He also beams when I bring up the scene in which the witch Circe, played by Samantha Morton, transforms Odysseus’s crew into pigs, re-sculpting their faces like a potter at her wheel. Nolan looked back to some of his favourite transformation scenes in films he’d grown up with, such as An American Werewolf in London, “where they were done largely in camera and had a tactility to them that was simultaneously credible, compelling and repulsive. But I also knew I wanted Samantha Morton to do it because I’d never had a chance to work with her before and always knew she would come up with something incredible.
“So I told the visual and special effects guys, ‘Whatever you come up with, this has to be driven by performance. I can’t tell her to act to a piece of electrical tape’. So they came up with” – he pauses – “mechanisms that allowed her to find things through performance, and really just play with the scene.”
After filming it, the cast and crew gave Morton a spontaneous round of applause: Thomas later pointed out to Nolan that it was the first time that had happened on one of their films since Heath Ledger’s underworld pow-wow scene, with the notorious “vanishing pencil” in The Dark Knight.
There are some technological advances that Nolan remains determined not to embrace: he famously doesn’t own a smartphone, and says his stance isn’t liable to soften any time soon. “You guys have all become pod people,” he laughs. But while he has no intention of buckling, “I worry the world is eventually going to wear me down. The return of the QR code since Covid has been particularly tricky for me.”
Why is he so against phones? “Partly because I know I’d become horribly addicted to them if I had one. I’d spend all my time looking things up. And I find I’m only able to advance my thinking on projects in those pockets of time where everybody usually jumps on their phone – waiting for a train, or in an airport, or sitting in a restaurant waiting for somebody to turn up for dinner. Those are the moments I work out whatever it is I need to do next.”
Having no smartphone, he adds, also means he’s never tempted to hop online to debunk rumours, spar with haters, or respond to gossip – such as the odd story that circulated last year that his next film would be a remake of the 1983 helicopter action thriller Blue Thunder. He says he was “bewildered” when he read it: “I have absolutely no idea where it came from. And besides, I was always more of an Airwolf fan.”
If he owned a cinema, would he ban phones? “Well, my local cinema is the Vista in Los Angeles, which is run by Quentin Tarantino, and they have a hard and fast attitude towards smartphones and watches: if you have to make a call or need to look at your phone, just step outside into the foyer. And I think it’s a wonderful rule. And the other thing I’d borrow is that they play the audio track from the film in the toilets, so if you have to step out you don’t miss anything.”
He is less on board, though, with Tarantino’s self-imposed 10-films-and-done rule: the creator of Pulp Fiction and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has long maintained that even the best directors eventually go off the boil, and that accordingly his next film (whatever it is and whenever he makes it) will be his last.
“I think it’s dangerous to look at it that specifically,” Nolan says, frowning. “I mean, Quentin has his reasons, and I respect those enormously. But I’m hoping that he won’t stay true to them.” For him, he continues, the calculus is a little different: “I view every film that I do as the last I’ll ever make – and one day I will be right. So every time I want to put everything into the project at hand. I’m never thinking, ‘Well, I’ll save this for the next one’. I don’t ever want to think like that. I want each movie to be everything.”
The Odyssey is in cinemas from Friday July 17