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You’d think filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” would be one of the last things to become a target in a culture war – but here we are.
Nolan sat down with The Telegraph this week to ask him about the backlash that seems to have originated over the casting choices of two very minor characters in the story.
As the paper aptly puts, “Elon Musk and a bunch of YouTubers whose revenue streams depend on them getting angry about a new film twice a week, denounced Nolan for capitulating to Hollywood’s woke agenda.”
It has had a minor impact – the backlash was enough that the final trailer drew 600,000 ‘dislikes’ on YouTube. Whether it will impact ticket sales remains to be seen, but Nolan says he’s not worried about that talk:
“Comes with the territory. 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.. Remember, I spent 10 years of my life dealing with Batman… 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 honour the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can…. 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.”
Tracking data from analysts The Quorum (via Cosmic Book News) indicates the issue the film is having isn’t lack of interest but rather lack of awareness (currently sitting at 50/100).
In the same interview, Nolan also offered his thoughts on A.I. and seems to think that the kids are going to be all right:
“I’ve never seen a more rapid wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime. So much energy has been expended on bringing in AI, but if you look at that generation’s reaction, they’re utterly rejecting it.
[My children’s] judgment of AI slop has been immediate and harsh. They see it for what it is very quickly – and it’s much easier for them to identify it, because it grew out of an online world they know really well.
And while that doesn’t mean that every aspect of the technology is useless or meaningless, in filmmaking it’s hitting at exactly the wrong time. After years of driving towards heavily virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling.”
Nolan’s “The Odyssey” opens in cinemas next Friday.
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