“The Odyssey” director Christopher Nolan shocked “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart Monday night when he said he would not have been able to make his new Homer adaptation were it not for his last film, “Oppenheimer.”
“‘Oppenheimer’ had way more success than I think we had any right to expect,” Nolan told Stewart, when asked why he chose “The Odyssey” as his follow-up to his 2023 Best Picture winner, noting, “That gives you an opportunity to get something made that you might not otherwise be able to get made.”
Culturally paired with Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” which was released on the same day as it, “Oppenheimer” far exceeded expectations by not only winning seven Oscars but also grossing nearly $1 billion at the worldwide box office. Stewart, for his part, was nonetheless shocked that it took that film’s expectations-defying success to clear the way for Nolan to make a proper Greek epic.
“You would have had trouble, Christopher Nolan, after everything — after ‘Interstellar,’ after ‘Inception,’ after ‘Memento,’ after [‘The Dark Knight’]?” Stewart incredulously asked. “You would have had trouble selling that, had it not been for ‘Oppenheimer?’”
“I think it helped that it was very successful,” Nolan explained. “I think it all helped to go to the studio and say — because being ‘The Odyssey,’ it needs a massive budget. It needs a massive cast. It needs a lot. So you’re asking a lot of the studio. You’re asking a lot of the cast and everybody.”
“It was a very hard movie, but hard for all the right reasons,” Nolan noted. “It’s ‘The Odyssey.’ It should be hard.”
“The Odyssey” reportedly cost $250 million to make. With marketing and distribution costs, that potentially sets a $500 million bar for the film to turn a profit, a staggering number for even a filmmaker as successful, well-known and consistent as Nolan. Despite that, the filmmaker confirmed to Stewart that he finished “The Odyssey” on time and under budget.
“[That] never happens. How?” Stewart remarked, to which Nolan replied, “The reality is, we went in at a hundred days and by Day 91, we couldn’t have taken another step. So we finished at the right time.”
“Everybody was done. I mean, people were just exhausted. They’d been through it,” Nolan added of the “Odyssey” shoot, which included on-location filming in Morocco, Greece, Italy, Scotland, Iceland and Malta. “It took the right time to make the film. We had enough time to make it. We had the resources to make it.”
You can watch Nolan’s full conversation with Stewart in the video above.
