Christopher Nolan says he would not have been able to make The Odyssey without the success of his previous film, Oppenheimer. The director explained the connection during an appearance on The Daily Show with host Jon Stewart.
Stewart asked Nolan why he chose to adapt Homer’s epic poem, one of the foundational texts of Western literature, written down around the 8th century BCE. Nolan’s answer was simple: the chance came because his last film performed far better than expected.
“Coming out of my last film, Oppenheimer had way more success than I think we had any right to expect,” Nolan said. “And that gives you an opportunity to get something made that you might not otherwise be able to get made.”
Why The Odyssey needed Oppenheimer’s success
Stewart pushed back, surprised that the director behind Inception, Interstellar, Memento and the Dark Knight films would still need to prove himself to a studio. Nolan said the scale of the project was the reason.
“It needs a massive budget. It needs a massive cast. It needs a lot,” he said of The Odyssey. He described it as a hard film to make, “but hard for all the right reasons,” and said that difficulty shows up on screen. The box office and awards run behind Oppenheimer, he suggested, gave him the standing to ask a studio for those resources.
Oppenheimer, released in 2023, went on to win seven Academy Awards, including best picture and Nolan’s first best director. Its performance reset expectations for what an original, adult drama could earn in theaters, and Nolan pointed to that result as the leverage that made a project the size of The Odyssey possible.
A shoot that finished right on time
Nolan said the production wrapped on schedule and on budget, though barely. The shoot was planned for 100 days.
“By day 91, we couldn’t have taken another step,” he said. “Everybody was done. People were just exhausted. They’d been through it.” He said the film took the right amount of time to complete, and that the team finished at the point where they had nothing left to give.
The interview also had a lighter side. Stewart opened with a run of unusual questions about the story, asking why the cyclops did not tell a joke, what happened to the wheels on the Trojan horse, and whether the whole thing was simply playing out in Odysseus’ head. He joked that he would never get the chance to sit and talk through it with Nolan in a college dorm room.
The Odyssey has already drawn heavy online debate well ahead of its release, discussion Nolan has said comes with the territory for a project of this size. The film reaches theaters as one of the most closely watched titles on the release calendar.