In our initial interview, Nolan was reluctant to discuss the ending of The Odyssey<\/em>. He\u2019s known as the master of the last-act twist, and likes leaving the audience with more questions than answers. He told me he never wants to impose his interpretation on others. (Are Cobbs\u2019 kids in Inception<\/em><\/a> real or imagined? You decide.) But when I hopped on the phone again shortly before the film\u2019s release to have a spoiler-filled chat about the film\u2019s final act\u2014readers beware!\u2014he offered some insight as to why he made certain changes when adapting the epic poem<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n We discussed the surprising parallels between The Odyssey <\/em>and Oppenheimer<\/em><\/a>, why Nolan decided to give Odysseus and Penelope the happy ending they don\u2019t get in Homer\u2019s epic poem, and how to interpret Zendaya\u2019s mysterious character: Is she actually a goddess or merely a manifestation of Odysseus\u2019 guilt? We also dug into Zeus\u2019 Law<\/a> and the deeper meaning behind Helen\u2019s scarred face.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Nolan: My form of storytelling is, you take a hero, as we did with Oppenheimer, and Oppenheimer has all these flaws, all of these complexities. You find an actor who can take the audience on a journey with that character and make mistakes with that character and not judge that character. And then you step back from that character and go, \u201cWell, how did we get here?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [For this movie,] you do that through Odysseus\u2019 men. That\u2019s one of the things in the poem that\u2019s breezed over\u2014the way in which the crew ends up getting killed one by one, despite his leadership. In the process of adaptation, you go, \u201cThat\u2019s actually pretty interesting. Maybe we need to make that more center stage.\u201d What\u2019s the relationship between him and his crew? How do they feel about how he\u2019s leading them and the things that befall them?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n He\u2019s a guy who makes a lot of mistakes. His ultimate mistake is the horse. So there\u2019s a sort of tragic flaw right from the beginning in our telling.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Nolan with Matt Damon as Odysseus and Zendaya as Athena on set of The Odyssey.<\/span> Melinda Sue Gordon\u2014Universal Pictures<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n I couldn\u2019t possibly answer that because I learned very early on with Memento<\/em> that it\u2019s unfair to define the experience for the audience by answering questions like that.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Here\u2019s what I will say: For me, what was important was that we view the gods the way that people at the time might have viewed them. So they\u2019re seeing evidence of the gods in nature. They\u2019re seeking and finding gods and the influence of gods in the people around them. Odysseus says to Telemachus, \u201cDon\u2019t look for gods in men. You\u2019ll just be disappointed.\u201d And some of what Odysseus says about divinity, to me, is somebody who\u2019s protesting a bit too much, someone trying to live in denial of their own instincts and their own practices.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yes. If I\u2019ve done a film right, it leaves me with questions. It leaves me with things I want to keep exploring and thinking about. And Oppenheimer<\/em> fed very much into my reading of the story of Odysseus.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n John Leguizamo [who plays Odysseus\u2019 friend Eumaeus] says it at the very beginning: \u201cThat\u2019s very clever, but your cleverness will get you in trouble.\u201d As it does again and again and again. This is where it ties into Oppenheimer<\/em>: Just because you can<\/em> doesn\u2019t mean you should<\/em>. The parallels were pretty apparent to me as I figured out how to adapt it.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you find these things are difficult to deal with, sometimes the solution is just to dive in and make it everything. I didn\u2019t use the term xenia<\/em> because you don\u2019t want to throw too many terms at people. But it\u2019s essentially the golden rule. It all comes back to weather, to geography. When you leave the house, you are depending on the kindness of strangers, and you have to trust that when you arrive somewhere after weeks or months of traveling, that you will be fed, you will be given water. Three thousand years ago, that was everything. You were always at the mercy of strangers. And so this idea that a stranger could be a god in disguise, it\u2019s very powerful as the underpinning of a belief system.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Christopher Nolan filming the Sack of Troy in The Odyssey<\/span> Melinda Sue Gordon\u2014Universal Pictures<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n That line, \u201cThe face that launched 1,000 ships, or maybe just 500\u201d just occurred to me to write. Sometimes what you do as a writer is purely instinctive. I felt the poem didn\u2019t necessarily address what it is for Helen to be brought back by Menelaus and how that would ever work. How would that relationship be? How could it possibly be anything other than the most acidic, awful marriage?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s a lot of sh-t that\u2019s happened in that relationship, and we have a very brief moment of time with them in this story. I was looking for a shorthand way to communicate the aftermath of the war and how it\u2019s been traumatic for the entire world.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Circe articulates it well in the film. I love the way Samantha [Morton] has played the part. Talking about choices of adaptation, the end of the poem is so grim and so misogynistic, I had to exclude some of that material. But I didn\u2019t want to completely take it off the table in terms of what it is saying about men and the way they wage war.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Well, it is<\/em> the fall of civilization, so there is a fairly bleak sensibility. The end is talking about cycles, and you can view cycles pessimistically: History is doomed to repeat itself. But there is also something optimistic about those cycles. As Penelope says, \u201cCivilization will rise again.\u201d There is rebirth and regrowth.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For me, it was important in looking at the ending to try and strike the right balance between pessimism and optimism\u2014pessimism about what might have precipitated the Bronze Age catastrophe and the optimism that positive things will reassert themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source time.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In our initial interview, Nolan was reluctant to discuss the ending of The Odyssey. He\u2019s known as the master of the last-act twist, and likes leaving the audience with more questions than answers. He told me he never wants to impose his interpretation on others. (Are Cobbs\u2019 kids in Inception real or imagined? You decide.) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2515802,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[373430,22008,21912],"class_list":["post-2515801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-culturepod","tag-magazine","tag-movies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Christopher-Nolan-on-Helen-Zendayas-Athena-and-Odyssey-Ending-scaled.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2515801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2515801"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2515801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2515803,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2515801\/revisions\/2515803"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2515802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2515801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2515801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2515801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}TIME: Odysseus is a man who suffers from PTSD, and, in your interpretation, who believes he\u2019s responsible for the end of a civilization because he violated the ethical code by which the ancient Greeks lived their lives. <\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
My interpretation of Zendaya\u2019s character is that she is not Athena as Odysseus initially present her\u2014gods don\u2019t exist in this world\u2014but a manifestation of his guilt. During the sack of Troy, we see her as a priestess in the Temple of Athena, and the Greeks behead her. For Odysseus, she encapsulates the chaos that the horse has wrought on the world. But my editor did not interpret it that way. I am hoping you will settle our disagreement. <\/h3>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
I was struck by the parallels between Oppenheimer and Odysseus, two brilliant men who create a tool of devastating destruction and then struggle with the guilt of what they have done. When I spoke to Matt Damon, I asked, \u201cWhat did you think when you first read the script?\u201d And he said, \u201cIt felt like Oppenheimer.\u201d<\/em> I assume that was a conscious choice.<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The movie hinges on this idea that by creating the Trojan Horse, Odysseus destroys \u201cZeus\u2019 law.\u201d That\u2019s the movie\u2019s term for the ancient Greek concept of xenia<\/em>\u2014the respectful relationship between host and guest\u2014which can be tricky to explain to a modern audience. Why was it important to include? <\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/static.time.com\/v3\/assets\/bltea6093859af6183b\/blt1ec749d2ec21b3c7\/69fba073e070ce0b2db76c56\/christopher-nolan-odyssey-02.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp)
<\/picture>At different points in the film, if man is given the opportunity, he becomes a beast. A soldier will behead a priestess. You imply that Menelaus purposefully scarred Helen\u2019s face either because he believes she\u2019s responsible for the Trojan War or to prevent anyone from taking her again. <\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t buy that he saw her face and said, \u201cShe\u2019s so beautiful I can\u2019t kill her after all,\u201d as he does in the myth? <\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
You also see this idea of man as beast in the scene with Circe. She says that Odysseus\u2019 men would have raped and killed her\u2014that they\u2019re pigs. Then you get to the end and see the sack of Troy and the horror of what they did. She\u2019s right. <\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
And yet you give Odysseus and Penelope a happy ending that they do not get in the poem. <\/h3>\n<\/p>\n