starring Matt Damon in his desperate and recurring (as he did in Interstellar) endeavor to return home was screened in all its splendor and in 70 mm. Nolan drinks tea and Nolan, himself, returns to his shipwreck, to his identity, to the encounter with the very soul of his cinema.

Christopher Nolan, during the filming of The Odyssey.Melinda Sue GordonUniversal Pictures

"To say that Homer has stood the test of time falls short. Homer is a contemporary author."

A scene from Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey showing the destruction of Troy, the starting point of the story.Melinda Sue GordonUniversal Pictures

"We think that science has replaced superstition, but the denialist obstinacy proves otherwise."

Matt Damon plays Odysseus, and Zendaya becomes the Greek goddess Athena in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.Melinda Sue GordonUniversal Pictures

"The Odyssey is the basis of all literature, but above all, it is a great adventure with gods, monsters, and a grand adventure. Entertainment is not to be despised."