Why My Nolan Interview Went Viral Across the Western Internet Overnight

Hello, everyone, and welcome to A Single Tree Does Not Make a Forest. This is a casual chat episode.

The last time I devoted an entire episode solely to my own affairs was probably when I got divorced: Episode 184, “What Is It Like to Endure False Accusations in the United States?” It has been a long time since I spent an entire evening feasting on gossip about myself. But if it is my own gossip, I suppose I have to be the one to tell it. So let me recount the story from the protagonist’s perspective.

The story is extremely simple. There was not the slightest bit of conspiracy, connections, bribery, or unfairness behind it.

A year ago, I made Episode 167 of the podcast, “How to Read Homer’s Epic, The Odyssey.” An employee at Universal Pictures regularly listens to my podcast. After hearing that episode, he emailed me a month ago and invited me to Beijing to attend the premiere of The Odyssey and interview Nolan. He also asked whether I wanted to fly from Zhejiang to Beijing two months in advance to watch the film, so I would have time to prepare my questions.

I said that wasn’t necessary. On this podcast, I always make things fresh and serve them immediately. I could watch the film one day and conduct the interview the next.

So I brought my friend Zhao Yufei with me. Three days ago, after the two of us watched the premiere of The Odyssey, we stopped for barbecue on our way home at around eleven o’clock. We chatted and wrote down some of the topics that interested us in a notebook. The next day, I interviewed Nolan.

The Universal employee treated me very well. Initially, he said he could give me half an hour, or even forty-five minutes. After all, I really am nobody. I am just a podcast host. I have no credentials, no team, and no affiliation with any accredited institution. Then, a few days before the interview, Nolan’s publicist said they could give me only fifteen minutes.

Okay, fine. Fifteen minutes it was. I can seize every opportunity, and that was enough. But it meant that during the interview I did not have time to follow up on, or interrogate, any of Nolan’s answers. Later, he was enjoying the conversation quite a bit, so in practice we ended up going a little over time.

We both knew that we had enjoyed the conversation very much. That evening, while Nolan was having dinner with executives from Universal Pictures, he mentioned that he had really liked the questions posed by the female Greek-studies expert in that day’s interview. “Very philosophical.” Those were his exact words. Everyone was thinking that it would have been great if the interview had originally been scheduled for longer.

So there genuinely were no special connections involved. All of you who listen to the podcast are my connections. That is how simple the whole story was.

A makeshift production

After I interviewed Nolan, the staff gave me three little cards. I did not know whether they were called SD cards, though I thought they were. Because A Single Tree Does Not Make a Forest is an unedited podcast, which I upload as soon as I finish recording, I had no idea how to produce a video. I did not even know how to export the footage from one of those little cards.

Then I had a sudden flash of inspiration: I did have connections in Beijing. My publisher, Imaginist, was there.

I called my editor on WeChat and said, “Can I take a cab to your publishing company right now and have you help me export this video from the little card?”

Then I had another flash of inspiration and called my younger cousin.

“Little cousin, what are you doing right now? Stop scrolling on your phone. Stay home and make a video for your big sister. I’ll send you a red-envelope payment.”

I sent her a red envelope containing 1,000 yuan. Then I said, “I’m going to translate the subtitles myself right now.” My cousin’s English is not very good, so I still had to do the translation.

What a makeshift operation, right? An extremely makeshift operation.

I literally called my editor at Imaginist, took the SD card, and hailed a DiDi to the publishing company. My editor, not knowing whether to laugh or cry, helped me export the video and sent it to my cousin through a cloud drive. I sat there at Imaginist and began translating the subtitles. The amount of production that went into this video was approximately zero. There was no editing and no production whatsoever.

I immediately uploaded the audio to Xiaoyuzhou as the previous episode of my podcast. That evening, after I hounded my cousin like a whip-cracking slave driver and a vicious dog, she finished adding and editing all the subtitles. I uploaded the video to Xiaohongshu and Bilibili.

That was the end of everything I did.

After that, things started to get interesting.

When the video had only thirty or forty thousand views on Bilibili, a foreigner, an American who was a devoted Nolan fan, uploaded it to YouTube. The YouTube video even still had the Bilibili watermark. When I read the comments a few hours later, I had a premonition. I said to myself that the video was going to break out beyond its original audience, because the comment section was showing all the signs.

Every comment said that this was the best interview the person had heard during the entire promotional campaign, or even one of the best interviews Nolan had ever done.

To make a long story short, foreigners reposted the video on X, formerly Twitter, and some well-known figures in the film world shared it. They included Geoff Keighley, whose late father, David Keighley, had been a close friend of Nolan’s. At the moment I am recording this, Geoff Keighley’s post containing my seventeen-minute interview with Nolan has received eight million views. Adding together all the discussion of the video on X, it may have been viewed more than ten million times within a single day.

The funny thing is that it still had fewer than 100,000 views on my own Bilibili account.

A friend of mine who uses Reddit told me that the top posts on many of its film forums were all about my interview with Nolan. The interview became so popular online that, today, TheWrap, a mainstream Hollywood film-and-entertainment outlet, published an article about it. The article said that a Chinese political-philosophy lecturer and podcast host, Zhongshu, had posted an interview with Director Nolan on a platform called “Blibli,” and it reported on the important things Nolan had said during the interview.

My own tangible experience of this was also quite funny. Overnight, American scholars I know and my former PhD classmates all texted me. They had all seen my video.

I follow the Western academic world on X, so I follow all kinds of university presidents, professors, deans at other schools, and public intellectuals who are relatively well known in our field in the United States. When I woke up this morning, I discovered that all of them had followed me back. It was hilarious. They did not just follow me back; they also reposted my video.

That was my concrete experience of what had happened. Online figures in the millions do not feel real to me. But Americans who have known me over the years, many of whom are senior to me, have now followed me back and realized that I am not merely some insignificant little student. That is something I can actually feel.

So today I am going to feast on my own gossip. I want to explain why this interview suddenly became so popular on the non-Chinese internet. I often explain all kinds of phenomena in the world on A Single Tree Does Not Make a Forest. Today, I am personally at the center of one of those phenomena, so let us enjoy some extremely fresh gossip.

What counts as a good interview

The first thing I noticed was a very interesting contrast. Whether you look at the YouTube comments or the reactions on X, the number of people commenting on my English accent is zero. Among more than ten million views, you cannot find a single comment judging the quality of my English.

It is only Chinese people on Chinese platforms, Weibo and Xiaohongshu, who are saying that my spoken English is nonstandard and picking out grammatical mistakes. Across the entire non-Chinese internet, all you hear foreigners saying is, “Why can’t we say anything as profound as she does? We Americans are finished. We Americans are all idiots. We don’t read books.” Only Chinese people on Weibo are picking out my grammatical mistakes.

I am using my own case to tell all of you: do not be insecure. If other people pick out grammatical mistakes in what you say, that is their problem. Do not feel inferior, and do not torment yourself internally. This is their problem. It is the bitter, deeply ingrained suppression of others by people who are themselves insecure. You did nothing wrong.

That is the first interesting contrast.

Overall, however, I still want to say that an important reason, and a precondition, for this interview becoming so popular on the non-Chinese internet is simply that it is a good interview. It is that simple. Ninety-nine percent of the responses I have received say, “Fantastic interview.”

The problem with our era is that good interviews are becoming increasingly rare. This may simply be what everyone expects an interview to be. I merely fulfilled that basic expectation.

The most common assessment I saw on foreign social media was that my interview with Nolan was a textbook example of an interview. People asked whether other interviewers could please conduct interviews according to this standard: “This is what we want to hear. This interview is far too short. It should have been two hours long.”

There were also many comments that I found quite funny. A large number of people said, “Hollywood, please send all of our directors to be interviewed by Ms. Zhongshu. From now on, no director who hasn’t been interviewed by her should be eligible for an Oscar nomination.”

Then many people began using the interview to disparage other directors. They said, for example, that a Marvel director would turn into a stammering, intellectually disabled gorilla in front of this lady and be unable to speak, because my questions were simply too difficult.

Overall, what people meant was about the same as what people were saying in the Chinese-language context, even if the audience there was not as large: this was a good interview. That was it.

Some fanatical Nolan fans even began analyzing his microexpressions. They said that, because they were extremely familiar with Nolan, they knew he had never laughed so many times in an interview, or been made to laugh so many times by an interviewer. They had watched every Nolan interview, and he never said at the end, “This was a very interesting conversation.”

Amid the overwhelming flood of comments, I also sensed a kind of nostalgia. Those foreigners were asking, “What has happened to our interviewers and journalists? Why is everything now short-form video full of clowning around and casual chitchat while eating chicken wings? Our interviews used to be like this: everyone sat down and talked slowly.”

Many people listed film-media figures from the last century whom I had never heard of, saying that their interviews used to be like this. The interviews were quiet. There was no fawning, no clowning around, and no gossip.

The most common comment beneath the YouTube video was: “My God, the interviewer finally didn’t ask all those questions about IMAX cameras or celebrities. They’re actually discussing the film. For this entire stretch of more than ten minutes, they discuss only the director’s own creative work and his understanding of The Odyssey.”

Let me take a step back and say that this outcome was actually related to a particular deficiency in my own abilities: I do not know how to be a media professional or a journalist. Although podcast hosts may now count as a type of media professional, I have absolutely no idea how a media professional is supposed to ask questions. I do not know how to represent anyone. I can represent only myself.

I interviewed Nolan the morning after I saw the film. At eleven o’clock the previous night, I had just walked out of the cinema. Zhao Yufei and I went to get a late-night snack, and I took out a notebook. As we ate, I held the notebook and said, “Okay, what topics are interesting to us? What do we, as members of the audience, want to know?”

That was it.

Besides being audience members, however, we are also scholars. The Odyssey happens to be a work I have studied since I began learning Ancient Greek at the age of fifteen. I learned Ancient Greek by reading The Odyssey. At school, I also spent a great deal of time reading the original work.

The day before the interview, Zhao Yufei spent an hour and a half recounting the plot of The Odyssey on her podcast, Political Philosophy Roundtable. I stood beside her while she recorded it. So that night, as we ate our late-night snack, we discussed what we wanted to know as scholars and as people familiar with Homer’s original work.

America’s collective self-reflection

The fact that it was a good interview was a precondition for its success, but the explosion of interest also allowed me to observe some very similar characteristics shared by the Chinese and foreign internets.

The most common response on the non-Chinese internet is now collective reflection by Westerners, or Americans more specifically. Americans are collectively asking themselves, “Why are our own American journalists so bad? Why is their standard so low? How can a Chinese host ask Nolan a profound question like, ‘Did you Christianize The Odyssey?’ while our own Jimmy Fallon is playing table tennis with Nolan?”

The most widely reposted tweets say things like, “We Americans have become so stupid that Director Nolan has to travel all the way to China before he can meet an interviewer who isn’t an idiot. Our country is finished.”

The most common comments are: “She puts Hollywood reporters to shame.” “It took a Chinese interviewer to shame the entire American establishment.” “This Chinese person has humiliated the American media.”

I am not the one saying these things. Foreigners are now saying them all over Twitter.

If you go to YouTube and watch the video posted by Nolan Archives, all the top comments are expressions of collective reflection. One says, “This interview made me realize that American interviews are all low-IQ, assembly-line garbage.” Another says that this Chinese person’s interview and American interviews are completely different, and that this Chinese female journalist, this Chinese female interviewer, utterly crushed the entire Western ideological sphere.

I am not reading comments with no likes. I am reading the most-liked comments beneath the video.

Westerners do not know who I am, so they have simply flattened me into “Chinese woman,” “Chinese lady,” and “China Lady Nolan Interview.” Many people are saying, “My God, China isn’t only about to overtake the United States in AI and technology; now they’re also overtaking us in their understanding of Western culture.”

How do I know that I have truly become famous? Because, at this very moment, another set of voices has appeared: Americans who want to claim me as one of their own.

They say, “Actually, if you look at this Chinese woman, she was educated by us Americans. She belongs to us. She went to high school in the United States. Only an American education could produce a person like this.”

It is hilarious.

The argument then continues, with other people replying, “The important point isn’t that she was educated by Americans. It’s that the media environment in America is terrible. She is a Chinese host, and Chinese people like listening to, and are capable of listening to, someone who speaks with this degree of depth. Our American media professionals are drooling illiterates. China gave someone like Zhongshu the chance to get ahead. Look, they previously put her in Vogue, and Ralph Lauren filmed an advertisement in China with someone like her. The fact that a person like this can actually get ahead in China demonstrates that Chinese people can give this sort of person opportunities and room to survive.

“Could a person like this get ahead in the United States? No. Chinese people were the ones who allowed her to interview Nolan. Would we Americans let someone like this interview Nolan? Nolan appeared on a Chinese person’s podcast. Once again, America has failed.”

Internet users really are much the same everywhere. Insecure people are always desperately trying to salvage their self-esteem. There are also many culturally insecure people in the West.

I saw some other very funny examples. Argentinians were reflecting on themselves and saying, “Nolan came to Argentina, and all we could ask him was, ‘Do you like our Argentinian caramel flan?’” Indians reposted the interview and said, “Nolan came to India a few days ago, and all we could ask him was, ‘Do you like curry?’” Koreans reposted it and said, “He just left South Korea, and all we did was make him do finger hearts.”

First they flattened me into “Chinese lady,” and then they turned me into a symbol of Chinese people, to be used by foreigners to elevate their own countries. We often mock Chinese people who like to write Yilin-style stories, but foreigners write them too, reflecting on why their own countries’ mass media have fallen to such a low level.

The precondition for all this was that the interview itself was very good. One reason it could become so popular was that it gave many Americans an opportunity to elevate another country and collectively reflect on why their own mass media were steadily deteriorating. Beyond that, there were two more specific reasons why it broke out into wider circles, involving two different professional fields.

The first concerned Emily Wilson, the translator of a very popular edition of The Odyssey. She recently wrote a long article for the London Review of Books attacking Nolan. Many foreigners treated my interview as a kind of response from Nolan to her. They even began comparing Emily Wilson and me, saying, “This is how you pose challenging questions to a director while still remaining respectful toward him, rather than making him feel that your challenge is purely an insult, attack, and offense.”

In other words, if you challenge a director with neither servility nor arrogance, Nolan can respond with an open mind. This is the kind of conversation people want to see, one that is not simply intellectuals treating one another with mutual contempt. That phenomenon is extremely common as well. Western intellectuals also look down on one another.

Foreigners began interpreting the interview and saying that I had been very cunning because I joked with Nolan during it. I said that now that he had adapted The Odyssey, classical scholars would start pursuing him like film critics, biting down on him like vicious dogs and refusing to let go.

Those foreigners said, “Wow, this Chinese lady is taking a veiled swipe at Emily Wilson.”

In reality, I was not thinking that much about it at the time. I was thinking about the American classical scholars I know personally and count among my friends. Ever since this film appeared, mainstream society has finally started caring about the topics they study, so they have all been writing articles, frantically writing articles, discussing Nolan’s film.

I was not taking a veiled swipe at this particular classical scholar. I was taking a veiled swipe at every classical scholar in my life.

My second observation concerns a circle with which I am unfamiliar: the Hollywood film-criticism world. Many large Hollywood film-criticism accounts with millions of followers, along with people discussing film on Reddit, reposted my interview and the answers Nolan gave me.

They said that Nolan rarely responds directly to film critics or states his view of them. In my interview, he distinguished for the first time between amateur and professional film critics. According to them, Nolan had previously never paid any attention to film criticism. In the interview, however, he not only mentioned the mechanisms of his own filmmaking but also distinguished between amateur and professional film criticism.

The fact that a director evaluated film criticism from his own perspective, from the director’s standpoint, gave my interview with him a certain intellectual significance within film circles.

At the same time, one line from Nolan was widely quoted by Western Hollywood media. It was his comment about cinematic mechanisms, or cinematic formulas. He said that some amateur film critics believe that, as soon as they can identify a formula, the formula becomes ineffective. This is not actually the case. Merely being able to recognize a formula does not mean that the formula therefore ceases to work.

That statement is extremely important.

When Nolan was discussing cinematic mechanisms, I was thinking that scholars do exactly the same thing. This is precisely how Nietzsche criticized historians. Nietzsche said that historians generally believe that once they have identified the laws behind certain phenomena, the phenomena themselves lose their meaning. But that is not actually the case. Spinoza thought that by identifying the timeline of the writers behind the Bible, he had dissolved the meaning of God. What Nolan offered was a very profound critique of a particular kind of rational speculation.

The interview’s popularity on X also led me to discover a phenomenon I had previously known nothing about: the American alt-right on X genuinely seems to hate Nolan. This is completely invisible in the Chinese-language context.

For example, my listeners on Xiaoyuzhou leave comments saying that they think Nolan’s film is conservative. But the genuine American internet right believes that Nolan is a vulgar, talentless, woke “white leftist.” I found that assessment extremely surprising. I thought it was absurd.

Members of the alt-right on X reposted my interview and said, “This woman from China intellectually crushes Nolan for seventeen straight minutes.”

I found that hilarious. They said Nolan had no understanding whatsoever of classical studies. I do not know why they reached that conclusion. Were classical scholars sourly showing off their erudition? Was it some kind of male status competition? Or did some fundamentalists of European civilization think Nolan’s film was too diverse and that its values were insufficiently conservative? I do not know.

I had not known that so many people on X thought Nolan was mediocre. They said the interview exposed his ignorance and lack of understanding of Homer. At the very least, I would say that these people’s own understanding of Homer lacks openness. They are unwilling to accept any understanding of Greek historical reality other than their own understanding of Homer.

Two people flattened into symbols

Comments like those reminded me that, in the end, it does not matter. The interview was a good interview because there were two specific people in it. By posing questions to Nolan as a specific person, I revealed a more specific, and therefore more three-dimensional, Nolan.

But as the interview broke out beyond its original audience, those two specific people gradually disappeared from the comments. People were no longer seeing human beings. We were quickly transformed and flattened into two symbols: one called “Chinese lady,” the other called “Hollywood blockbuster director.”

One represented Chinese education; the other represented Western culture. One was used to prove that the American media had already degenerated; the other was used to prove that Hollywood had been destroyed by woke culture.

The internet’s greatest skill is taking specific people and stuffing them back into the worldviews everyone has already prepared. If you like China, you say that Chinese ladies now understand Western civilization better than American journalists do. If you like America, you say that she attended high school in the United States, after all, and that American education cultivated her. If you hate Hollywood, you say that this interview has finally exposed Nolan’s ignorance. If you hate classical scholars, you say that even a Chinese podcast host understands how to discuss Homer better than Emily Wilson does.

Some people even saw that I was a young East Asian woman and automatically imagined the persona of a mysterious Eastern scholar who was both humble and learned. But no matter what, all these images, even though they flatten me, have another characteristic: they do not put me down.

Of course, everyone reposting you is using your face to say something they already wanted to say.

By this stage, my interview with Nolan was no longer a film interview on the non-Chinese internet. It had been stuffed into Americans’ current narratives about the decline of American culture, the rise of China, media anti-intellectualism, the battle to defend classical civilization, the left-right struggle in Hollywood, and even the debate over whether American education has failed.

Just seventeen short minutes were treated by the internet’s various tribes like a whale to be carved up, with each tribe cutting away the piece it needed most.

Rigor and respect do not have to contradict each other. You can absolutely ask sharp questions about a work while still acknowledging that its creator may have reasons of his own.

Much public discussion today mistakes criticism for exposure, as though the moment I prove that a director omitted something, misread something, or used some formula, I have already defeated the work. But understanding is not a competition. A critic’s true ability is demonstrated not by making the creator look foolish, but by allowing both sides to reach a place that neither had previously imagined.

That is why I thought it was particularly important when Nolan said in the interview that identifying a cinematic mechanism does not mean the mechanism ceases to work.

People in our era are far too accustomed to seeing through others and then becoming complacent, feeling as though that makes them superior. They see through narratives, formulas, ideology, capital, and propaganda. They mistake seeing through something for transcending it, as though giving an experience a name makes you immune to its effects.

But even if you know that tragedy has a formula, tragedy can still move you. Even if you know that music is manipulating your emotions, you can still shed tears at a particular moment. Even if you know that the hero’s homecoming is a motif that has persisted for thousands of years, it can still lead you to understand your own family, loyalty, and mortality anew.

I can understand the interview’s breakout success as the reward, at one accidental moment, for more than a decade of reading. But it was equally an extremely accidental event of dissemination. An employee at Universal Pictures happened to have listened to Episode 160 of my podcast. He happened to be willing to send me an email inviting me. Nolan’s team happened to give me only fifteen minutes. An overseas fan happened to upload the video to the foreign internet. Several large accounts happened to repost it. And Americans happened, at this exact moment, to be anxious about their own media, education, and culture.

This is an era when platforms and media outlets constantly tell us that people can concentrate for only fifteen seconds, or even three seconds. Yet this seventeen-minute interview caused many people to complain that it was not two hours long.

The pig at the bacon competition

Finally, I thought of Hannah Arendt’s Men in Dark Times, which I have been translating recently. In that book’s final chapter, while writing about a close friend of hers who was a poet, Arendt made an especially caustic remark.

My first question to Nolan compared filmmakers to the bards of the modern world, so I will end with a poet.

Arendt said that the world is not made up of poets and people who read poetry; those two groups actually belong to the same species. The world is mainly composed of people who watch television and people who read Reader’s Digest. Worse still, a new species has appeared in the world: the modern critic.

Fifty years later, I could rewrite Arendt’s remark this way: the world is mainly composed of people who watch short dramas and people who watch short-form videos. Worse still, the world also contains a new species called the tweet-posting keyboard warrior.

This kind of critic comments on plays, novels, and poetry not for the sake of the works themselves, but to prove something about himself. He imagines that he knows exactly how a poem, novel, or film was cobbled together. In his eyes, the poor creator is left with only one extremely elementary task: assembling all the components that the critic has already seen through and placing them before the public.

Arendt writes that this is like a pig walking into a bacon competition, only for the critic to impatiently drive it away, saying, “Get lost, pig. What do you know about bacon?”

I like this analogy because it precisely captures the attitude many people who review things today take toward creators:

“I understand your work better than you do. I know what formulas you used. I can infer what ideologies influenced you. I know which audience you are catering to and what narrative structure you are reproducing. What do you know? You were merely responsible for producing the work.”

What I did in this interview was refuse to treat Nolan like a pig. I treated him as a person.

I was not there to give his film a score, nor was I there to prove that I understood The Odyssey better than he did. I had simply watched his work and brought my own experience as a reader to ask him: Why did you handle it this way? How do you understand Homer? Are you aware that your adaptation has created these issues? Are you willing to continue thinking along the path opened up by these questions?

The modern critic’s greatest illusion is mistaking “I know how he made it” for “I understand it,” and then mistaking “I understand it” for “I have already transcended it.”

But a work of art is not a magic trick that automatically stops working once it has been exposed. Knowing how bacon is made does not mean you understand better than the pig what it means to be a pig. And when a pig can explain why it is a pig, it has already acquired personhood.

Circe transformed Odysseus’s soldiers into pigs. A good interlocutor can transform pigs into human beings.

Knowing what narrative mechanism a story uses does not mean you have exhausted the experiences that story is capable of revealing. In my interview, at least as I imagined it, this was not a critic interrogating a creator. Nor was it a fan gazing up at an idol. It was simply two people treating each other as human beings capable of thought and seriously discussing a work within a limited span of time.

I know that, in every sense, this is a luxury.