Christopher Nolan has rebuffed his lead Matt Damon’s suggestion that The Odyssey represents the last of its kind in Hollywood, and has made it clear that he has no time for what he calls defeatism about the future of cinema.
Throughout the film’s press tour, Damon repeatedly described realizing The Odyssey as his “last chance” to be part of an old-fashioned 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 was like the movies when I first started working,” Damon said. GQ.
“I knew this was the last chance I would have to do something like this. I don’t think people will have the resources to make films this way for a very long time.”
Nolan understands where his star comes from, but respectfully disagrees.
Talk to The telegraphhe acknowledged that it had been a long time since anyone had made a film like this, traveling the world and bringing together thousands of actors.
“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. We have all these new, beautiful voices in film, taking ownership of the medium and pushing it forward.”
As proof, Nolan cited two of the summer’s most surprising hits, Behind the scenes And Obsessionboth made by young, fledgling directors on tiny budgets and both attracting huge audiences.
“That’s why I’ve never bought into arguments that the attention span of young audiences is too limited to appreciate a three-hour Greek epic. These films are so mysterious and ruminative. I mean, parts of Behind the scenes are like David Lynch at his most obscure. And yet, young people never have enough. »
Nolan has 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 in my entire life seen such a rapid and massive rejection of a so-called fundamental technological leap,” he said. The telegraph.
He noted that his own children immediately identify AI-generated content and reject it without hesitation.
“Their judgment on AI neglect was immediate and harsh. After years of transitioning to heavily virtual environments, we are seeing a renewed interest in more tactile and real forms of storytelling.”
In a separate interview with AFPNolan went further.
“The interesting thing about AI is that I’ve never seen a technology that was so successfully adopted by Wall Street, by investors and by tech companies and that the public rejected so completely. It was young people in particular who coined the term ‘AI slop’. There’s a sort of disdain for AI things. The idea that it would replace human beings and human creativity is nonsense to me.”
The Odysseywhich follows Ulysses’ decade-long journey after the Trojan War with a cast including Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, hits theaters July 17.
