‘Sometimes I felt like I had bitten off more than I could chew’: Christopher Nolan on sweeping the Oscars, directing ‘Odyssey’ — and getting a puppy | Odyssey

“I’m in that moment of absolute terror.” says Christopher Nolan, sitting in a suite at the Corinthia Hotel in London, wearing a slightly rumpled suit, next to a teapot. Outside, crowds jostle, hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the stars inside — Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Lupita Nyong’o. It’s the day before the world premiere of Nolan’s latest film, an adaptation of Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey,” and the final day of waiting before audiences decide whether the biggest gamble of Nolan’s career has paid off. The film, which is said to have cost $250m (£185m), doesn’t just need an audience to show up. It takes the entire world of cinema to do this.

“It never gets easier, because He says: “I make films for the audience, and the audience tells me what they like. They finish the film. I have nothing to hide behind. I can’t just say: ‘Oh, people don’t get that’. These are not the films I make.” What does the public make of it? Do they attend? Would they like it if they attended?

“By the way, I don’t think I would be doing my job properly if I didn’t feel afraid every time I made a movie, because you’re trying to challenge yourself, you’re trying to take risks.”

He doesn’t seem terrified. He looks as relaxed and happy as I’ve seen him in 20 years. I’ve interviewed Nolan several times, and he was known to be cagey, if very friendly, and had mastered the art of talking about his films while revealing almost nothing about himself – “the most reclusive director in America” ​​is as he once described himself to me. His interview can at times seem like an attempt to interrogate John le Carré’s master spy, George Smiley.

But whatever the reason — Oppenheimer’s seven Oscars, the blissful exhaustion of finally finishing “The Odyssey,” which was shot over six months in as many countries — something seems to have melted in Nolan. The new dog, a chocolate Lab named Charlie who “can hear the fridge opening from a mile away”, may have been acquired by Nolan and his wife, Emma Thomas, after the last of their four children left home.

“They’re all in the world,” he says. “We have a dog, and then I decided to make The Odyssey because it’s the best movie about dogs. I never had a dog when I was a kid, and we never got a dog when my kids were younger because we traveled a lot. They were a little fed up that we got one as soon as they left, even though they love the dog. And then, when I came to The Odyssey, I wasn’t so spontaneous, but it’s a really, really important part of that story.” When Odysseus finally returns home to Ithaca, 20 years later, he is instantly recognized by the ancient hound Argos, who was seen in Nolan’s trailer as a puppy. “It was fun to enjoy a little tasting of the little Argos, and I was glad they did,” he says.

Conceived in the wake of Oppenheimer’s success, lit by Universal’s Donna Langley, and set in stone at the moment the Oscar was handed to Nolan with a hug from Steven Spielberg — “I kind of collapsed in his arms like a runner crossing a finish line,” Nolan says — the film is quite literally Oppenheimer’s son. “I thought: OK, now I have the opportunity to make a movie that I wouldn’t have been able to make otherwise,” Nolan says.

Thomas, his wife and producing partner, and whom I’ll talk to later, puts a finer point on this. “I don’t think there was any world where we could go into the studio and say, ‘We want to adapt a 2,700-year-old poem,’ and that would automatically be a blockbuster,” she says. “We were asking for a big budget to do this. This wouldn’t have happened without Oppenheimer.”

Being on the campaign trail for nine months means Nolan won’t be able to start writing until April 2024, but the delay only served to heighten the long-distance ruminations about structure he started doing the moment he chose a poem he hadn’t read since grade school. “I’ve spent many years in hotel rooms like this talking about the non-linear structures of my film as if it were so radical, and then you go back to the oldest foundational literary text and find that it has a completely radical structure. It’s stories within stories, it’s flashbacks within flashbacks. And that was immediately exciting.”

This wasn’t his first homer. In the early 2000s, in the wake of the success of Memento, Nolan found himself briefly attached to David Benioff’s screenplay for the film Troy, based on the Iliad, which was eventually directed by Wolfgang Petersen, so “I spent a lot of time figuring out how do we present that to an audience that all knows this horse’s belly is stuffed with Greeks?” He says. “How do you make that credible?” The image that came to him, the seed for the “Odyssey” screenplay he later wrote, was that of a monument on a beach, sinking into the sand. “The Hail Mary, as we say in America, is just an act of desperation that shouldn’t work. That was the first picture I had. I carried it with me for 20 years. I always wanted to do it.”

Almost everyone describes it as the hardest shoot of their careers – like making seven ambitious films in one, says Thomas. The cast and crew crossed deserts, mountains, seas and arctic landscapes, often arriving at locations only by helicopter or long flights. Cinematographer Hoyt Van Hoytema’s team had to carry 300-pound (136 kg) IMAX cameras, the weight of a mini-refrigerator, across terrain where simply getting people to set up for filming was often enough of a challenge. “At the end of each day, the department heads would have dinner, and then we would sit in the screening room to watch the dailies,” Thomas says. “Every time you face one challenge, you think: ‘Oh my God, we did it.’ And then you think: ‘Oh no, next week we have something else entirely to deal with.’ It was just the rigors of the challenges that were presented.”

Nolan and Difficulty are old friends, of course. His preference for real locations on a soundstage, “in-camera” effects over computer-generated effects, and IMAX—an immersive format that can only be shot in three-minute takes and requires a small balloon to silence the camera—made the rough seas that struck the filming of Dunkirk seem like just a patch of bad weather.

Is difficulty the point? “It’s not really the case,” Nolan says. “The more we talked about it, the more it seemed like it was some kind of Herzogian ordeal but that’s not really my bag. In fact, it’s just about the Odyssey. You need things you’ve never seen before. I get bored with theaters and sound sets, not because I don’t want it to be difficult. It’s because nature and the real world give you scope and a range of options and serendipity that you can’t achieve in the studio. But yes, it was physically exhausting and there were times when I felt like I might have bitten off more than I could chew.”

If he doubted himself, it wasn’t on set. It was the night before. “I sleep well because I’m tired,” he says, but by Sunday, he’ll have a chance to read the script again and look at the schedule for next week. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, how the hell am I going to do this week?’ This often keeps me up all night, Sunday night, and I can’t sleep. So I came in feeling exhausted the next day, but I was ready. “I had a way out.”

There was one location in particular that stuck out to him: the ruined clifftop Castello di Santa Caterina on the Sicilian island of Favignana, which he and production designer Ruth de Jong chose for Odysseus’ home in Ithaca. Reaching it requires walking for 45 minutes on a winding rocky path every day. “It hung over my head when I knew we were going to be in this situation, but we got great spirit from the cast and crew. Tom Holland had me walking down this road like a deer, which made me feel old and tired, but as an example to everyone, he was just there.”

On the final day, after filming wrapped at Universal in Los Angeles around 1 a.m., Thomas opened a few bottles of champagne as she and Nolan usually do. “In this case, I think it was our first time doing this, and we really felt like no one wanted to leave,” Thomas says. “It was like we were completely in shock. You want to keep going, to jump out of the plane again.”

Prior to its release, “The Odyssey” generated the usual amount of culture-war levity, with parts of its atmosphere centered on the casting of Nyong’o as Helen and Elliot Page as Sinon. Homer’s epic poem, believed to be about men’s courage – which begins “Tell me, Muse of Man” – has recently been cast as a kind of Alamo in the eyes of cultural conservatives eager to fend off the onslaught of “wokeness.” “Out came Homer’s Odyssey, out went gender studies,” one activist recently wrote. There’s a certain irony, then, in the fact that Nolan has, in my opinion, written his strongest collection of female parts to date. In his film, Helen, Penelope, Circe, Athena, and Calypso are not merely prizes, temptations, or divine interventions, but characters fully realized in displays of great power.

“They are icons in the text,” Nolan says. “The problem is that there’s not much to them behind these ideals in whatever form they take. What I love about what the women did in this film is that they give you a sense of the person behind the symbol. Watching Lupita as Helen, you suddenly get some sense of what it would actually be like to be the catalyst for this huge war and siege — what that would mean, and what that would do to someone. Then Anne [Hathaway] Like Penelope – so strong, so precise.

This depth, he says, is shaped in conversation with the actors rather than imposed by the script. “I’ve been on set enough to know that terrible moment, where you, as a writer and a director, are asked this question that you can’t answer. And you have to have an answer. There might be a mystery planned – the way Anne played Penelope, I almost didn’t want to know what was going on in her head – but yeah, you have to be on your toes.”

If history is any guide, now is the time when Nolan gets his first push toward his next project. “The first signs will probably be after about a week of not having anything to do, and he starts feeling very antsy,” Thomas says. “Then he’ll start thinking: ‘Okay, I need to do something.’ Anxiety, after all, is what brought him to Ithaca in the first place. But it seems unlikely that “The Odyssey” will be released any time soon, with its world premieres – from Mumbai to London – surely followed by a steady awards campaign for the film, in every category, until next spring.

“I’m desperate for a period when I have nothing to do,” he says. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had time like this. It’s true – I get bored very quickly and that’s one of the reasons I want to go back to work. I’m anxious.” It stops. “At the moment, all I can see is just trying to get through this, get the film out and then take a little break.”