To Chris Nolan, on The Odyssey
Post-viewing thoughts from a fellow filmmaker.
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Dear Chris,
I went to see your new movie today at Directors Village in Westwood, what used to be the Fox Village. It’s not even officially open yet. You’re part of the Village Directors Circle, as I understand it, and the group opened the theater early for this limited engagement. They’re advertising it very badly. Showtimes are still sold out at Universal CityWalk, and our matinee was barely a quarter full. I heard that you came here to inspect everything personally before the debut. I wonder what you think of the theater.
Right off the bat, I liked the double meaning of your first card. You said it was “a time of apparent magic.” Obviously, that works two ways. The magic is apparent, but you’re also implying that the way the story has been passed down is only apparently magical. Even opening with Travis Scott makes it clear that this story has been passed down like a Xerox and changed each time. You hit that point pretty hard again at the end.
I thought it was clear what you were doing with Travis Scott. I also wonder whether you deliberately guided him to be a rather boring and unimpressive bard. Certain aspects of the performance suggested as much. After all, he was the suitors’ bard, and everything about them was rather underwhelming and tacky. At the same time, your interviews cut against that reading. Either way, I didn’t find him compelling as a speaker, but I thought that served the tale.
I find myself wondering whether you’re troubled at all by the film’s massive aspect-ratio disparities. IMAX is a huge selling point of the movie, and it’s hard for me to tell whether you really treasure it so much or whether it’s more of a marketing scheme. I can imagine it’s important to you, or else you wouldn’t have gone through all the trouble of shooting on those giant cameras. How, then, can you be comfortable with almost everyone seeing the film in this incredibly letterboxed form? Even the standard 70 mm presentation is 2.20:1, while IMAX 70 mm opens all the way out to 1.43:1. I’m sure you shot with safe zones that could accommodate both, but still. In the course of editing, you must come to consider one version canonical. Do you think the IMAX version has excessive dead room, or do you think the 70 mm version is an uncomfortably tight crop? How can you be at ease with so many people around the world seeing the film in such different forms? In my view, one defining aspect of an auteur’s work is an intense desire to control the viewers’ experience of a film. Variable aspect ratios seem almost antithetical to that.
I guess my biggest single takeaway was this: you clearly endeavored to make your Odysseus feel the way you would feel if you had done the things Odysseus did. That’s very different from trying to place yourself inside the head of Homer’s Odysseus and imagine how he feels in a given moment.
I’m not saying one approach is better than the other. They’re simply different projects with different goals.
Aesthetically, the most striking thing for me was the grayness of the world. Nothing about Homer’s Odyssey, of course, is gray. The Mediterranean is rife with color and splendor. I know you’ve read a great deal about the ancient world, and I can’t help wondering whether the grayness was supposed to be a nod to the aftereffects of the Thera eruption. Were you trying to imply that the eruption disrupted the Minoan world and ultimately led to the Sea Peoples? I could see it going that way, but perhaps I’m just putting ideas in your mouth. Maybe the grayness was purely thematic. There were moments during certain escapes to the boats when the color became incredibly vivid, which I found surprising. Those moments had no particular levity. I’d be very curious to know why you chose to make the world vivid for fleeting moments of terror when so much of the rest of it was muted.
I’d also be curious to know your reaction to Emily Wilson’s response. I know you hold her in very high esteem. You spent more than a year talking her up as a major source of inspiration. In return, of course, she pretty much savaged your work. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that harsh between peers, at least not from the twenty-first century. Are you bitter toward her? What would you say if you had to respond?
There’s a lot of dumb controversy, as I’m sure you know, about the races of various actors in your cast. It would be easy to say that your casting was essentially color-blind, based on merit and accolades, but I don’t think that’s true at all. I think you were extremely deliberate in the way you used both race and birth sex to shape the audience’s emotional reactions. I’d venture that you’re much savvier about this than you would ever publicly let on.
Using Elliot Page as Sinon, for example, gave the character a kind of gut sympathy in the audience’s lizard brain. It was like a reversal of Elizabethan theater in that sense. Sinon was pitiful, and Page’s slight physicality contributed to that.
It was also pretty obvious to me that Zendaya’s “Athena” was really just a guilt-image of the dead Trojan priestess. I couldn’t help noticing that she looked like Malala Yousafzai the way you costumed her, and the skin tone choice in casting seemed quite deliberate, too.
Casting Lupita Nyong’o as both Clytemnestra and Helen also seemed incredibly deliberate, visually. I understood quickly, I think, what you were doing by draping Jon Bernthal’s Menelaus in this sort of swaggering gangster affect. You were trying to show that this whole Trojan War business was low-class and trashy. I know you’re obsessed with class. You love a protagonist in a suit. A flashy gangster, of course, is the antithesis of that. Helen’s blackness, too, made her status as a prize feel a little like eerie exotic fetishism. I have no doubt you did that on purpose.
I’d be curious to know how long your first cut was. Like Oppenheimer, The Odyssey went by in a blur. The first reel, especially, was blindingly fast. At times, it almost felt like a video-essay summary, as though you had found an actual movie and were cutting it down to only the necessary plot beats. Did you have a five-hour cut at one point? A six-hour cut? You’re a careful planner, so I imagine you knew what would have to happen in the end. Do you think we’ve reached the limit of how fast these films can go without becoming absurd, or would you ever push the pace even further? In the TikTok world, I suppose anything is possible.
I also think it’s a little funny how much emphasis was put on the spectacle of the 70 mm film when, as others have pointed out, the focus pulls were so incredibly loose. I have nothing against loose and messy focus pulls. They’re all over John Cassavetes’s films, and I love those. There was a stark contrast, though, between the technical specificity of other aspects of the film and the startling imprecision of the focus pulling during dialogue scenes. Do you wish you could have tightened that up? What happened on set that made it impossible? Was your puller, even with all his experience, out of his depth with the large format? Was everything really rushed? Did you deliberately select takes for performance at the expense of focus pulling?
On the subject of film stock, I want to ask as well whether you truly think film is the best medium for watching The Odyssey. There’s no reason, of course, that it couldn’t be projected in ultra-high-definition digital IMAX. Watching the print at Directors Village, I was struck by the relative dimness and the prominence of the flicker—and this is a theater where you personally approved the presentation. Even without gate weave, the flicker alone makes it hard to forget that you’re watching a cascade of still images. When I watched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I was struck by how superior the DCP image was. I’m sure you’ve watched both. Do you genuinely prefer the 70 mm version, or do you feel somewhat obligated to truck it out to theaters? If the latter, why?
I’m also curious to know, structurally, whether you felt the script was quite close to Oppenheimer, and how you feel about it. You used many of the same techniques, including the nested storylines. Do you think you’ll do it again a third time, or are two enough? Does part of you worry that you’re leaning on the same tricks again?
Thematically, I understand why your film is resonating. I look around at the society we live in and there’s a sick psychological sense of impending doom. It’s been there since the 1970s, you know. Any kind of growth is evil. Condos are evil. Nuclear power is evil. We are evil. We were traumatized by the Vietnam War and again by the war on terror, and we haven’t recovered.
Your interpretation of Odysseus’s crew, of course, heavily evoked American soldiers. What is your relationship to the war on terror, would you say? You’re an Englishman, but the United Kingdom participated, of course. It’s also interesting that you chose an American with a quintessentially American accent to portray a character who’s clearly so close to your own heart. You’ve spent a great deal of time in America by now. Does part of you feel American? Do you feel that we’re one great civilization, Britain and America, on the edge of doom, or is it the opposite? Do you feel like an outsider critiquing American civilization merely as a guest?
The rant you gave Penelope about having twenty years of experience admittedly did stick out, as the peanut gallery is saying. I think there was just a little LinkedIn language there. Not that you’ve ever used LinkedIn. I wonder what was in your heart as you wrote it. Were you thinking of Emma? I imagine every wife you write is a reflection of her in some way. Do you feel that she has capabilities beyond the recognition she receives, like your Penelope? I’d be very curious to know whether she would ever want to direct. If she did, would you produce for her? It could be an interesting experience. At the same time, she might find it impossible to come in with a blank slate, being your wife.
Looking at this film as part of your body of work, I can’t help wondering whether you’ve painted yourself into a corner by trying continuously to one-up yourself. I fully understand why you feel the need to take a year off and reset after this. It must have been a grueling shoot. I’m curious, though, to see whether you ultimately try to work at this scale again. What’s bigger than the Odyssey? I don’t imagine you’ll ever do the Bible.
I must admit that The Odyssey has a second quality that also evokes video essays. It’s not just the pace. It’s how emphatically you billboard things. Do you ever grimace a little at the number of times you need to repeat clear information for an audience that may be only half paying attention? If you knew for a fact that you were going to have a focused, intelligent audience, would you get more esoteric?
Even while you were laying things out with great simplicity for a mass-market audience, I could tell that you were trying to prove yourself to the scholars. You sometimes showed your homework very plainly, particularly when it came to the Aeneid and other ancient sources. It almost felt as though you were trying to insulate yourself preemptively against criticism. Was it contemporary criticism you were trying to anticipate, or criticism from the future? Do you find yourself lying in bed and thinking about how your body of work will be received in decades, or does that sort of thing not trouble you?
There’s one last thing I want to ask. I couldn’t help noticing that Oppenheimer was clearly a bit of a “couch movie” for you, as they used to say. That is, you really made it about yourself and put yourself through a therapeutic ordeal in the process of creation. The Odyssey, it seems, was exactly the same. You were once again seemingly wringing your hands with a deep sense of guilt, putting yourself in the hero’s shoes. I want to ask, then, whether you think it helps you psychologically to process things this way. Did you feel more healed or uplifted after making Oppenheimer? I would have thought so, but The Odyssey is just as dark, if not darker. I know it’s not my place, but if you find yourself spiraling, I might encourage you to break the cycle and stop making films that are exercises in your own personal anxiety. Speaking from artistic experience, it may just make the whole thing worse.
With respect,
Cairo Smith
