“The Odyssey” director Christopher Nolan has disagreed with Matt Damon, who played Odysseus in the soon-to-be-released epic.
Nolan praised a new generation of filmmakers and actors while expressing confidence that cinema remains a vital and evolving art form.
Christopher Nolan explains why he disagreed with Matt Damon’s view of making The Odyssey
According to OK! Magazine, Nolan disagreed with Matt Damon’s comments on the filming experience. While Damon described the filming experience as nostalgic, the filmmaker has said that it is “a defeatist aspect of viewing” that he does not agree with.
Nolan told The Telegraph, “I think I know what [Damon] was driving at, because it does seem like a long time since somebody made a film like this in this type of way, where you travel the world, get together a cast of thousands and so on.”
Damon had commented that big productions in movie-making are becoming rare. Nolan resisted this pessimistic view, placing more trust in the “great new young voices in movies, making the medium their own and moving it forward.” The Oppenheimer director refused to accept that the film industry is becoming irrelevant in any way. He said that films are still “vital and essential and continues to transform itself.”
He also dismissed the argument that younger audiences have lost interest in epic-length films. He said, “I never bought into the arguments that young audiences’ attention spans are too fried to enjoy a three-hour Greek epic.”
The acclaimed director went on to praise longer films with big productions, saying, “Those films are so mysterious and ruminative. I mean, parts of Backrooms are like David Lynch at his most obscure. And yet young people can’t get enough of them.”
“The Odyssey” is Nolan’s first feature after his Oscar-winning Oppenheimer. The film, about to be released soon, has already piqued the interest of viewers and even faced criticism on the casting. Nolan, however, has paid no heed to criticism coming from people who have not watched the film yet. He remains steadfast in his ambition to honor the original text while bringing it to the screen in the strongest way he could.
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