In our initial interview, Nolan was reluctant to discuss the ending of The Odyssey. He’s known as the master of the last-act twist, and likes leaving the audience with more questions than answers. He told me he never wants to impose his interpretation on others. (Are Cobbs’ kids in Inception real or imagined? You decide.) But when I hopped on the phone again shortly before the film’s release to have a spoiler-filled chat about the film’s final act—readers beware!—he offered some insight as to why he made certain changes when adapting the epic poem.
Nolan: My form of storytelling is, you take a hero, as we did with Oppenheimer, and Oppenheimer has all these flaws, all of these complexities. You find an actor who can take the audience on a journey with that character and make mistakes with that character and not judge that character. And then you step back from that character and go, “Well, how did we get here?”
He’s a guy who makes a lot of mistakes. His ultimate mistake is the horse. So there’s a sort of tragic flaw right from the beginning in our telling.
Nolan with Matt Damon as Odysseus and Zendaya as Athena on set of The Odyssey. —Melinda Sue Gordon—Universal PicturesMy interpretation of Zendaya’s character is that she is not Athena as Odysseus initially present her—gods don’t exist in this world—but a manifestation of his guilt. During the sack of Troy, we see her as a priestess in the Temple of Athena, and the Greeks behead her. For Odysseus, she encapsulates the chaos that the horse has wrought on the world. But my editor did not interpret it that way. I am hoping you will settle our disagreement.
Here’s what I will say: For me, what was important was that we view the gods the way that people at the time might have viewed them. So they’re seeing evidence of the gods in nature. They’re seeking and finding gods and the influence of gods in the people around them. Odysseus says to Telemachus, “Don’t look for gods in men. You’ll just be disappointed.” And some of what Odysseus says about divinity, to me, is somebody who’s protesting a bit too much, someone trying to live in denial of their own instincts and their own practices.
John Leguizamo [who plays Odysseus’ friend Eumaeus] says it at the very beginning: “That’s very clever, but your cleverness will get you in trouble.” As it does again and again and again. This is where it ties into Oppenheimer: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. The parallels were pretty apparent to me as I figured out how to adapt it.
The movie hinges on this idea that by creating the Trojan Horse, Odysseus destroys “Zeus’ law.” That’s the movie’s term for the ancient Greek concept of xenia—the respectful relationship between host and guest—which can be tricky to explain to a modern audience. Why was it important to include?
Christopher Nolan filming the Sack of Troy in The Odyssey —Melinda Sue Gordon—Universal Pictures
That line, “The face that launched 1,000 ships, or maybe just 500” just occurred to me to write. Sometimes what you do as a writer is purely instinctive. I felt the poem didn’t necessarily address what it is for Helen to be brought back by Menelaus and how that would ever work. How would that relationship be? How could it possibly be anything other than the most acidic, awful marriage?
You don’t buy that he saw her face and said, “She’s so beautiful I can’t kill her after all,” as he does in the myth?
Circe articulates it well in the film. I love the way Samantha [Morton] has played the part. Talking about choices of adaptation, the end of the poem is so grim and so misogynistic, I had to exclude some of that material. But I didn’t want to completely take it off the table in terms of what it is saying about men and the way they wage war.
And yet you give Odysseus and Penelope a happy ending that they do not get in the poem.
For me, it was important in looking at the ending to try and strike the right balance between pessimism and optimism—pessimism about what might have precipitated the Bronze Age catastrophe and the optimism that positive things will reassert themselves.
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