Christopher Nolan has pushed back his leading man Matt Damon’s proposal The Odyssey represents the last of his kind in Hollywood, and made it clear that he has no time for what he calls defeatism about the future of cinema.
Throughout the press tour for the film, Damon has repeatedly described the making The Odyssey as his “last chance” to be part of an old-school Hollywood epic.
“It was a really weird movie for me personally in the sense that I almost had a nostalgic feeling the whole time I was making it because it felt like the movies when I started working,” Damon shared. GQ.
“I knew this was the last chance I was going to have to do something like this. I don’t think people will have the resources to shoot movies like that for much longer.”
Nolan understands where his star is coming from, but respectfully disagrees.
speaks to The telegraphhe acknowledged that it’s been a long time since anyone made a movie quite like this, traveled the world and assembled a cast of thousands.
“But there’s a defeatist aspect to looking at it that way that I don’t agree with,” he said.
“I think cinema is vital and essential and continues to transform itself, we have all these amazing new young voices in film who are making the medium their own and moving it forward.”
As proof, Nolan pointed to two of the summer’s most surprising hits, Backrooms and Occupationboth made by young first time directors on minimal budgets and both draw huge audiences.
“That’s why I’ve never used the argument 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 is like David Lynch at his most obscure. And yet young people can’t get enough of them’.
Nolan also linked the success of these films to what he sees as a broader generational rejection of artificial intelligence in creative work.
“I have never seen a more rapid wholesale rejection of a supposed fundamental leap in technology in my lifetime,” he shared The telegraph.
He noted that his own children identify AI-generated content immediately and reject it without hesitation.
“Their assessment of AI slop has been immediate and harsh. After years of driving against heavily virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling.”
In a separate interview with AFPNolan moved on.
“The interesting thing about AI is that I’ve never seen a technology that has been so successfully adopted by Wall Street and by investors and by tech companies that has been so thoroughly rejected by the public. Young people in particular coined this term ‘AI slop.’ There’s a kind of disdain for things AI. The idea that it’s replacing people wholesale and human creativity, to me, that’s nonsense.”
The Odysseywhich follows Odysseus’ decades-long journey home after the Trojan War with a cast that includes Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, opens in theaters on July 17.
