Christopher Nolan has rejected his star Matt Damon’s suggestion that The Odyssey represents the last of its kind in Hollywood and made it clear that it has no time for what it calls defeatism about the future of cinema.
Throughout the film’s press tour, Damon has repeatedly described making The Odyssey as their “last chance” to be part of an old-fashioned Hollywood epic.
“Personally, it was a really strange movie for me in the sense that I almost had a feeling of nostalgia the whole time I was making it, because it felt like the movies when I started working,” Damon said. GQ.
“I knew this was the last chance I was going to have to do something like this. I don’t think people are going to be given the resources to shoot movies like that for much longer.”
Nolan understands where his star is coming from, but he respectfully disagrees.
talking 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 a cast of thousands of people.
“But there’s a defeatist aspect to looking at it that way that I don’t agree with,” he said.
“I think film is vital and essential and continues to transform, we have all these great new young voices in film, making the medium their own and moving it forward.”
As proof, Nolan highlighted two of the summer’s most surprising hits: Backrooms and Obsessionboth made by young, new directors on minimal budgets and both attracting huge audiences.
“That’s why I never believed the arguments that young audiences’ attention spans are too low to enjoy a three-hour Greek epic. Those movies are so mysterious and thoughtful. I mean, parts of Backrooms They’re like David Lynch at his darkest. And yet, young people can’t get enough of them.”
Nolan also linked the success of those films to what he sees as a broader generational rejection of artificial intelligence in creative work.
“Never in my life have I seen such a rapid and total rejection of a supposedly fundamental technological leap,” he said. The telegraph.
He noted that his own children immediately identify AI-generated content and discard it without hesitation.
“Their judgment on the decline of AI has been immediate and harsh. After years of moving towards heavily virtual environments, we are seeing renewed interest in more tactile and life-like forms of storytelling.”
In a separate interview with AFPNolan went further.
“The interesting thing about AI is that I have never seen a technology that has been so successfully embraced by Wall Street, by investors, and by technology companies, and so roundly rejected by the public. Young people, in particular, coined this term ‘low AI’. There is a kind of disdain for the things that are AI. The idea that it replaces human beings as a whole and human creativity, to me is nonsense.”
The Odysseywhich follows Odysseus’s decade-long journey to Odysseus’ home after the Trojan War with a cast including Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, opens in theaters July 17.
