Christopher Nolan has pushed back on his leading man Matt Damon’s suggestion that The Odyssey represents the last of its kind in Hollywood, and made clear he has no time for what he calls defeatism about cinema’s future.
Throughout the press tour for the film, Damon has repeatedly described making The Odyssey as his “last chance” to be part of an old-fashioned Hollywood epic.
“It was a really weird movie for me personally in the sense that I had almost a nostalgic feeling the entire time I was making it, because it felt like the movies when I started working,” Damon told GQ.
“I knew that this was the last chance I was going to have to do something like this. I don’t think people are going to be given the resources to shoot movies that way for much longer.”
Nolan understands where his star is coming from, but respectfully disagrees.
Speaking to The Telegraph, he acknowledged that it has been a long time since anyone made a film quite like this one, travelling the world and assembling a cast of thousands.
“But there’s a defeatist aspect of viewing it that way that I don’t agree with,” he said.
“I think cinema is vital and essential and continues to transform itself, we’ve got all these great new young voices in movies, making the medium their own and moving it forward.”
As evidence, Nolan pointed to two of the summer’s most surprising hits, Backrooms and Obsession, both made by young first-time directors on minimal budgets and both drawing enormous audiences.
“This is why I never bought into the arguments that young audiences’ attention spans are too fried to enjoy a three-hour Greek epic. Those films are so mysterious and ruminative. I mean, parts of Backrooms are like David Lynch at his most obscure. And yet young people can’t get enough of them.”
Nolan also connected those films’ success to what he sees as a broader generational rejection of artificial intelligence in creative work.
“I’ve never seen a more rapid wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime,” he told The Telegraph.
He noted that his own children identify AI-generated content immediately and dismiss it without hesitation.
“Their judgment of AI slop has been immediate and harsh. After years of driving towards heavily virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling.”
In a separate interview with AFP, Nolan went further.
“The interesting thing with AI is I’ve never seen a technology that’s been so successfully adopted by Wall Street and by investors and by tech companies that the public has so thoroughly rejected. Young people in particular, they coined this term ‘AI slop.’ There’s a sort of disdain for things AI. The idea that it replaces human beings wholesale and human creativity, to me it’s a nonsense.”
The Odyssey, which follows Odysseus’s decade-long journey home after the Trojan War with a cast including Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, opens in cinemas on 17 July.
