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Welcome back to the Daily Show My guest tonight Oscar winning director Oscar winning writer and producer His new film is called The Odyssey Please welcome Christopher Nolan. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. Let me begin by saying this. Holy shit. i saw this uh on sunday thank you very much your people set up a lovely screening it's a staggering work just remarkable uh to the point where you know i i feel like i know a lot of the tricks i don't know how you did it i honestly don't that's all practical right

those are real boats that's real water this is not yeah real boats real water i it's the odyssey uh i wanted to take the audience on this incredible journey and for me i mean we use every trick in the book certainly but the basis of it is to get the actors get matt damon tom holland and hathaway everybody rob pattinson get them out there in the world find locations real locations uh get a real boat uh you know get out there get a real cyclops get a real cyclops as close as we Yep, yep, exactly.

What made you decide to take on this epic work?

Well, coming out of my last film, Oppenheimer, had way more success than I think we had any right to expect. And that gives you an opportunity to get something made that you might not otherwise be able to get made.

You would have had trouble. Christopher Nolan, after everything, after Interstellar, after Inception, after Memento, Yeah, after Memento, after Batman. You would have had trouble selling that had it not been for Oppenheimer?

I think it helped that it was very successful. You think the Oscar thing helped? I think the Oscar thing helped. I think it all helped to go to the studio and say, because being the Odyssey, it needs a massive budget. It needs a massive cast. It needs a lot. So you're asking a lot of the studio. You're asking a lot of the cast and everybody. You know, I like to say it was a very hard movie, but hard for all the right reasons you know it's the odyssey it should be hard uh it shows up on

screen i mean all of it shows up on screen and someone was telling me that you actually completed it ahead of schedule as you have with all of your movies and under budget yes never happened it was never happened i mean it's just how

Well, I mean, the reality is, you know, we went in at 100 days. And by day 91, we couldn't have taken another step. So we finished the right time. You were done. We were done. Everybody was done. I mean, people were just exhausted. Right. They'd been through it. And so, you know, it took the right time to make the film. We had enough time to make it. We had the resources to make it.

There is now, I am obviously, I don't want to say an expert in mythology and Greek literature. Some would say. But some of our writers are experts. And so when we walked out, I walked out with someone who's actually studied those texts in Greek. And I was looking at him like, because for me.

I was utterly absorbed and transformed by the powerful storytelling and the epic nature of it and all those things. But this is a person that, to be frank, would probably be a bit of a pain in the ass to watch The Odyssey with. Loved it. Oh, great. Great. One note. Okay. It's a little late. What time is it? Okay. Apparently, there is a joke that Odysseus makes with Cyclops. Yes. Yes. He was very upset that that was not in the movie.

I understand. It's a pun. Puns in translation are tough. Do you do a lot of puns in your monologues every night? We do sometimes, but only because we write the show at a fifth grade level. It's slightly different. There you go. I tried. It was not possible to work it in.

have you when you do something like this that so many people feel a sense of ownership over yeah yeah or did the experience with things like batman already kind of inure you to that experience not

not inure it it taught you what's at the base of it you know when you take on the character of batman as we did in the dark knight trilogy you were dealing with at that time 75 years of history with a beloved character who'd been worked on by these incredible writers and artists And what we learned in that experience is if we made the best film we possibly could, if we put as strong an interpretation on the characters as we could, the fans felt the respect and the love for the source material, even if we weren't doing exactly what they would have done. That was what was important, was to respect the material. And I think the same applies very much to Homer.

That is a very interesting take, because I would imagine it's easy to approach it with almost a sense of defensiveness, which I've seen in those kinds of films where they say, well, these people, it's a toxic fandom and they won't. But that's a very different mindset, which is I want to make sure that I've honoured this material in the right way and that should resonate with them.

Yeah. I mean, that's what we found at every stage with those movies. People have very strong feelings about the characters. They're interested. And that's a huge advantage for a filmmaker. I mean, the fact that people have been fascinated by the Odyssey for 3,000 years, The fact that people, you know, care about a film coming out, you know, that's a huge advantage. It means we've got people's attention, and now we have to show them something that feels worthwhile, that feels like it does justice to this incredible story.

Right, and it does have that epic nature. This is going to feel far afield. It felt like, in some respects, The Odyssey was a sequel to Oppenheimer. And I know that sounds incredibly, incredibly dumb. So let me explain why I think that. I'm incredibly dumb. When I think about Oppenheimer, what so stayed with me in that movie was the weight that Oppenheimer must have felt when he saw the reality of what he had created. and the odyssey feels like a journey of a man reckoning with what he had done in war and what war does to men and it made it they felt very connected to me both films i was about to stop

you because we don't want any spoilers oh three thousand year old spoilers uh but no i i am very much i i feel like you certainly watch the film the way i intended and i think by the end that connection is made. You know, the interpretation of the Odyssey, what it could mean, the idea of these extraordinary events of the Trojan War, the force, all of this. Yeah, we wanted to try and wrestle with it, you know, in a modern sense to try and say, okay, what if these things were real? What if we were there? What would it be like? You know, what would the resonance be? What would the gravity of the situation be? And in micro, you know, it's things like being on a real ship in a real storm or going into the cave of the cyclops what would that really be like right and the answer is intense um and as far as the effect of everything that odysseus has been through and and what part he's played in in this mythic conflict right trojan war uh yeah it felt like the thing to do was to really try and take that on with a certain amount of weight a certain amount of gravity but for me every film I do if I've done my job right I leave it with questions and sort of interesting things that I want to keep drilling down on right and coming out of Oppenheimer yeah I definitely brought Oppenheimer into this movie with me yeah certainly and it's

also because the movies are all so well constructed I feel like you would have been a great architect as well if you want it to be. Like, there's such wonderful symmetry and puzzles to unfold in there.

as a constructor?

I do. I mean, I do... Before I write, I do a lot of sort of diagramming out. I draw a lot of pictures, not storyboards, but actually diagrams of the narrative and how the structure might work. And coming to this poem, I mean, Homer's original is one of the great nonlinear structures, which for me, you know, that's the kind of structure I enjoy in cinematic storytelling. So I really try to be faithful to that. that but yeah I do a lot of sort of visual diagramming a lot of trying to think in trying to find ways to think of the narrative in three-dimensional terms then I sit down and write

when I've when I've done months and months of that and it does you know you said something interesting you said you know it's this non-linear story and it has so many narrators and you don't know who's reliable and who is not reliable is that something you have to decide as you go in do you think to yourself well tell him I guess he's reliable or Penelope is or or even Odysseus are there moments where you think did this even happen to him is this just his mind trying to erase the pain of what he went through in troy are we going deep now go deep baby yeah i know i know here's the thing i will never get a chance to get high with you in a dorm room so this is it baby this is all we got because that it really i'm telling you this is a poignant work it really

speaks to the moment we're in and everything no i i mean i actually i i love the nature of the question um i'm just trying to think of how to answer it for people who haven't seen the movie and i don't want to well i never like to define the experience yes for the audience and so for me there are ambiguities there are there are questions there are layers in which things can work but the answer to the first part of your question and this has always been the case for me with my work is i have to know the answer i have to know what i believe the answer to be and then otherwise the ambiguities won't be productive there'll be a sort of non-answer as opposed to if you look at the ending of inception for example right the spinning top and you know um people often will ask me you know was it well exactly and when you approach it though

in your mind you know the answer yes but that's not something that you put out there because that

changes the experience exactly for the viewer first time i ever took a film uh you know really out there and did a bunch of interviews on it was Memento right and that's a film I wrote based on a short story that my brother had written and he came with me he came with us to the the Venice Film Festival which really premiered it and right afterwards I was asked a bunch of questions and they asked me about the ambiguity the end right and I said well it's meant to be up to you but I think it's this this this and he took me aside and he's like nobody heard the first part where they said it's meant to be up to you all they hear is what you say you're interpreting Trump's everything. You can never do that again. And he was right, and I never have since then, because... Okay, I'm just going to cross out my McConaughey in the library interstellar question.

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do you do you find yourself because it feels like the type of project that's so literally immersive do you have to complete a work before you begin to do those diagrams and sketches of other work or do you find yourself in certain phases of it beginning to plant seeds in in other

areas that you'll revisit no I very specifically do one thing at a time like once I burrow in on a project I nothing else exists I mean family just about you know it's you you know one of the responsibilities but one of the one of the the great thrills of my job is you get to sort of live in a world for a couple of years and I devote myself to that fully and for me that's never finished really until the film goes out to the audience the audience finishes the movie they they tell us what it it is that we did and so we're right now you know a few days away and

it's a terrifying time is that so do you do you feel a little bit of the the jitters from that or do you think you've got a pretty good idea of where you think it'll it'll land for people have

you seen it enough with people i've seen it enough with people we we screen it as we go to guinea pigs, you know. Sure. By the way, also in the movie. Oduceus fights guinea pigs.

He's changed some things around.

Yeah, so you have an idea of how the movie's playing for an audience, but the truth is there's nothing like going out into the world for thousands and thousands of screens all over the world, you know, over one weekend. I mean, that's a very different thing and it never gets any easier and it's absolutely terrifying.

Can I ask you one particular sequence? The Trojan horse sequence, which is something that I think for all of us that have a familiarity with, you know, the Iliad and the Odyssey and sort of our introduction to myth and Edith Hamilton and, you know, how that all spins off. the trojan horse had always existed as a certain uh methodology for how it gets in detroit you take a very different approach yeah that i thought landed thematically the poignancy of it much better thank you so i guess what i'm saying is homer ain't got shit on you But no, what was the process just going into that particular scene? Because just the mechanics of it seemed so difficult, but also it just, it felt like such a brilliant summation thematically of the weight that Odysseus felt like he was carrying.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of that thinking for me comes about as a result of looking at it saying, okay, how can we have this work and be credible for a modern audience? We all know when we see a Trojan Hall that it's stuffed with Greeks. You're starting from a difficult position. It's like, how do you sell that concept?

It's a piñata that fights back.

It's a piñata that fights back. And I had actually, 20 years ago, I was briefly attached to direct Troy, the film that David Benioff had written

based on the Iliad yes I read that that was the Brad Pitt it was yeah so I had I had to figure

out because the horse was was in that script even though it's not in the Iliad they put it in the film and so I had to sort of figure out well what's my approach to it and I came up with this idea of the horse half buried in the sand about to be destroyed or carried away by the waves so that as the Trojans find it the last thing it looks like you know there's no wheels there's no it doesn't look like something that that's meant to be carried into the city and and that image stuck with me for you know decades i really wanted to do that and and flesh out the whole sequence because to me that was the excitement it's like can we present this to an audience in a way that they can believe in and that was the sort of mantra for everybody on the film with every sequence right people want to go on this journey with us let's give them a reason to believe it's grounded

in a practical realism that i think is is what helps it create that epic because i'm i'm raised in the clash of the titans generation you know it was sort of like harry hamlin with the band and then like uh the the the sylla comes into the wall you know it's it was all like claymation yeah and camp and that's how i've never

I've never seen that type of movie portrayed with a sort of, like you say, grounded realism, even though they're gods.

Well, and this is the thing is, you know, when we looked at it, Greek mythology hadn't really been told in modern cinema in that way. The work of Ray Harryhausen, you're talking about Clash of the Titans and things like that. Very, very brilliant, handmade, amazing approach, but always on a B-movie budget. Never with the ability to kind of put it out there big, you know, with an incredible cast and, you know, on that sort of scale. And I think it was those technical limitations. Like in the great era of, you know, sword and sandals movies of the 50s and 60s. Right. You don't have the techniques to be able to embrace the fantastical. And what is the Odyssey without the fantastical? You want to see the Cyclops. You want to see Scylla and Charybdis and the Sirens and Cersei and all of that. Sir said, boy, those scenes are just spectacular. Samantha Morton, incredible actor. Incredible. One of them to work with for a long time.

And you even had to, you know, when you were talking about the technology of it, you had to sort of create machinery that didn't exist because IMAX is notoriously loud.

Yes, cameras are, I mean, it's like a generator. Yes. It's a crazy thing to have to act in front of. So in the past, we'd always used it for the action scenes. I saw IMAX first when I was about 16 years old. at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. And I wanted, right then, I was like, if I could ever... At 16? Yeah, yeah, I wanted to make a film entirely in IMAX. On The Dark Knight, I had the opportunity to meet with IMAX and say, can we use your cameras and do the action scenes that way? So the introduction of Heath Ledger's Joker, Truck Flip, all that stuff. All that's IMAX. But because the cameras are so loud, we couldn't do performances. We couldn't capture the dialogue. And so finally, with this film, I called them up, And I said, look, if ever there were a film to do the entire film in IMAX, this is the one. So can we find a way to silence the cameras? And they built this blimping system, this kind of high-tech box. You put the camera in, and then you can...

So you're filming down there, but that IMAX has got to run out. How long... What's the cartridge on an IMAX?

A little under three minutes. So every three minutes... Yeah. Every three minutes, you're saying to the actors, just stay in that mode. Stay in the water. Incredibly dramatic scene.

And you came in nine days faster and under...

budget even with that well i think actually sometimes the limitations give everybody a real focus and so i went to the actors early on and i said in the middle of your most intense scene is it okay if we just stop the camera reload it keep everybody quiet uh here's what i'm gonna say

yeah you're a wizard harry and the film is spectacular and as always you are my favorite And I just so appreciate the intentionality that you put into it, and the craft of it, and the beauty of it, and it's just spectacular, and I do hope everybody rushes out to see it in the way that it was intended, because it's really a remarkable piece of work. Congratulations.

Thank you very much.

Christopher Nolan, ladies and gentlemen.

I'm a show of this everywhere, July 17th.

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