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Christopher Nolan’s reputation precedes the man these days. He is one of the last Hollywood directors whose name alone is a brand; a calling card; a promise on the poster that you’re about to see something epic. It’s synonymous with IMAX spectacle and enigmatic characters. What might be less publicized or celebrated, however, are the humane qualities that make him so compelling as a storyteller. They’re crucial though for any leader whom men and women will follow on to the ends of the earth—or at least the Tyrrhenian Sea off the coast of Sicily.
“So before the scene where I’m lashed to the mast and face the Sirens, Chris was waiting for me on the dock with Hoyte [van Hoytema],” actor Matt Damon says with a smile, and perhaps the hint of a sigh, while recounting to us The Odyssey’s shoot across the Mediterranean. The scene in question is pivotal in Homer’s epic poem about a Greek king unable to get home. In the Ancient Greek text, it is here where the ethereal Sirens whisper sweet honey into Odysseus’ ear as he’s tied to his ship’s mast, sailing past their treacherous rocks. In Nolan’s movie, that sweetness is also implied, as is the Sirens’ primal beauty as observed from a distance. But what most forcefully trickles into Odysseus’ ear—and across Damon’s face in extended closeup—is nothing less than psychological agony. He hears the broken promises and waylaid desires whispered between a separated husband and wife. And feels the tears of torment.
“So it’s at six in the morning when we’d leave,” Damon explains, “and I had my armor and everything on, and saw them on the dock. Normally they took off on the camera boat before us, because it takes about an hour to get out there, but they knew I had to do this scene that day. And Chris said, ‘Hoyte and I were saying we should start with [you], and shoot till we’re happy. And then we’ll get the other pieces that we need.’”
It’s a small gesture, but for an actor like Damon, it might be the most graceful piece of direction he ever got from Nolan after three films together. Instead of focusing on the riggings, coverage, or capturing the Greeks’ authentic, wooden longship in the morning sun, Nolan and his cinematographer would just shoot one of the most emotionally taxing closeups of the movie until they, and Damon, were satisfied.
“That does a lot of things,” Damon says. “Number one, it means you’re not going to have to sit around all day. It’s like, I know I have one hour on a boat ride [where] I can get my mind right, and the second I step off that boat we’re going. And we’re going to shoot till we’re happy, meaning we’re going to do this a lot, we’re not leaving until we get everything we need. It seems like very simple direction, but there’s a lot of wisdom.”
Wisdom, and as added by Damon’s co-star and the other emotional anchor of The Odyssey, acute empathy.
“There’s a lot of humanity,” Anne Hathaway says of her director. “So I liked Chris, I was sort of amazed by him, but those little moments make you realize, ‘Oh, there’s a really deeply kind person inside this genius that we revere.’”
Hathaway’s seen it many times over, having collaborated with Nolan for longer than Damon, beginning with her stint as Catwoman in 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, which is an experience she still looks back on with pride, especially with how it established a fruitful creative relationship.
“When we were working on Dark Knight Rises together, which I think I was 27 years old or something like that on, I couldn’t believe my good luck,” Hathaway remembers. “Because I was still very much the girl from The Princess Diaries, but all of a sudden I got to be on a Christopher Nolan movie playing this character that had meant so much to me my entire life. So I just wanted to be so prepared, I wanted to do such a good job. I just wanted to leave it all on the table, and I think he knew that about me.”
She continues, “So we were doing a sequence and before it even started, he just came up to me and said, ‘You know what, I just wanted to let you know we’re going to do a lot of takes of this because I’ve just had it in my head a certain way for a really long time, and I just need it to flow this certain way. So I’m going to do a lot of takes, but it’s not because you’re doing anything wrong.’” It is a note of humility and preemptive concern.
That probing sympathy for all the filmmaking talent and characterization at play becomes blindingly self-evident in The Odyssey, a film where the entire cast from stars like Damon and Hathaway, to the smallest of supporting roles, are filled with Oscar winners and AAA talent. Hence while even Homer’s Helen of Troy is depicted mostly as the dutiful wife of Menelaus, the Spartan king who fought a bloody war of attrition for 10 years on the shores of Troy after she was taken by (or left him for?) a Trojan prince, the Helen played by Lupita Nyong’o opposite Jon Bernthal’s Menelaus must convey oceans of pained emotions in only a handful of scenes.
“Helen of Troy is kind of ubiquitous,” Nyong’o says. “We all know a version of the Helen story… but oftentimes the women are footnotes in these stories, so it was nice to flesh it out.” While she had not read The Odyssey in full while growing up in Kenya, Nyong’o became extremely familiar with various versions of the Trojan War myth, and what a woman like Helen might think about having an entire war fought in her name.
Adds the Oscar winner, “I do think that this film asks us to consider more than just her face.”
It also asks us to consider the emotional turmoil of even a man who clearly seems to resent that face after being reunited with it. Bernthal’s Menelaus is still married to Helen after the war’s end—which is more accurate to the Greek myths than 2004’s Troy ever got—but there is an inherent contradiction between how coldly the Spartan king treats his returned wife versus the genuine kindness he shows Telemachus, Odysseus’ young adult son played by Tom Holland.
“I think in the canon of Chris’ work and in the canon of all great storytelling, it’s always a gray area,” Bernthal reflects. “It’s not, ‘Okay, this is a good guy, this is the bad guy.’ It’s about what are the characters going through? I think there’s deep shame, there’s deep anger, there’s deep bitterness, there’s deep sadness, there’s deep survivor’s guilt. All this stuff is going on.”
Like Homer, it is tapping into universal emotions bigger than just heroes and villains. Anyone can relate to the pull of wanting to go home—or the fear that they blew it somehow by leaving. In some ways, The Odyssey feels like a culmination in Nolan’s work, and not just because it is the third movie where a hero must fight his way across vast distances to get back to Ms. Hathaway. It is also another story about the longing of home and family—and the fear of being unable to see them again not because of external forces, but due to internal, human ones.
“The first thing I said to Chris when I read the script was, ‘Wow, this traffic’s in a lot of the same themes as Oppenheimer,’” Damon reveals. “Just because I just felt that’s a story about accountability for what you’ve done and the decisions you’ve made. Odysseus is very much responsible for his own ingenuity and living with the effects of that.”
It is another film about a great man who does terrible things, and in the aftermath is unsure if he even deserves the home life he yearns for. It’s about the moral anguish of a struggling husband tied to the mast, not the spectacle he alone might be privy to. The intimate scope of Nolan’s epics in a nutshell.
The Odyssey opens in theaters on Friday, July 17.
The post Anne Hathaway and Matt Damon on the ‘Deeply Kind Person Behind Christopher Nolan’s Genius’ appeared first on Den of Geek.
