In an extensive interview with Vulture, director Christopher Nolan spoke about… well, pretty much everything you wanted to know about The Odyssey but were too afraid to ask or never had the chance. And while the entire piece is a fascinating read filled with valuable information, the most notable takeaway may just be this line that serves as both the soft premise of the piece and the film itself.
“The genre of Greek mythology doesn’t really exist in movies,” Nolan says. “What I saw with The Odyssey is a gap that hadn’t been filled.”
To be fair, Christopher Nolan doesn’t believe there is a total absence of Greek mythology movies. He even references movies like Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans as inspirations. He also certainly doesn’t believe that the story of The Odyssey is not well-known. He describes the challenges of “the Ur-text” problem, which is his phrase for a foundational story that has become so popular that it can feel stale.
Instead, Nolan is seemingly pointing to a relative lack of entries in that genre as well as a relative lack of substantial entries. More specifically, he shares his belief that the relative lack of notable Greek mythology movies can be partially attributed to a lack of both the appropriate technology and the necessary vision to make such stories come to life.
“Hollywood made all these incredible movies about the classical period of antiquity, but it was left to geniuses like Ray Harryhausen to visualize the more mythical aspects,” Nolan explains. “For a long time, it wasn’t technically viable to make this kind of film and give as much weight and validity to a fantastical story as you did to a non-fantastical story.”
Nolan notes that The Lord of the Rings movies were a game-changer in terms of both the technology required to make such fantasy films and the vision to make those movies feel like proper blockbusters. But for The Odyssey, Nolan wanted to take things further by making a Greek mythology movie that feels a little more true to the spirit of the original narrative. The more mystical elements of the story are presented in a way that feels like a part of the world that the characters live in. That approach extends to the gods, which Nolan downplayed in terms of their actual on-screen appearances.
“For me, having these remote gods with chess pieces or whatever, all the things you’ve seen in the past, felt alienating,” Nolan says of his decision to only show one god, Athena, in the movie. “It’s not so much about trying to be realistic; it’s just trying to see the gods the way these characters would have seen them.”
Ultimately, you could certainly argue that Nolan is right to say there is, at least, a shortage of movies that properly explore the eternal legacy of Greek myths and treat such stories as true epics. We’ll find out if The Odyssey joins that elite group of films when the movie releases on July 17.
