Director Christopher Nolan says the backlash against his casting in The Odyssey is “irrelevant” because people have not yet seen the film.
In an interview with the Telegraph, Nolan insists that he is not at all worried over the criticism. When asked about the hubbub, he casually replies, “Comes with the territory.”
“But look,” Nolan continued, “these conversations that happen before people see the film – they’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet.” And he added that he felt The Odyssey was going to stir controversy regardless.
“But remember,” Nolan said, “I spent 10 years of my life dealing with Batman.”
“When I came on to Batman Begins, writers and artists had been working on this beloved character for almost 65 years, and a lot of freighted thoughts were out there about what he represents. And what I learnt over my time on that trilogy is you can’t worry about any of that at all,” the Oscar-winning director explained.
“What you have to do is honor the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can,” he exclaimed.
“In the end, fans of the property – even when we were doing something that was not what they would have done – enjoyed the sincerity of the attempt to put as good a version of it on screen as we could,” Nolan said.
“All I can do is make the best film I possibly can in the most sincere way. It’s very different from how anyone else would do it, but that’s what adaptation is,” he concluded.
Critics have pointed out several red flags in the upcoming film’s promotional materials: indications that the script leans heavily on a revisionist Odyssey translation by left-wing, feminist writer Emily Wilson; his casting of African actress Lupita Nyong’o to play the Greek character Helen of Troy, who is described as having pale skin and light blonde or reddish hair; and the casting 5-foot-one, 105-pound transvestite actor Elliot Page as Sinon, a Greek warrior who does not even appear in The Odyssey or in Homer’s other epic The Illiad. The character was created much later by Roman poet Virgil in his Trojan War epic The Aeneid.
The casting spurred a Greek culture news site to blast the film for having no Greeks at all in a film based on one of the most famous Greek tales ever written.
While the film’s costume design has not been labeled “woke” by detractors, it has been attacked as quite inauthentic for armor and clothing of the Trojan War era, with Nolan responding that he was going for a more stylized look instead of aiming for historical accuracy.
Finally, there is Nolan’s choice of dialogue. As the heavily downvoted final trailer reveals, many of the characters are speaking in modern vernacular with American accents. Nolan said he felt that choice made the film more accessible: “I was maybe being naïve, it might bite me on the ass, but I wanted an earthy narrative. To me it was a no-brainer.”
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