CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S CLIFF NOTES: Christopher Nolan on the Flaws of Film Criticism and the Shared Philosophy of Oppenheimer and The Odyssey.

In discussing the adaptation and perspective of historical distance, Nolan says, “The main point is this 400-year-or-so gap between the events that Homer is describing and when Homer’s story was written down or first received by audiences. That’s a pretty interesting gap. For me, I don’t think I’m completely at odds with the way Homer is telling the story when you look at it from a historical perspective. The reason is—and what I became interested in as I adapted it—is that Homer is writing about an era hundreds of years earlier that his audience viewed as being more advanced than theirs. So, while they were a civilization on the rise, they were trying to get back to where they had been 400 years before.”

“That idea of a cycle—the idea of, as you say, a civilization at dusk—I think is there in the past, but it’s subtle. When you look at the history, and you see that when they would unearth these walls of old palaces that had crumbled, they called them ‘Cyclopean walls’ because they thought only a giant could have built such grand walls. They had this idea of the greatness of this past civilization. I became interested in that collapse—what they call the ‘catastrophe,’ the Bronze Age collapse—and what happens between the events of the Trojan War and Homer. From a modern perspective, that is something that is frightening, interesting, and intriguing. For me, it partly comes out of having worked on Oppenheimer before this, which is very much a film about the end of the world and the collapse of civilization. I definitely carried that sensibility into this adaptation of The Odyssey.”

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Earlier: The concluding epic in Christopher Nolan’s Death Drive trilogy.