Christopher Nolan does not agree with his “The Odyssey” leading man Matt Damon when it comes to their new epic being the last of its kind in Hollywood.
Damon has stated repeatedly during the movie’s press tour that filming “The Odyssey” felt like his “last chance” to make an old school Hollywood epic given Nolan’s commitment to practical, large format filmmaking and shooting on location.
“It was a really weird movie for me personally in the sense that I had almost a nostalgic feeling the entire time I was making it, because it felt like the movies when I started working. And I know that that’s going away,” Damon in an interview with GQ earlier this year. “I knew that this was the last chance I was going to have to do something like this… I don’t think people are going to be given the resources to shoot movies that way for much longer.”
In a recent interview with The Telegraph, Nolan said that he can understand where Damon is coming from but he does not agree.
“I think I know what [Damon] was driving at, because it does seem like a long time since somebody made a film like this in this type of way, where you travel the world, get together a cast of thousands and so on,” Nolan said. “But there’s a defeatist aspect of viewing it that way that I don’t agree with. I think cinema is vital and essential and continues to transform itself — we’ve got all these great new young voices in movies, making the medium their own and moving it forward.”
Nolan cited two of the summer’s unexpected hits, “Backrooms” and “Obsession,” as proof that you can’t write off cinema just yet, explaining: “This is why I never bought into the arguments that young audiences’ attention spans are too fried to enjoy a three-hour Greek epic. Those films are so mysterious and ruminative. I mean, parts of ‘Backrooms’ are like David Lynch at his most obscure. And yet young people can’t get enough of them.”
Oscar winner Nolan is also encouraged by how younger audiences seem to be rejecting “AI slop” in favor of handcrafted movies like “Backrooms.”
“I’ve never seen a more rapid wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime,” Nolan said about AI. “So much energy has been expended on bringing in AI, but if you look at that generation’s reaction, they’re utterly rejecting it.”
Nolan said that his own 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.”
In a separate interview with the AFP (via The Guardian), Nolan doubled down on his criticism of AI, saying: “The interesting thing with AI is I’ve never seen a technology that’s been so successfully adopted by Wall Street and by investors and by tech companies that the public has so thoroughly rejected. It’s just sort of an odd thing. Young people in particular, they coined this term ‘AI slop.’ There’s a sort of disdain for things AI… I think the idea that it replaces human beings wholesale and human creativity, to me it’s a nonsense.”
“The Odyssey” opens in theaters July 17.
