KB News Desk
In Seoul with Matt Damon, Charlize Theron and producer Emma Thomas, Nolan pitches his Homeric epic as cinema at its most communal, two days before its opening here
Christopher Nolan is not exactly famous for handing out compliments. His sets run with a discipline that borders on the monastic, and by his cast’s telling, the word “perfect” crosses his lips roughly once a decade. Matt Damon, who by his own account logged some of the most demanding months of his career shooting “The Odyssey,” seems to have learned to live within those margins.
“I’ve never received a ‘perfect’ from this director, but I like to think we have a shorthand,” Damon said Monday at a press conference in central Seoul. “I’m a very optimistic person.”
Charlize Theron, asked whether she too had been holding out for a kind word or two, wanted no part of the grievance. “This was purely a Matt Damon issue. I had no qualms,” she said. “My phone number is still the same, Chris, if you want to call me up for the next one.”
Nolan eventually came around. Theron’s reply, the director ruled, had been perfect. Damon’s was “not terrible, which for an Englishman is a very, very high compliment.”
“If I can get a ‘not terrible,’ that’s good enough for me,” Damon said.
The four were in town for the Korean release of “The Odyssey,” the cinematic event of the summer, which opens here Wednesday nearly three weeks after its North American debut.
For Nolan and producer Emma Thomas, the trip marked a first visit to the country. Damon was last here a decade ago, while Theron, officially a first-timer herself, had vacationed in Seoul with her daughter just a couple of months ago and joked that she felt “very spoiled” to be back so soon.
Both Theron and Thomas wore norigae, the traditional Korean pendant, fastened at the waist — Thomas said hers was a gift from the studio’s local staff at dinner the night before. “It speaks to the themes of the movie, with an anchor there,” she said.
The group had kept local media busy well before the press event. Damon headed straight from the airport to a ballgame — a friend who works as a baseball agent has a client on the home team — and came away taken with the cheering sections. “It was a completely different way to watch a baseball game,” he said.
Nolan walked the river downtown and tried salt bread, the buttery roll that has become a staple of Korean bakeries, which he found “extraordinary and absolutely wonderful.” Theron caught up with friends from her recent vacation, ate her way through the city and, by her own admission, found time to stock up on skin care.
Ask about the shoot itself, though, and the story turns to one of perseverance. Filmed in six countries with the actors on real ships and mountainsides, the production demanded a level of stamina that Damon, for one, seemed to relish recounting.
“Each location was incredibly challenging, and another chapter in this longer story, so each one felt like its own film,” he said, revisiting his oft-quoted line that the job felt like shooting seven movies at once. “Whatever skill you’d mastered to conquer the previous location wasn’t applicable to the new one.”
By all accounts, the effort paid its own dividends. Damon called the experience “joyful just precisely because it was so hard. Thomas, for her part, expected everyone to bolt the moment Nolan called cut on the last day. Instead, after a celebratory glass of champagne, the crew stood around for hours past midnight. “It was almost like everyone was bonded by trauma,” she said. “Nobody wanted to leave.”
If the press conference had a refrain, it was an insistent case for the big screen. “The thing that cinema offers you is an experience of sharing a story with an audience, even as you’re seeing a subjective, first-person point of view,” Nolan said. “You’re seeing something that’s very personal to you, and the camera is showing you precise things in your unique perspective, but you’re sharing that with a lot of other people. That’s what the medium of cinema has that no other medium has.”
Theron made the same argument from a moviegoer’s perspective. “The greatest part about going to the movies is that you’re going to have your own experience, and when you leave, hopefully it starts conversation,” she said.
As Calypso, the nymph who holds Odysseus on her island for years, the actor has watched audiences split over the character as the press tour moved from country to country. “It’s been interesting as we’ve been traveling to hear people have their own opinion about who they think Calypso is. To some she’s more villainous, and to some she’s more of a tragic hero.”
It also happens to be a pitch rooted as much in the material as in its spectacle. Homer’s lyric lived for centuries as oral performance, passed from teller to teller and reshaped with every recitation, and Nolan’s Odysseus spends much of the movie talked about rather than seen — a legend refracted through hearsay and secondhand accounts — until the film reveals his journey home as a bid to reclaim one man’s story, along with the guilt-ridden memory buried beneath it.
The gods who steer every turn of Odysseus’ fortunes in the mythology are nowhere to be found, and in that omission lies the director’s ambition: to reframe the age-old tale as a humanist, and arguably crowd-pleasing, parable about what holds people together and what’s lost when it comes apart.
Not that anyone present was shy about the implications of that choice. “I know that we don’t like to talk about what messages there are in the movie, but I do feel that there’s something about the story that is about connection, and about the impact that we have on each other, whether that be thousands of years ago or today,” Thomas said.
Nolan, for his part, would rather have the film do the talking. Movies work best, he said, when audiences are left to decide for themselves what they’ve seen. “My answer to what’s the message of the film is the experience of the film itself,” he said. “We’ve made the film for people who know nothing about Homer’s ‘Odyssey.’ I really want them to have a sense of adventure and entertainment and emotional engagement with it. More than anything, I just want them to have a great time at the movies.”
“The Odyssey” opens in theaters nationwide Wednesday.
