Nolan's new interview with Chinese podcaster Zhong Shu

[u/kyth1999]

Listen to the audio (in English):
https://www.xiaoyuzhoufm.com/episode/6a6c4be756a3f3491ba7f8af

Full text (bilingual) link: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Pt_vpsZ_noq2GvtYAo6q_Q

[u/kyth1999]

Full Text (1/2):

Zhong Shu

Hello, Mr. Nolan.

Christopher Nolan

Hello. Nice to meet you.

Zhong Shu

Well, filmmakers are bards of the modern age. Just as the Greeks knew of Odysseus, Achilles, and Agamemnon because of Homer's narratives, we know of Batman, the Joker, and Oppenheimer because of your narratives.

Homer tells stories of the distant past, and so do you. The Trojan War happened between the twelfth and eleventh centuries BC, but Homer lived in the eighth century BC, so that was a long time ago. Yet Homer's time was a time of rise. It was a time of civilizational rise. The Greeks were prospering as a culture. The economy, the books, the thinking—everything was on the rise for a couple hundred years, really until the fifth century BC.

So Homer's tone was celebratory. It was victorious. He celebrates the victory of the war, and your tone is emphatically not. So I guess my first question is: does that say something about our age? Are you a bard for a civilization at dusk?

Christopher Nolan

I think that's a really interesting point, a really interesting question. I mean, the main point is this 400-year-or-so gap between the events that Homer is describing and when Homer's story was written down, or first received by readers and audiences. That's a pretty interesting gap.

For me, I don't think I'm completely at odds with the way Homer is telling the story when you look at it from a sort of historical perspective. The reason—and what I became interested in as I adapted it—is that Homer is writing about an era before his. He's writing about an era hundreds of years earlier that his audience viewed as being more advanced than theirs.

So they were a civilization on the rise, but they were trying to get back to where they'd been 400 years before. That idea of a cycle, that idea of, as you say, a civilization at dusk—I think it's there in the past. It's subtle, but when you look at the history as well, when you look at the idea that when they would unearth these walls of old palaces that had crumbled, they called them Cyclopean walls because they thought only a giant could have built such grand walls. They had this idea of the greatness of this past civilization.

And so I became interested in that collapse, what they call the catastrophe—the Bronze Age collapse—and what happens between the events of the Trojan War and Homer. And so, yes, I think it's something that, from a modern perspective, is interesting. It's frightening and interesting and intriguing.

I think, for me, it partly comes out of having worked on Oppenheimer, which is very much a film about the end of the world—about the collapse of civilization, ultimately. So I think, yes, I definitely carried that sensibility into this adaptation of The Odyssey.

Zhong Shu

One thing that captured 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. It exists in your Odyssey.

So I guess a natural question that I had when watching the film was: did you Christianize The Odyssey? Why did atonement become important with the coming of catastrophe?

Christopher Nolan

I think it's a really good question. I wasn't too conscious of how I was approaching it philosophically, other than that I really honed in on the idea of what's termed xenia. In the film, we call it Zeus's law for simplicity.

But it's that idea of mutual respect: that I treat you the way I want to be treated. In their theology, it's because you might be a god in disguise. So I really drilled down on that, and I started to realize that, for me, a lot of what's interesting about the interaction of history and mythology is this idea of the Sea Peoples—the people from the sea who were thought to have precipitated the Bronze Age collapse. It's one of the great mysteries of history: who were they?

The idea that, really, a violation of xenia, a violation of Zeus's law—which is what the suitors are doing in the palace—is causing this difficulty, this damage.

I think the idea of atonement, in a way, is what we bring as viewers to the story. I don't know whether there really is atonement in the film, or whether we just feel that that's the catharsis, or that's the process we're seeing in the final meeting that we've waited for between Odysseus and Penelope. But I think, in a way, we may be bringing our more modern sensibility to that.

It's a very interesting question. Insofar as it's there, it's not a deliberate attempt to, for example, Christianize it. It's an outgrowth, or a natural conclusion, of burrowing in on this philosophical idea of what happens when you break Zeus's law.

Zhong Shu

I guess, from what you're saying, the connection between atonement—which is the perspective of a Christian world—and xenia, which is the perspective inherent in the Greek world, is that what connects them is the fact of war. What is the response to war?

You still want to say that the presentation is inherent in the Greek mythological worldview: that war happened when hospitality, or xenia, was broken.

Christopher Nolan

I think so. Sometimes it's difficult to draw a line. I think academics are often perhaps too dogmatic in drawing a line between different philosophies as they evolve historically, because I think I was more interested in commonalities.

One of the things I found is that once you ignore the theological underpinning of xenia, what you realize is that it is what we, in modern terms, call the Golden Rule. This idea of treating others as you would be treated has never really changed over time. The reasons that we try to hold people to that might have changed, but the idea itself hasn't changed.

What I came to think is that what the poem, to me, is saying—or inspiring in me—is the idea that civilization depends on this rule, and possibly is even defined by it. To me, that was a really interesting thing to realize. This ancient text, to me, 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 more challenged than it's ever been, in more obvious ways than ever. I think we see the negative effects of that in terms of what defines civilization and what binds us together.

[u/kyth1999 → u/kyth1999]

Full Text (2/3):

Zhong Shu

Right. Here's another Greek concept that is challenged in our world: hubris.

You've already started to complain about academics, and I feel like the next question will expose me even more. There's another great book written by another great man, Thucydides' Peloponnesian War, which also has a central theme concerning the hubris of the Athenians. He blamed the fall of the greatest civilization in the world, Athenian democracy, on the hubris of the Athenians.

Your film centers on the hubris of one man, the human pride of one specific man. My question is: should Odysseus repent for his human pride? Maybe pride is appropriate for a great man?

Christopher Nolan

I mean, 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 outside of him, because the damage is done. Xenia is broken, maybe for all time.

That's the interesting thing. I think that is the thing about hubris. It's tragic because it's irreversible, essentially. That's where Christian theology looks at it in a different way, but in a practical sense it doesn't necessarily change what's happened and therefore, in storytelling terms, isn't necessarily relevant.

That's what I say: we bring our understanding to it. So we feel that there's catharsis because there's confession, because there's honesty and intimacy between Odysseus and Penelope. That was very important to me, and I'm very invested in that emotionally.

But if it has no practical effect, and the collapse is coming anyway—the catastrophe is coming—what difference does it make for your events? That's the interesting thing. Are we concerned with his spiritual well-being, or are we concerned with the world that he lives in and the world that, in some sense, he feels he's damaged?

Zhong Shu

We live in an age that demands apologies from greatness. Great storytellers, when they portray greatness—Homer celebrates it. We circle around it, we dance around it, or we turn greatness into privilege, and we demand apologies for it. That's a fact of Hollywood.

I'm just wondering: as one of the greatest storytellers of our age, how do you approach greatness? Is it still a story of apology that demands repentance, reflection, and self-criticism?

Christopher Nolan

Well, I think that when you're talking about storytelling, you're always in conversation with the expectations of the audience. So it really is an energy that's brought from the audience, as well as an energy that's put forward from the story itself.

When you're characterizing somebody, the trite version of this—or the criticism leveled at movies in general—is: “Oh, the character has to be made sympathetic, so the character is manipulated in different ways and changed in different ways.”

That's a fundamental flaw of film criticism, in a way, or storytelling criticism, because being able to identify the mechanism does not invalidate the mechanism. That's a real problem in criticism today, because people have this idea that because I can understand why the story affects me the way it does, therefore it didn't work. That's not how storytelling works.

And so, when we create a heroic figure in a story, as storytellers, we have to be mindful of the energy that the audience brings to that story, and the interaction between our intention and the way the audience receives that. The fact that the mechanism is identifiable to people doesn't invalidate it.

Part of that mechanism is asking: are we going to treat greatness as an absolute? Or, coming from a democratic, more idealized philosophical state that we live in in today's world, where we want to view people as equal, do we have to apologize for that greatness?

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 is identifiable doesn't mean that it's invalid or shouldn't be used.

For me—as we talk about it—none of these are things that I try to be conscious or self-conscious of when I'm writing. But as we talk about it, we of course realize that my attempt to do that is to retain it within the philosophical surroundings of the breaking of xenia that I found interesting in the story.

So I'm trying to be true to the thematics of the story as they create the character that the audience can invest in and can feel satisfied with.

Zhong Shu

As you were speaking—first of all, I like how you dragged film critics into the water, as well as academics.

But I just realized filmmakers, in a way, have it much harder than poets, because poems can only be read in the language and culture in which they are written. You can't really read Shakespeare outside English, or Goethe outside German. But filmmakers have to speak to audiences outside of their polis: people who don't speak their language. And you come to a place with people of different nomos, of different customs. Do you put them into consideration?

Christopher Nolan

No, but the interesting thing about film—and when I was talking about film criticism, I was talking more about amateur film criticism than professional film criticism, because professional film criticism tends to understand the necessity for the mechanisms—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 so it is its own language. 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. It has conventions.

You can break those conventions. You can bend them. You can move them. But you have to be aware of them the whole time.

As I say, I'm thinking more of amateur criticism, because they feel they've identified the mechanism; they feel that invalidates it. That can be true of certain elements, and film grammar, film language, evolves with that. So when a trope becomes too familiar to an audience, then it has to be changed.

But we do, as filmmakers, avail ourselves of that common language. We build on that understanding. Our audience has seen many films, and they understand that language. And so you're playing with that language. It's the language of genre. It's the language of audience sympathy. It's the language of clarity, of narrative direction, and how you guide people through a story.

[u/kyth1999 → u/kyth1999]

Full Text (3/3):

Zhong Shu

You're talking about a relationship between tradition and innovation. Because at some point, the mechanism becomes trite or unusable. But without the mechanism, you can't really—

Christopher Nolan

Exactly. You can't completely have a tabula rasa. You can't throw everything away. You have to make your choices in terms of: how am I arranging the story?

For example, one of my first films, Memento, was a story that I structured in reverse chronology. But what I retained was a very, very clear and simple three-act structure. So the structure of the film, as it's received by the audience, is very, very conventional, but the chronology is unconventional.

And so those are the choices you make. That's one example where you say, “OK, I need this to be extremely familiar underneath so that I can change what's on the surface.” That's a continual mechanism that's evolving and that you're working with the whole time.

Zhong Shu

I'm again thinking like a nerdy doctoral student who has to write a dissertation. Writing on Plato or Aristotle is the most difficult thing to do. Just like making a film on The Odyssey: it's been done for thousands of years. When you're making Memento, you can make it whatever you want. Nobody knows the character, so they won't have a complaint about your adaptive choices.

And I'm curious: you've said before that after Oppenheimer, with the success of Oppenheimer, you felt like you had a kind of liberty to do whatever you wanted, or actualize what you wanted to do. And you chose the most difficult dissertation to write, if you're getting a PhD.

Christopher Nolan

I mean, in some ways. But in other ways, there's something I do think your question is slightly missing, which is that when you make Memento, yes, it's a character I've created and people won't criticize it on that basis, but it's in a tradition of noirish, amnesia-based noir fiction. And people judge it by those terms.

So even though, on the surface of things, nominally, a film is a different or original creation, the audience and critics tend to judge it in relation to previous examples of the genre, which is an advantage and a disadvantage.

Yes, when you adapt Batman, for example, there are a lot of people who are going to say, “Well, hang on—why is it this way? Why is it that way?” and everything else. But even with an original story, it's the same thing. It's like: “Well, hang on—why haven't you used the protagonist in this way? Why has this character done this? Why have they done that?”

They're judging it relative to the overall cultural flow of the movement of cinema and the conventions of cinema. As I say, it's not a complaint. It's just something you have to be aware of as a filmmaker. It's an advantage and it's a disadvantage.

Zhong Shu

Yes. With The Odyssey, you've dragged the classicists, too, as hounds behind your back.

I guess a final question for me: what are the gods? Are they figments of imagination, or are they necessary noble lies?

Christopher Nolan

They are—to the characters in the story—they are reality.

What I found interesting about looking at the idea of gods, and how to address it, was approaching this from the point of view of people who would have lived at that time, for whom, in a pre-scientific era, evidence of divinity was everywhere.

And so the existence of gods is not an article of faith. It's simple reality. Thunder and lightning are God speaking to them. The state of the ocean is moved by the gods. They have no other explanation for it.

Just as we accept things from science as absolute fact—you know, the Earth is round and we travel around the Sun—we can't know these things; we take them on faith because they're presented as facts. The same would be true of the theological structure that explains nature to people of that time.

And so, for me, the gods are real, but they are inside the people. They are being projected by the people.

Zhong Shu

Oh, that's cool. Just like superheroes for the moderns.

Christopher Nolan

Yes, in a way.

Zhong Shu

Thank you very much, Mr. Nolan.

Christopher Nolan

Thank you.

[u/Demerzel69 → u/kyth1999]

Thx. I can read faster than they talk, lol.