Director Nolan was the type of person who made a point of noting that certain questions were difficult to answer. I have often seen similar answers in other interviews as well.
"That's a difficult question to answer,"
he would say, though that did not mean he wouldn't answer it. Rather, he seemed to be the kind of person who wanted to make it clear that it was a challenging question for him. To me, he said twice that the final question was difficult to answer. I will share what that question was later in this article.
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Director Nolan mostly wears a suit with a dress shirt even on rough location film sets. When it is cold, he throws an overcoat over it. It is the opposite of Zuckerberg, the head of Meta. Another famous film director who preferred wearing a suit on set was Alfred Hitchcock. Both share the commonality of being British. A true 'English gentleman,' perhaps.
To interview Director Nolan, I also wore a suit—despite the heat. However, Nolan was dressed in a black polo shirt and a dark brown jacket. Perhaps that attire actually helped ease my tension a bit. Although I have interviewed many directors and actors, I was still slightly nervous, as he is arguably the world's most influential director (according to a 'New York Magazine' survey). But as the interview progressed, I felt that he was a cautious and diligent person rather than stiff or arrogant. He reminded me of Director Park Chan-wook in that you could feel him listening carefully to the questions and striving to answer as accurately and meticulously as possible. Of course, because the interview time was so short, some answers felt like textbook responses.
I have always thought of Director Nolan as a diligent 'ambitious man.' Looking at his films, that is evident. He unleashes his cinematic imagination, traversing back and forth through time and space, past and future. His filmography features Batman as well as Oppenheimer. He moves freely between the distant future of 'Interstellar' and the distant past of 'The Odyssey.' I wonder if the agonizing human beings in his films might be Nolan's own cinematic alter ego. That is why my first question was this.
- As a director and filmmaker, what cinematic ambition of yours does 'The Odyssey' fulfill?
"For me, 'The Odyssey' is a foundational text of Western literature. Above all, it is one of the greatest adventure stories of all time, a tale that has captivated people across generations for nearly 3,000 years. As a film director, I look for gaps in cinema culture—searching for something new to bring to audiences. The fact that the world of Greek mythology had never really been properly tackled in a modern cinematic sense struck me as quite extraordinary."
(In fact, films based on The Odyssey include the 1954 'Ulysses' starring Kirk Douglas and the 1997 'The Return' starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche. Director Nolan's standard must have been different.)
"That was precisely the opportunity I was looking for as a filmmaker. So I dove in with the specific ambition to deliver one of the great adventure stories to modern audiences in a way that allows them to feel truly connected and part of the story. I always try to do things I haven't done before. The story world of the Bronze Age was something I had never done, and I felt I could present it on screen in a fresh way."
Director Nolan majored in English literature in college. In other words, he likely had time to think deeply about The Odyssey long ago. Nolan said that studying English literature in college helped him cultivate an eye for expansive worlds spanning time and shifts in storytelling methods. As you know, The Odyssey is an oral epic poem.
"When reading the Odyssey poem from the perspective of adapting it into a film, so much of it resonated with me. The poem is realistic and accessible. I wanted to tell the story in a very grounded way that draws that out for the audience. When dealing with literature of the past, we too often put it on a pedestal and treat it with excessive reverence. The real challenge and joy of this adaptation was giving audiences the experience of reading this poem within the film—experiencing it for the first time as a fresh story."
One of the things I was most curious about before watching the movie 'The Odyssey' was how the fact that The Odyssey was originally a poem would be reflected in the film.
- The Odyssey is originally an oral epic poem, and the adaptation in the opening, consisting of short words, was impressive. When and how did you come up with the specific idea to reflect this in the screenplay?
"One of the very first decisions I made when I decided to make this film was to introduce the bard character played by Travis Scott. Introducing the concept of the act of storytelling itself was very important to me, because The Odyssey is a poem about storytelling. I wanted to pay homage to the concept of a story passed down orally from bard to bard before it was written down. Most scholars believe that The Odyssey was eventually recorded in that manner.
This poem has been passed down through various eras and cultures through oral repetition. So I felt it was important to start with that, and it was one of the earliest decisions I made. Particularly for Telemachus, what matters is that he receives stories about his father—the concept of a father he doesn't even remember—through song and poetry."
'The Odyssey' is, above all, the original adventure story. Director Nolan said that 'The Odyssey' is an adventure tale, as well as a love story, a coming-of-age story, and a homecoming story. He added that these were crucial themes for people at the time the poem was written.
"I think the reason this poem has sustained interest over thousands of years is that the themes it deals with are universal truths. They are just as valid and important to us today as they were 3,000 years ago."
However, Nolan's adaptation of 'The Odyssey' has sparked heated debate in the English-speaking world, becoming a major topic of conversation. Director Nolan stated that he referenced various translations of 'The Odyssey' while making the film. Among them, Emily Wilson, author of a major 2017 translation, criticized Nolan's adaptation in the London Review of Books after watching the film, calling it grandiose and superficial. Given that the opening line of 'The Odyssey' translated by Emily Wilson, chair of the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, is "Tell me about a complicated man," titling her piece "An Uncomplicated Man" was a rather scathing satire. With other scholars pushing back that Nolan's adaptation is his creative freedom, this debate has drawn considerable attention, but since it is not the main topic of this article, I will leave it at that.
Where was I? Right, around this point, pressed for time, I had no choice but to skip a few prepared questions and move on to IMAX. The IMAX format was invented a year before Director Nolan was born in 1970, and Nolan is said to have harbored a long-held dream of making movies in IMAX ever since seeing an IMAX film at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago when he was around 16.
- You have continued your IMAX journey for nearly 20 years since 'The Dark Knight.' Filming the entire movie in IMAX this time must have brought special feelings.
"Ever since 'The Dark Knight,' I've tried to use IMAX cameras as much as possible, but it was mostly limited to action sequences."
(Starting with 28 minutes in 'The Dark Knight,' he shot around an hour in IMAX for 'The Dark Knight Rises,' 'Interstellar,' 'Dunkirk,' 'Tenet,' and 'Oppenheimer.')
"When embarking on this movie, I went to IMAX and said, 'If there's ever a film to shoot entirely in IMAX, this has to be the one.' I asked them if they could make the camera quieter, and thanks to the blimp system they developed—an advanced box that insulates camera noise—we were able to shoot dialogue scenes as well. At that point, I realized we could shoot the entire film in the IMAX format."
"The greatest advantage of shooting on large-format film is that it is the format closest to the way the human eye sees. For someone like me interested in drawing the audience into the story, it is the optimal format. It was truly wonderful to be able to do that across the entire film, rather than changing formats for only certain sections."
- In a way, this seems like a milestone in your IMAX journey. Did you feel a sense of accomplishment, like 'I finally did it,' after finishing filming?
"When we finished IMAX shooting, there was certainly a feeling of fulfilling a long-cherished ambition. However, because filmmaking happens in stages, after shooting, we had to edit the negative film. Each stage brought its own sense of completion, but I believe true completion is the moment the film is being shown to audiences around the world. It opens in South Korea this Wednesday, and the audience completes the film. Their response tells what the movie is, and only then will the journey feel complete."
If it's a Christopher Nolan film, we cannot omit this question: Why stick to location shooting and analog production methods instead of VFX in the age of AI? (Using VFX is not a bad thing. To shoot in an analog way like Nolan requires a massive amount of capital. Worldwide, Director Nolan is practically the only director today who can negotiate on equal footing with major Hollywood studios.) I gained confidence from Nolan's answer.
"Technology has various uses and forms, and we also utilize all kinds of technology and cutting-edge techniques. But what I always try to maintain in filmmaking is an obsession with tonality. Because we shoot in real places and on actual locations, when we need to implement fantasy elements that cannot be captured directly by the camera, we collaborate with the visual effects team while trying to shoot as much as possible for real. This stems from my desire to maintain the tonality of the film.
Audiences are very sensitive to tonality—that feeling of 'Are we really somewhere actual? Are the actors standing in a real space, or is it an animated world?' Making more artificial, animated-feeling films is a completely valid and viable approach. I simply choose a more realistic tone, and the challenge is finding ways to carry that tone through even in sequences where visual effects must be used."
In 'The Odyssey' as well, Nolan shot as much as possible through analog methods—including scenes such as confrontations with the Cyclops or giants, and sea whirlpools—to the extent that one wonders, 'How on earth did they shoot that live-action?' Furthermore, as Nolan says, even films that seem laden with VFX actually need to do as much live-action shooting as possible and build VFX on top of that to reduce production time and costs. Nolan provides audiences with realism and immersion by capturing even hard-to-realize live-action scenes as much as possible through physical, analog shooting (such as crashing an actual Boeing 747 in 'Tenet' or filming the atomic bomb explosion scene with physical special effects in 'Oppenheimer'). Nolan's answer brings to mind the saying, 'The devil is in the details.'
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Having listened to his answers up to this point, I had already reached the final leg of my short interview odyssey with Director Nolan. The final question I added—with permission from a representative from Universal Pictures headquarters, who had come to the interview site for some light monitoring—was this very question. It was the exact question that Nolan described as difficult to answer.
- As a film director, where do you think you are currently in your own odyssey? And what is the ultimate goal you wish to achieve when you reach your Ithaca?
"That is a difficult question to answer. My rule is always to focus on one thing at a time. I try not to view each movie as part of a broader body of work or a segment of a journey I am on. I try to see just that movie itself, because that is how audiences receive a film. Of course, there are fans who know my previous work, and film critics who write from that perspective. But fundamentally, I have to make movies for audiences who don't care who the director is. They are simply interested in the story. So viewing my work on a continuum with other films is very difficult for me. It is truly hard to answer."
✻ This interview took place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul on August 3 from 11:30 AM to 11:45 AM for about 15 minutes. It was partially edited—like the non-linear storytelling style Director Nolan favors—but preserved the order of questions and answers and the original interview statements as much as possible.
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