Jon Stewart was really, really, really impressed by The Odyssey.
The Daily Show host had director Christopher Nolan on his Comedy Central talk show on Monday night and repeatedly enthused about the Universal film during their 20-minute chat (watch it, below).
Stewart opened the segment by saying, “Holy shit. It’s a staggering work. I was utterly absorbed and transformed by the powerful storytelling and epic nature of it. [It’s] just remarkable to the point — I feel like I know a lot of the tricks, but I don’t know how you did it … Here’s what I’m going to say: You’re a wizard, Harry. The film is spectacular. As always, you’re my favorite filmmaker. I so appreciate the intentionality that you put into it, the craft of it, the beauty of it, it’s just spectacular. I hope that everybody rushes out to see it [in theaters] — in the way it was intended, because it’s really a remarkable piece of work.”
Stewart was particularly impressed by Nolan’s dedication to practical effects, marveling, “That’s all practical [effects] right? That’s real boats, real water?”
“Real boats, real water,” Nolan replied. “It’s The Odyssey. I wanted to take the audience on this journey. We use every trick in the book, certainly. But we wanted to find real locations, get a real boat… It was a hard movie for all the right reasons. The Odyssey should be hard.”
“Somebody was telling me you actually completed this ahead of schedule — as you have all your movies — and under budget,” Stewart said. “[That] never happens!
“The reality is we had 100 days and on day 91 we couldn’t have taken another step,” Nolan replied. “We finished at the right time. We were done. People were just exhausted.”
Another element of the film that Stewart focused on edges into what Nolan called “3,000-year-old spoilers.” (So stop reading here if you don’t want to know about some of the thematic revelations in the story.)
“It felt like, in some respects, The Odyssey was a sequel to Oppenheimer — and I know that sounds incredibly dumb, so let me explain why I think that,” Stewart began. “When I think about Oppenheimer, what 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. They felt very connected to me.”
“I feel like you certainly watched the film the way I intended,” Nolan replied. “We wanted to try and wrestle with it, 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?’ I definitely brought Oppenheimer into this movie with me.”
The Odyssey tells the story of the Greek hero Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his long, perilous journey home from the Trojan War to the kingdom of Ithaca, where his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway), son Telemachus (Tom Holland) and loyal servant Eumaeus (John Leguizamo) await his return. Along the way, he encounters mythic figures including the goddess Circe (Samantha Morton) and the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron), while Penelope is pursued by the treacherous suitor Antinous (Robert Pattinson). The film opens this week.
