{"id":697259,"date":"2026-07-17T20:37:42","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T20:37:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/697259\/"},"modified":"2026-07-17T20:37:42","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T20:37:42","slug":"at-times-i-felt-id-bitten-off-more-than-i-could-chew-christopher-nolan-on-sweeping-the-oscars-making-the-odyssey-and-getting-a-puppy-the-odyssey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/697259\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018At times I felt I\u2019d bitten off more than I could chew\u2019: Christopher Nolan on sweeping the Oscars, making The Odyssey \u2013 and getting a puppy | The Odyssey"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018I\u2019m in that moment of sheer terror,\u201d says Christopher Nolan<\/a>, sitting in a suite at the Corinthia hotel in London, in a slightly rumpled suit, next to a pot of tea. Outside, crowds jostle, hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the stars within \u2013 Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Lupita Nyong\u2019o. It is the day before the world premiere of Nolan\u2019s latest film, an adaptation of Homer\u2019s epic poem the Odyssey, and the last day of waiting before audiences decide whether the biggest gamble of Nolan\u2019s career has paid off. The film, which reportedly cost $250m (\u00a3185m), doesn\u2019t just need an audience to show up. It needs the entire moviegoing world to do so.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt never gets any easier, because I make films for audiences and the audience tells me what it likes,\u201d he says. \u201cThey finish the film. I don\u2019t have anything to hide behind. I can\u2019t just be like: \u2018Oh, people don\u2019t get it.\u2019 Those aren\u2019t the films I make. What does the audience make of it? Do they turn up? Do they like it if they do turn up?<\/p>\n

\u201cBy the way, I don\u2019t think I\u2019d be doing my job right if I wasn\u2019t petrified every time I put a film out, because you\u2019re trying to challenge yourself, you\u2019re trying to take risks.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

He doesn\u2019t seem terrified. He seems about as relaxed and happy as I\u2019ve seen him in 20 years. I\u2019ve interviewed Nolan many times, and he is a famously cautious, if unfailingly amiable, interviewee, who has perfected the art of talking about his films while revealing next to nothing about himself \u2013 \u201cthe most accessible reclusive director in America\u201d is how he once described himself to me. Interviewing him can at times feel like attempting to debrief John le Carr\u00e9\u2019s master spy George Smiley.<\/p>\n

But whatever the reason \u2013 the seven Oscars for Oppenheimer<\/a>, the happy exhaustion of having finally finished The Odyssey, shot over a period of six months in as many countries \u2013 something seems to have thawed in Nolan. Maybe it\u2019s the new dog, a chocolate lab named Charlie \u201cwho can hear the fridge open from a mile away\u201d, acquired by Nolan and his wife, Emma Thomas, after the last of their four children left home.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re all off in the world,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a dog and then I decided to make The Odyssey<\/a> because it\u2019s the ultimate dog movie. I never had a dog as a kid, and we never got a dog when the kids were younger because we travelled too much. They\u2019re a bit fed up that we got one as soon as they left, although they love the dog. And then coming to the Odyssey, I\u2019m not being glib, but it really is a very important part of that story.\u201d When Odysseus finally makes it home to Ithaca, after 20 years, he is instantly recognised by his old hunting dog Argos, who is glimpsed in Nolan\u2019s trailer as a puppy. \u201cA little taste of young Argos was a fun thing to have and I was pleased they did that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Cillian Murphy and Christopher Nolan on the set of Oppenheimer. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon\/AP<\/p>\n

Conceived in the contrails of Oppenheimer\u2019s success, greenlit by Universal\u2019s Donna Langley and set in stone the moment the directing Oscar was handed to Nolan with a hug from Steven Spielberg \u2013 \u201cI sort of collapsed in his arms like a runner crossing the finish line,\u201d says Nolan \u2013 the film is in every sense the child of Oppenheimer. \u201cI thought: OK, I\u2019ve now got an opportunity to make a film that I wouldn\u2019t be able to make otherwise,\u201d says Nolan.<\/p>\n

Thomas, his wife and producing partner, whom I speak with later, puts a finer point on it. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s any world we could have gone to a studio and said: \u2018We want to adapt a 2,700-year-old poem,\u2019 and that be an automatic huge movie,\u201d she says. \u201cWe were asking for a big budget to do it. That would not have happened without Oppenheimer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Being on the campaign trail for nine months meant Nolan couldn\u2019t start writing until April 2024, but the delay only sharpened the long-distance rumination over structure he started doing the moment he picked a poem he hadn\u2019t read since primary school. \u201cI\u2019ve spent many years in hotel rooms like this talking about the non-linear structures of my film as if it was so radical, and then you go back to the oldest foundational literary text and it\u2019s got an absolutely radical structure. It\u2019s stories within stories, it\u2019s flashbacks within flashbacks. And that immediately was exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matt Damon as Odysseus and Zendaya as Athena. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon\/Universal Pictures<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t his first pass at Homer<\/a>. In the early 2000s, in the wake of Memento\u2019s success, Nolan found himself briefly attached to David Benioff\u2019s script for Troy, based on The Iliad, which was eventually directed by Wolfgang Petersen, so \u201cI had spent a lot of time figuring out how do you present that to an audience who all know that the belly of that horse is stuffed with Greeks?\u201d he says. \u201cHow do you make that credible?\u201d The image that came to him, the germ of his later screenplay for The Odyssey, was the image of a beached monument, sinking into the sand. \u201cA true Hail Mary, as we say in America, just an act of absolute desperation that shouldn\u2019t work. That was the first image I had. I carried that with me for 20 years. I always wanted to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas attend The Odyssey premiere in Paris. Photograph: Pierre Mouton\/Getty Images for Universal Pictures<\/p>\n

Almost everyone describes it as the hardest shoot of their career \u2013 like making seven ambitious movies in one, says Thomas. The cast and crew crossed deserts, mountains, seas and Arctic landscapes, often reaching locations only by helicopter or long hikes. The cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema\u2019s team had to lug 300lb (136kg) Imax<\/a> cameras, the weight of a small refrigerator, across terrain where simply getting people to set was often challenge enough. \u201cAt the end of each day the heads of department would have dinner and then we\u2019d collapse into a screening room to watch dailies,\u201d says Thomas. \u201cEvery time you would get through one challenge, you\u2019d think: oh my God, we did it. And then you\u2019d think: oh no, next week we\u2019ve got a whole other thing to deal with. It was just the relentlessness of the challenges that were posed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nolan and difficulty are old friends, of course. His preference for real locations over soundstages, for \u201cin camera\u201d effects over computer-generated ones, and for Imax \u2013 the immersive format that can only be shot in three-minute bursts and requires a small blimp to silence the camera \u2013 have made the roiling seas that lashed Dunkirk\u2019s shoot seem like merely a spot of bad weather.<\/p>\n

Is difficulty the point? \u201cIt\u2019s really not,\u201d says Nolan. \u201cThe more we talk about it, the more it feels like it was a some sort of Herzogian ordeal but that\u2019s really not my bag. In truth, it\u2019s just about The Odyssey. You need things that you haven\u2019t seen before. I get bored on sound stages and sets, not because I wouldn\u2019t want it to be difficult. It\u2019s because nature and the real world gives you a scale and a set of options and serendipity that you can\u2019t achieve in the studio. But yeah, it was daunting physically and there were times where I felt like maybe I\u2019d bitten off more than I could chew.\u201d<\/p>\n

If he ever doubted himself, it wasn\u2019t on set. It was the night before. \u201cI sleep well because I get exhausted,\u201d he says, but come Sunday, he\u2019d get a chance to read the script again and look at the schedule for the week ahead. \u201cI\u2019d go: \u2018Oh shit, how the hell am I going to do that week?\u2019 and that keeps me up often at times all night, Sunday night, just not able to sleep. So I come to set frazzled, the next day, but I was prepared. I had a way out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cast and crew had to hike 45 minutes uphill to Castello di Santa Caterina on the island of Favignana. Photograph: Hemis\/Alamy<\/p>\n

One location in particular preyed on his mind: the ruined clifftop Castello di Santa Caterina on the Sicilian island of Favignana which he and production designer Ruth De Jong had selected for Odysseus\u2019s Ithaca home. Reaching it required a 45-minute hike up a stony, zigzagging path every day. \u201cThat loomed very large over me knowing that we were going to be in that situation, but we got such a great spirit from the cast and crew. You\u2019ve got Tom Holland<\/a> bounding up this path like a gazelle, making me feel very old and tired, but as an example to everybody, he was just in there.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the very last day, after filming finished on the lot at Universal in Los Angeles around one o\u2019clock in the morning, Thomas cracked open a few bottles of champagne as she and Nolan usually do. \u201cOn this one, I think this was the first time we\u2019d done that and it really felt like nobody wanted to leave,\u201d says Thomas. \u201cIt was like we were totally trauma-bonded. You want to carry on, jump out the plane again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ahead of its release, The Odyssey has generated the usual amount of culture-war static, after sections of the manosphere fixated on the casting of Nyong\u2019o as Helen and Elliot Page as Sinon. Homer\u2019s epic poem, thought to be about the valour of men \u2013 \u201cTell me, muse, of a man,\u201d it begins \u2013 has recently been taken up as a kind of Alamo for cultural conservatives eager to hold off the \u201cwoke\u201d onslaught. \u201cHomer\u2019s Odyssey is in, gender studies is out,\u201d wrote one activist<\/a> recently. There is a certain irony, then, to the fact that Nolan, to my mind, has written his strongest ensemble of female parts to date. In his film, Helen, Penelope, Circe, Athena and Calypso are not just prizes, temptations or divine interventions, but figures fully realised in performances of great power.<\/p>\n

Lupita Nyong\u2019o who plays Helen attends the New York premiere of The Odyssey. Photograph: Taylor Hill\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the text, they\u2019re icons,\u201d says Nolan. \u201cThe problem is that there\u2019s not so much to them beyond these ideals in whatever form they take. What I love about what the women in this movie have done is they give you a sense of the person behind the icon. Watching Lupita as Helen you suddenly have some sense of what it would actually be like to be the catalyst for this huge war and siege \u2013 what that would mean, what that would do to a person. And then Anne [Hathaway] as Penelope \u2013 very strong, very nuanced.\u201d<\/p>\n

That depth, he says, is forged in conversation with the actors rather than imposed by the script. \u201cI\u2019ve been on enough sets to know that horrible moment where, as the writer-director, you\u2019re asked that question you can\u2019t answer. And you have to have an answer. There might be a planned ambiguity \u2013 the way Anne\u2019s played Penelope, I almost didn\u2019t want to know what she had in her head \u2013 but yeah, you have to be on your toes.\u201d<\/p>\n

If history is any guide, right about now is the time when Nolan gets the first tugs towards his next project. \u201cThe first signs are probably about a week after he\u2019s had nothing to do he starts to get really antsy,\u201d says Thomas. \u201cThat\u2019s when he\u2019ll begin to really home in on: \u2018OK, I need to do something.\u2019\u201d Restlessness, after all, is what brought him to Ithaca in the first place. But The Odyssey looks unlikely to release him anytime soon, with rolling premieres across the globe \u2013 from Mumbai to London \u2013 followed by what is certain to be a non-stop awards campaign for the film, in every category, until next spring.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m so desperate to have a period I have nothing to do,\u201d he says. \u201cIt feels so long since I had a time like that. It\u2019s true \u2013 I get bored very quickly and that\u2019s one of the reasons I like to go back to work. I get restless.\u201d He pauses. \u201cAt the moment, all I can see is just trying to get through this, put the film out and then take a little break.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Odyssey is in is in UK, US and Australian cinemas now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018I\u2019m in that moment of sheer terror,\u201d says Christopher Nolan, sitting in a suite at the Corinthia hotel…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":697260,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-697259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=697259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/697260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=697259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=697259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=697259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}