Christopher Nolan is pushing back on Matt Damon’s suggestion that making The Odyssey may represent one of the last chances for a film of that scale, arguing that the idea of cinema being in decline is too pessimistic. The Oscar-winning director, whose mythological epic opens this week, reportedly “grimaces” at Damon’s viral comments and says he sees a medium that is still evolving, not fading away.
The subject came up during an interview with The Telegraph, where Nolan was asked about his leading man’s remarks. Damon had described a nostalgic feeling while making the film, saying it “felt like the movies when I started working — and I know that that’s going away.” He added, “I knew that this was the last chance I was going to have to do something like this” and “I don’t think people are going to be given the resources to shoot movies that way for much longer.”
Nolan rejects the “defeatist” view
Nolan, who is also currently serving as the president of the Directors Guild of America, said he understood what Damon meant but disagreed with the conclusion.
“I think I know what [Damon] was driving at, because it does seem like a long time since somebody made a film like this in this type of way, where you travel the world, get together a cast of thousands and so on,” Nolan said. “But there’s a defeatist aspect of viewing it that way that I don’t agree with. I think cinema is vital and essential and continues to transform itself — we’ve got all these great new young voices in movies, making the medium their own and moving it forward.”
He pointed to Obsession writer-director Curry Barker and Backrooms director Kane Parsons as examples of Gen Z filmmakers drawing audiences with original work.
“This is why I never bought into the arguments that young audiences’ attention spans are too fried to enjoy a three-hour Greek epic,” Nolan said. “Those films are so mysterious and ruminative. I mean, parts of Backrooms are like David Lynch at his most obscure. And yet young people can’t get enough of them.”
Practical effects, AI, and a changing industry
Nolan said he is especially encouraged by younger filmmakers’ commitment to practical effects, and he connected that to his broader skepticism about AI replacing creative work in Hollywood.
“I’ve never seen a more rapid wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime,” Nolan said of AI. “So much energy has been expended on bringing in AI, but if you look at that generation’s reaction, they’re utterly rejecting it.”
He pointed to his four children’s response to AI as evidence that younger generations are quick to spot what he called “AI slop.”
“Their judgment of AI slop has been immediate and harsh,” he noted. “They see it for what it is very quickly – and it’s much easier for them to identify it, because it grew out of an online world they know really well. And while that doesn’t mean that every aspect of the technology is useless or meaningless, in film-making it’s hitting at exactly the wrong time. After years of driving towards heavily virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling.”
Still, Damon’s broader point about the economics of large-scale filmmaking may not be entirely off base. Obsession and Backrooms were low-budget sensations, while Damon’s claim that studios are becoming more hesitant to finance big productions built around practical effects and location shooting for non-franchise material seems plausible as well — except for major proven-draw filmmakers like Nolan, who followed the surprise $1 billion box office of Oppenheimer with another original project.
The Odyssey heads to theaters
Nolan also recently addressed the right-wing culture-war backlash against the film.
The epic stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, whose long journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War reunites him with his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), and son, Telemachus (Tom Holland). The cast also includes Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Jon Bernthal, Travis Scott, Charlize Theron, among others.
The Odyssey arrives in theaters July 17.
