Just a few short days before its release, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is already shaping up to be one of the defining cinematic experiences of the year.
The epic, a retelling of Homer’s famed story, stars Matt Damon as the titular Odysseus, and features a star-studded ensemble that includes the likes of Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, Lupita Nyong’o, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Elliot Page, and Samantha Morton, just to name a few.
Set for a July 17 wide release, the drama is sparking major anticipation not only due to its status as the follow-up to the English director’s Oscar-winning opus Oppenheimer, but also because of its incredibly A-list cast.
However, it’s exactly some of these casting choices that earned Christopher, 55, some ire, including backlash from conservative netizens over the decision to cast Lupita as Helen of Troy, the inclusion of Elliot, a transgender man, the implicit intent to get people in theatres for stars over story, plus perceived inaccuracies over set pieces and apparent plot devices.
In a new interview with The Telegraph, the knighted filmmaker explained that he is having none of it, fully standing behind his cast. “Comes with the territory,” he simply noted of any negativity toward his work.
“But look, these conversations that happen before people see the film – they’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet,” he opined, noting that he’d dealt with much of the same discourse when he took on the beloved Batman IP with his critically acclaimed trilogy.
“When I came on to Batman Begins, writers and artists had been working on this beloved character for almost 65 years, and a lot of freighted thoughts were out there about what he represents,” Christopher continued, pointing out some fears at the time over whether his style would translate to the superhero adaptation, and casting choices like Christian Bale as Batman and Heath Ledger as The Joker.
© Getty Images“And what I learnt over my time on that trilogy is you can’t worry about any of that at all. What you have to do is honor the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can.”
He continued: “In the end, fans of the property – even when we were doing something that was not what they would have done – enjoyed the sincerity of the attempt to put as good a version of it on screen as we could.”
© Getty ImagesChristopher’s Batman trilogy began with, appropriately, Batman Begins in 2005, followed by The Dark Knight in 2008 and The Dark Knight Rises in 2012. All three films received general acclaim, especially The Dark Knight, now considered one of the best films of the 2000s and one of the greatest superhero films ever made.
The latter two films in the trilogy each grossed over $1 billion worldwide, making Christian a Hollywood heavyweight and winning Heath several posthumous awards for his turn as The Joker, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
© Universal StudiosThe director said of The Odyssey: “All I can do is make the best film I possibly can in the most sincere way. It’s very different from how anyone else would do it, but that’s what adaptation is.”
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