Christopher Nolan really does have a cult-like mythology around him personally and professionally. People treat him like a wise guru who barely speaks, and when he does speak, all of his words are morsels of brilliance. While I agree that Nolan is a brilliant guy with interesting things to say about the world, art, film and everything else, he really is much more of a normal guy than his devotees believe. I would even describe him as chatty and a little bit gossipy. Nolan recently spoke to the Telegraph about The Odyssey, Elon Musk, AI, and the rise of these small-budget horror films which have become box office successes. Some highlights:

On Elon Musk & the alt-right bros complaining about The Odyssey: “Comes with the territory. But look, these conversations that happen before people see the film – they’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet.”

He remembers the commentary about Batman too: “But remember… I spent 10 years of my life dealing with Batman. When I came on to Batman Begins, writers and artists had been working on this beloved character for almost 65 years, and a lot of freighted thoughts were out there about what he represents. And what I learnt over my time on that trilogy is you can’t worry about any of that at all. What you have to do is honour the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can. In the end, fans of the property – even when we were doing something that was not what they would have done – enjoyed the sincerity of the attempt to put as good a version of it on screen as we could.” With The Odyssey, he hopes audiences will react in much the same fashion. “All I can do is make the best film I possibly can in the most sincere way. It’s very different from how anyone else would do it, but that’s what adaptation is.”

Whether he believes ‘The Odyssey’ could be the last big-budget spectacle of its kind: “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.” He singles out Curry Barker and Kane Parsons – the young YouTube crossover talents whose relatively thrifty directorial debuts, Obsession and Backrooms, have ranked among the year’s biggest critical and commercial hits – as evidence that things are on the right track. “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.”

He loves young filmmakers’ ambivalence towards AI: “I’ve never seen a more rapid wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime. So much energy has been expended on bringing in AI, but if you look at that generation’s reaction, they’re utterly rejecting it.” He cites his own four children – in their late teens and early 20s – as a further example. “Their 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 film-making 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.”

Why he’s never going to own a smartphone: “You guys have all become pod people… I worry the world is eventually going to wear me down. The return of the QR code since Covid has been particularly tricky for me.” Why is he so against phones? “Partly because I know I’d become horribly addicted to them if I had one. I’d spend all my time looking things up. And I find I’m only able to advance my thinking on projects in those pockets of time where everybody usually jumps on their phone – waiting for a train, or in an airport, or sitting in a restaurant waiting for somebody to turn up for dinner. Those are the moments I work out whatever it is I need to do next.”

His local cinema: “Well, my local cinema is the Vista in Los Angeles, which is run by Quentin Tarantino, and they have a hard and fast attitude towards smartphones and watches: if you have to make a call or need to look at your phone, just step outside into the foyer. And I think it’s a wonderful rule. And the other thing I’d borrow is that they play the audio track from the film in the toilets, so if you have to step out you don’t miss anything.”

On Tarantino’s “ten films and done” rule: “I think it’s dangerous to look at it that specifically. I mean, Quentin has his reasons, and I respect those enormously. But I’m hoping that he won’t stay true to them.” For him, he continues, the calculus is a little different: “I view every film that I do as the last I’ll ever make – and one day I will be right. So every time I want to put everything into the project at hand. I’m never thinking, ‘Well, I’ll save this for the next one’. I don’t ever want to think like that. I want each movie to be everything.”

[From The Telegraph]

I love his obvious delight as he trashes AI. “Their judgment of AI slop has been immediate and harsh.” He was practically spitting! And I’m sure Curry Barker and Kane Parsons are honored to get name-checked by the great mahatma – 21-year-old Kane Parsons being compared to obscure David Lynch is incredible. And those young guys really deserve it too, I’m glad that older directors are hyping them and publicly praising them. It’s awesome. Regarding Musk and his crew of misogynist and racist fanboys… what Nolan says is correct, but I also hope that he and his team are prepared to loudly support Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page if the “backlash” continues. Nolan can’t just leave them out there, receiving targeted hate, and saying nothing. He can’t act like Disney.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.