(VO) J’aurais pu parler 3h de plus avec Christopher Nolan

**Hugo Travers** (0:00)
Hello, Christopher Nolan. How are you?

**Christopher Nolan** (0:01)
I'm good. How are you doing?

**Hugo Travers** (0:02)
Very good. Thank you so much for taking the time today. We sat in this very room. That was three years ago for Oppenheimer. We had a talk about all those topics covered there. You're back now with The Odyssey, which is absolutely breathtaking in every way. One of the best, honestly, experience I've had in a theater in a long time. So I've got so many questions for you today, with no spoilers, of course, but quite a few questions about that movie and how it was made in every way. First of all, you've admitted feeling nervous ahead of the release of The Odyssey.
After an Oscar, after the success of Oppenheimer, what can still make you nervous when you release a movie?

**Christopher Nolan** (0:45)
I make films for the cinema. I make films for an audience. And so for me, however long I work on the film and however much we develop the cut and we test screen it and look at it and do this, do that, the film is not finished to me until the audience sees it.
And the audience sort of reflects back and tells me what the film is. And so for me, the experience isn't finished until the release. So there's a very exciting time because you spent all this time, everybody working on the film and putting this thing together for the audience. But it's also, it's a very nervous time.

**Hugo Travers** (1:24)
Especially because what I understand is that it's, you've done sort of your part of the job, but then the whole question is how they will react. And it's not, I mean, you can't do much once it's released. And so...

**Christopher Nolan** (1:35)
No, it becomes the audience. The audience owns it. They tell you what it is. And that sort of completes the experience really. It's sort of like if you are directing a stage play or if you're an actor, you have your first night, you have the audience and then the audience has come.
For me, cinema is an audience medium. It's about getting people together in cinemas to watch the film. And that first release that we really tailor the film for is about what the movie audiences think.

**Hugo Travers** (2:07)
The Odyssey is nearly like 3,000 years old, I think 2,200, something like this.
How do you explain that the story of Odysseus still speaks to us today? What does that say also about humanity and us as a humankind?

**Christopher Nolan** (2:23)
Well, it says that there are eternal truths, I mean, things about human beings and human civilization that don't change. And I think what's interesting about going back to this oldest of texts, I mean, it's really one of the oldest texts in sort of Western literature, it's a foundational text, it kind of informs everything that's come since.
And it's fascinated generation after generation for almost 3,000 years, because it expresses and taps into universal truths. It's a love story, it's also a war story, it's a coming of age story, it's about love and death in the aftermath of war and coming home, and this genre really of homecoming story that the Greeks perfected, they call it Nostos. It's this idea of being away for a long time, a hero coming home, changed, re-experiencing home in a different way.
That's really a timeless genre. What I found in adapting the poem is, I found a lot of the other films that I had made, a lot of the other stories that I thought were very original at the time, that actually really come from the Odyssey. I mean, obviously something like Interstellar is very clearly drawn from the Odyssey, but even things like the Dark Knight Trilogy and Inception, there are real commonalities. I think the eternal appeal of Homer is these universal truths that it expresses.

**Hugo Travers** (3:50)
You shot this movie in real life, no green screen, in so many difficult situations, lots of scenes in the sea with the weather, we can imagine all those difficulties. What would you say was the biggest challenge you faced shooting this movie in nature like this?

**Christopher Nolan** (4:10)
I mean, there were many different challenges of many different types, and it changed week to week, location to location, which was great.
Probably the single hardest from a practical point of view. If I were talking to another filmmaker and saying, what not to do? Shooting on the sea is very difficult. We had an excellent marine coordinator, Neil Andrea, who I did Dunkerque with, and on Dunkerque, we learned an enormous amount about how to get particular shots and how to get a whole crew and cast safely out on the water and achieve these shots. Hoyte Van Hoyte, my director of photography, and myself did that film together. So we brought all that to the boats, but still shooting on an ancient sailing vessel in rough waters. Yeah, it was a huge challenge for everybody. Then doing all that on IMAX.