Christopher Nolan disagrees with Odyssey star Matt Damon when it comes to his new epic being the last of its kind in Hollywood.
Damon stated multiple times during the film’s press tour that filming The Odyssey was his “last chance” to create an old-school Hollywood epic, given Nolan’s commitment to hands-on, large-format filmmaking and location shooting.
“For me personally, it was a really strange movie in the sense that I almost had a nostalgic feeling the whole time I was making it because it felt like those movies when I started working. And I know that will pass,” Damon told GQ earlier this year. “I knew this was the last chance I’d have to do something like this… I don’t think people will be given the resources to make films this way for a long time.”
In a recent interview with The Telegraph, Nolan said he can understand where Damon is coming from, but he doesn’t agree with it.
“I think I know what (Damon) was getting at because it seems like it’s been a long time since someone has made a movie like this in this way, where you travel the world and assemble a cast of thousands and so on,” Nolan said. “But there’s a defeatist aspect to that approach that I don’t agree with. I think cinema is vitally important and continues to transform – we have all these wonderful new young voices in cinema who are making this medium their own and pushing it forward.”
Nolan cited two of the summer’s surprise hits, Backrooms and Whiplash, as proof that the movie can’t be written off just yet, explaining: “That’s why I’ve never bought the argument that young audiences have too limited attention spans to enjoy a three-hour Greek epic. These films are so mysterious and brooding. 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 the “artificial intelligence trash” in favor of handcrafted films such as Back Room.
“I have never in my life seen a more rapid mass rejection of a supposedly fundamental leap in technology,” Nolan said of AI. “So much energy has been spent on introducing AI, but if you look at the reaction of this generation, they completely reject it.”
Nolan said his own children “condemned the AI slop immediately and harshly. They see it very quickly for what it is – and they have a much easier time identifying it because it has grown out of the online world they know so well. And while that doesn’t mean every aspect of the technology is useless or pointless, in filmmaking it comes at exactly the wrong time. After years of moving towards virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling.”
In a separate interview with AFP (via The Guardian), Nolan stepped up his criticism of AI, saying: “What’s interesting about AI is that I’ve never seen a technology that was so successfully adopted by Wall Street, investors and tech companies, but which was so decisively rejected by the public. It’s just a weird thing. Young people in particular coined this term “AI sucks.” There’s a kind of disdain for AI… I think the idea that it’s completely replacing people and human creativity is nonsense to me.”
The Odyssey will be released in theaters on July 17.