Interview with Nolan: A Bard at the Twilight of Western Civilization?

Hello, Mr. Nolan.

Hello.

Filmmakers are the bards of the modern age. Just as the Greeks knew of Odysseus, Achilles, and Agamemnon because of Homer’s narratives, we know Batman, the Joker, and Oppenheimer because of yours. Homer told stories about the distant past. So do you. The Trojan War took place between the twelfth and eleventh centuries BC, but Homer lived in the eighth century BC, so it had happened a long time before. Yet Homer’s time was an era of ascent, when a civilization was on the rise. Greek culture was prospering. The economy, books, thought: everything was on the rise for a couple of hundred years, really until the fifth century BC. So Homer’s tone was celebratory. It was victorious. He celebrated victory in the war, whereas your tone is emphatically not celebratory. Does that say something about our age? Are you the bard of a civilization at dusk?

I think that’s a really interesting point and a really interesting question. Underlying your main point is this gap of roughly four hundred years between the events Homer describes and the point when Homer’s story was written down or first received by readers and audiences.

That’s a pretty interesting gap. And I don’t think my approach is completely at odds with the way Homer tells the story when you look at it from a historical perspective. What interested me as I adapted it is that Homer is writing about an era that preceded his own. He’s writing about an era hundreds of years earlier that his audience regarded as more advanced than theirs. So they were a civilization on the rise, but they were trying to get back to where they had been four hundred years earlier.

That idea of a cycle, that idea of, as you say, a civilization at dusk: I think it’s there in the poem. It’s subtle, but when you also look at the history, you see that when people unearthed the walls of old, ruined palaces, they called them Cyclopean walls because they thought only a giant could have built walls so grand. They had this idea of the greatness of that past civilization. So I became interested in that collapse, what they call the catastrophe, the Bronze Age collapse, and in what happened between the events of the Trojan War and Homer.

From a modern perspective, I think that’s frightening, interesting, and intriguing. For me, it partly comes out of having worked on Oppenheimer immediately before this. That is very much a film about the end of the world, about the end of the world and, ultimately, the collapse of civilization. So yes, I definitely carried that sensibility into this adaptation of The Odyssey.

Atonement and xenia

One thing that captivated me was that the concept of atonement doesn’t exist in Greek culture. It doesn’t exist in the Greek language. It doesn’t exist in Homer’s Odyssey. But it exists in your Odyssey. So a natural question I had while watching the film was: Did you Christianize The Odyssey? Why did atonement become important in the approach of catastrophe?

I think that’s a really good question. I wasn’t overly conscious of how I was approaching it philosophically, except that I really honed in on the idea known as xenia. In the film, for the sake of simplicity, we call it Zeus’s law, but it’s the idea of mutual respect: I treat you the way I want to be treated. And in their theology, you do that because the other person might be a god in disguise.

So I really drilled down into that, and I began to realize that, for me, much of what is interesting about the interaction between history and mythology lies in the idea of the Sea Peoples, the people from the sea who were thought to have precipitated the Bronze Age collapse. It’s one of history’s great mysteries: Who were they? And there’s the idea that a violation of xenia, a violation of Zeus’s law, which is what the suitors are doing in the palace, is what’s causing it. It is precisely that breaking of Zeus’s law.

I think it’s a very interesting question, insofar as that is present. It wasn’t a deliberate attempt to Christianize it, for example. Rather, it grew out of, or was the natural conclusion of, burrowing into this philosophical question of what happens when you break Zeus’s law.

From what you’re saying, I suppose the connection between atonement, which is a perspective from the Christian world, and xenia, which is a perspective inherent in the Greek world, is the fact of war. How do we respond to war? You would still say that the depiction is inherent in the Greek mythological worldview: War occurs when hospitality, or xenia, is violated. Is that right?

I think so. And I think it can sometimes be difficult to draw a line. Academics are perhaps often too dogmatic when drawing lines between different philosophies as they evolve historically. I was more interested in their commonalities, because one of the things I found was that, once you set aside the theological foundation of xenia, you realize that it’s what we would now call the Golden Rule: Treat others as you would want to be treated. That idea has never really changed over time. The reasons we try to hold people to it may change, but the idea itself hasn’t.

And I came to think that what the poem is saying to me, or what it inspired in me, is that civilization depends on this rule and may even be defined by it. That was a very interesting realization for me: This ancient text speaks directly to the modern world. Because I think we live in a world where the concept of xenia, the concept of mutual respect, is being challenged more than ever before, and in more obvious ways than ever before. And I think we can see the negative effects of that in relation to what defines civilization and what binds us together.

Hubris, repentance, and greatness

Here’s another Greek concept that is being challenged in our world: hubris. You’ve already begun criticizing academics, and I feel that my next question will expose me as one even more. Another great book, written by another great man, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, also centers on the hubris of the Athenians. He blamed the fall of the greatest civilization in the world, Athenian democracy, on Athenian hubris. Your film centers on the hubris of one man, the human pride of one particular man. Should Odysseus repent for his human pride, which may perhaps be a form of pride appropriate to a great man?

I suppose the question could be asked: What difference would it make if he repented? That’s the interesting thing about these philosophical approaches. His repentance would be purely internal. It would be purely for his own spiritual self. It wouldn’t necessarily affect anything beyond him, because the damage has already been done. His union is broken, perhaps for all time. That’s the interesting thing. I think that’s the thing about hubris: It’s tragic because it is essentially irreversible.

Christian theology looks at it differently, but in a practical sense that doesn’t necessarily change what has happened. Therefore, in storytelling terms, it isn’t necessarily relevant. As I say, we bring our own understanding to it, so we feel that there is catharsis because there is confession, because there is honesty and intimacy between Odysseus and Penelope. That was very important to me, and I’m deeply invested in it emotionally.

But if it has no practical effect, and the collapse is coming anyway, the catastrophe is coming, then what difference does it make if he repents? That’s the interesting question. Are we concerned with his feelings?

When Homer portrays greatness, he celebrates it. We circle around it, we dance around it, or else we have to turn greatness into privilege and demand apologies for it. And that’s a fact of Hollywood. So I’m wondering: As one of the greatest storytellers of our age, how do you approach greatness? Does it still have to be a story of apology? Does it demand repentance, reflection, and self-criticism?

When you’re talking about storytelling, you’re always in conversation with the audience’s expectations.

There’s an energy brought to it by the audience, as well as an energy put forward by the story itself. When you’re characterizing someone, the trite version of this, or the criticism often leveled at movies in general, is: “Oh, the character has to be made sympathetic, so the character is manipulated or changed in various ways.” And in a sense, that’s a fundamental flaw in film criticism, or in criticism of storytelling. Being able to identify a mechanism does not invalidate that mechanism. And that’s a real problem in criticism today.

People have this idea that because they can understand why a story affects them as it does, the story therefore didn’t work. That isn’t how storytelling works. So when we create a heroic figure in a story, we, as storytellers, have to be mindful of the energy the audience brings to that story, and of the interaction between our intention and the way the audience receives it. The fact that people can identify that mechanism doesn’t invalidate it.

Part of that mechanism involves asking: Are we going to treat greatness as an absolute? Or, coming from the democratic, more idealized philosophical condition in which we live in today’s world, where we want to view people as equal, do we have to apologize for that greatness? And the answer is yes, we do, or the audience rejects the greatness. That is part of the mechanism. Once again, the fact that the mechanism can be identified doesn’t mean it is invalid or shouldn’t be used.

For me, and as we’re discussing this, none of these are things I try to think about consciously or self-consciously while I’m writing. But as we talk about them, we of course realize that my attempt to do that is to keep it within the philosophical framework of the violation of xenia, which is what I found interesting in the story. So I’m trying to remain true to the story’s themes while creating a character in whom the audience can invest and find satisfaction.

The universal language of film

As you were speaking, first of all, I liked the way you dragged film critics into the fray along with academics. But I’ve just realized that filmmakers, in a way, have it much harder than poets, because poems can only be read in the language of the culture in which they were written. You can’t really read Shakespeare except in English, or Goethe except in German. But filmmakers have to speak to audiences outside of [unclear], people who don’t speak their language. You come to a place where people have different norms and customs, and you don’t take them into consideration.

No, but the interesting thing about film is that you’re looking at a lingua franca of storytelling, created by Hollywood over the last hundred years, that is very effectively universal. And when I was talking about film criticism, I was referring more to amateur film criticism than professional film criticism, because professional film criticism tends to understand the necessity of these mechanisms.

So it is its own language, and that language is understood by people all over the world, which is what’s incredible about it. It is a very, very accessible modern language of storytelling, and it has certain rules and conventions. You can break those conventions, you can bend them, and you can shift them, but you have to be aware of them at all times.

And, as I say, I’m thinking more about amateur criticism. I sit with people who, because they feel they’ve identified the mechanism, believe that it’s invalid. But without that mechanism, you can’t really build. You have nothing on which to build. You can’t begin with a completely tabula rasa. You can’t throw everything away. You have to make choices about how you’re orienting the story.

For example, one of my first films, Memento, was a story I structured in reverse chronological order. But what I retained was a very, very clear and simple three-act structure. So the structure of the film as the audience receives it is very, very conventional, while the chronology is unconventional. Those are the choices you make.

That’s one example in which you say, “Okay, I need the underlying structure to be extremely familiar so that I can change what’s on the surface.” That’s a continually evolving mechanism, and it’s something you work with all the time.

Adapting familiar stories

I’m once again thinking like a nerdy doctoral student who has to write a dissertation. Writing about Plato or Aristotle is the most difficult thing you can do. It’s like making a film based on The Odyssey: It has been done for thousands of years. But with Memento, you can do whatever you want. Nobody knows the character, so they aren’t going to complain about your adaptation choices. And I’m curious: You’ve said that after the success of Oppenheimer, you felt you had a kind of freedom to do whatever you wanted, or to realize whatever you wanted to do. And then you chose the most difficult possible dissertation to write for your PhD.

In some ways, yes, but not in others. There’s something I think your question slightly misses, which is that when you make Memento, yes, it’s a character I created, and people won’t criticize it on that basis, but the film belongs to a tradition of noirish, amnesia-based noir fiction, and people judge it by those standards.

So even if, on the surface and nominally, a film is a different or original creation, audiences and critics tend to judge it in relation to earlier examples of the genre. That is both an advantage and a disadvantage.

So yes, when you adapt Batman, for example, a lot of people are going to say, “Well, hang on. Why is it this way? Why is it that way? How do you know?” But it’s the same even with an original story. They say, “Well, hang on. Why have you used the protagonist this way? Why did this character do this? Why did they do that?”

They’re judging it in relation to the overall cultural flow of cinema’s development and its conventions. And, as I say, that isn’t a complaint. It’s simply something you have to remain aware of as a filmmaker. It is both an advantage and a disadvantage.

The reality of the gods

Yes, and with The Odyssey, you’ve also got classicists chasing you like hounds. I suppose my final question is: What are the gods? Are they figments of the imagination, or are they necessary noble lies?

To the characters in the story, they are reality.

What I found interesting about considering the gods and how to address them was approaching the question from the point of view of people who would have lived at that time. For people living in a pre-scientific era, evidence of divinity was everywhere. So the existence of the gods wasn’t an article of faith. It was simply reality. Thunder and lightning were a god speaking to them. The state of the ocean was determined by the gods. They had no other explanation for it.

And in the same way, we accept certain things from science as absolute facts: The Earth is round, and we travel around the Sun. We can’t know these things directly. We take them on faith because they are presented to us as facts. The same would have been true of the theological structure through which people of that time explained nature.

So for me, the gods are real, but they are within people; they are projected by people.

Wow, that’s fascinating. Just like superheroes in the modern world.

Yes, in a way.

Thank you very much, Mr. Nolan.

Thank you.

Thank you. A very interesting conversation.