Christopher Nolan’s long journey to ‘The Odyssey’

Filmmaker Christopher Nolan (London, 55) has completed his artistic journey: he has become the Odysseus of his own film career and has finally managed to adapt The Odyssey, which opens on Friday, July 17, a project for which, in truth, he has been preparing his whole life. There are numerous traces in his biography and his films that reveal this path.

His first childhood memory of theater. The British-American was born in central London, where he attended school. In The New York Times he explains: “One of my first memories of receiving the story is being at primary school in London at probably five or six and seeing the older kids do a stage production. I remember the horse — I’m sure it was some cardboard concoction on a trolley — and the sirens, particularly.” From that moment, The Odyssey was already in his DNA.

All his protagonists are Odysseus. You only need to glance at Nolan’s filmography to understand that the protagonist’s journey in The Odyssey has been present in all his films: his cinema has had heroes, or antiheroes, recruited to make personal sacrifices for a greater cause (Batman Begins, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet and Oppenheimer); and men who long to return to their children (The Prestige, Inception, or Interstellar). There are sequences that now look like rehearsals for The Odyssey: Bruce Wayne, presumed dead, returns to Gotham in Batman Begins just as Odysseus returns to Ithaca; soldiers silencing their cries of fear, huddled in a stranded ship in Dunkirk while German bullets pierce the hull, like the Greeks holding their breath inside the Trojan horse as a spear drives into the wood.

He always thought he would be the first to adapt The Odyssey. It’s true: there has been no big-budget adaptation of Homer’s epic poem. Even during the glory years of the swords and sandals era, no one took it on. In The Telegraph, Nolan reflects: “There was, of course, all of that brilliant work by people like Ray Harryhausen on films like Clash of the Titans.” And that is why the Hades sequence hides a subtle tribute to one of the iconic scenes of the 1981 classic. “But he was always working on tiny B-movie budgets. They just didn’t have the technology to pull off the fantasy elements on the scale of Cleopatra or Spartacus.” That has driven the filmmaker’s cinematic hunger for decades, and thanks to Oppenheimer, which grossed $1 billion worldwide, he raised $250 million for this project, although it is not his most expensive film; that odd honor belongs to The Dark Knight Rises.

He nearly directed Troy. Nolan was the first director hired to helm Troy (2004) with Brad Pitt, which is a vision of Homer’s Iliad. There he conceived the idea of a Trojan horse stranded on the beach. For two reasons: the more prosaic was that any warrior would smell the trap if he found a giant wooden nag on wheels, but it is a different matter to discover it stuck in the sand; and because it paid homage to the Statue of Liberty image from Planet of the Apes. “It stuck with me,” the filmmaker told The Los Angeles Times. “It’s a powerful image I really wanted to film.” In Time he explained: “I think when I signed up to do Troy way back when, I was in a little over my head.” He has now found his way out of the labyrinth: “I think I needed to build on what I learned doing large-scale films to be able to make this film.” Incidentally, from that project to this one, Nolan has traveled a journey of more than two decades. Like Odysseus.

Nolan has been adapting classics for decades. In The Telegraph, the filmmaker recalls: “When I came on to Batman Begins, writers and artists had been working on this beloved character for almost 65 years, and a lot of freighted thoughts were out there about what he represents. And what I learnt over my time on that trilogy is you can’t worry about any of that at all. What you have to do is honor the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can.” In other words, it is Homer’s work, but it is also Nolan’s vision. “I’ve been telling this story in all my films for years. It’s a family story, a love story, a revenge story, a war story, a coming-of-age story. It’s a very strong foundational text for me,” he confessed to The Los Angeles Times.

The Odyssey is the first Hollywood film shot entirely in IMAX, and Nolan was destined for it. “My memories of cinema as a child are of gigantic screens and, as an adult, one tries to return to that,” he has said while promoting the release. “I’ve wanted to make an IMAX film since I was 16 and went to the Omnimax Theater at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. It blew my mind. While watching those scientific documentaries, I could only think: what if a fiction film were made with that technology?” Nolan had previously shot action sequences with IMAX cameras, but because of the noise they make, the limited film they can shoot without reloading and their immense size, they didn’t seem suitable for more intimate moments. In The Odyssey he has remedied those obstacles. And he didn’t do it to boost the box office, but for love of cinematic art: “I was hugely impressed by what IMAX could do with the human face in Oppenheimer; it looked like it had bored a hole in Cillian Murphy’s face.”

His heroes are never wholly good or flat. Nolan’s protagonists operate in shades of gray. As a child he loved Star Wars, watched it dozens of times, and in several outlets he has recalled being hugely attracted to Han Solo. In Memento, Leonard seeks his wife’s killer, and the ending is as bleak as it is coherently human. Now Odysseus is a tortured, tormenting figure, like Leonard or Oppenheimer. In The New York Times, Nolan was reminded that he once described Oppenheimer as someone who motivated others “through the theatricality of his persona.” “When I finished the film I was quite struck by that. Every film I do, I like to leave it with questions or unanswered themes that I might carry through to the next film. There’s a lot of ideas of leadership, of mixed motivations, the flaws of people, that idea of where the best of intentions can go horribly wrong. Odysseus is a very complex character — a trickster, somebody who’s smart and wily. In Star Wars terms, it’s Han Solo — but Han Solo is not the hero of Star Wars, it’s Luke Skywalker.” There are moral dilemmas, and the audience does not know beforehand what choice the protagonist will make. That is why he chose Matt Damon. “I had already worked with Matt twice and he has an incredible connection with the audience; he grabs them,” Nolan explains. “For this very complex character, you need an actor who can merge with the role, who is very open with the audience, because he will accompany them in his mistakes. And he makes many. Matt was the everyman in The Martian and a kind of superhero in the Jason Bourne films. Odysseus is part everyman, part superhero.”

The obsession with time. From the start, his films have included required journeys — physical, like Dunkirk; mental, like Memento — to complete the character’s feat, and narrative structures that fragment and repeat over time. Because for Nolan, time is his great theme. All his films deal with time, or are marked by a strict timeline, or must meet a narratively imposed deadline. Even Dunkirk saw its development structured by the different time frames of each action. In reality, it seems Nolan returns again and again to his first film, Following (1998). Odysseus is not a youngster but a middle-aged man who has spent decades of his life on that return home: he measures time very differently from the young... as was the case in Interstellar, when some travelers experience the passage of time differently than others.

A journey into darkness. Over the years, Nolan has steered his cinema toward darkness and the tormented. In the maturation of his themes he has chosen to leave behind earlier glimpses of light, which in truth were never abundant in his filmography. Seen this way, Oppenheimer still seems the somewhat optimistic prologue to the madness that ravages The Odyssey. Death envelopes both the present world and that of a warrior who centuries ago crossed the Mediterranean.

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