This is per a new interview the Odyssey director gave to The Telegraph this week, in which Nolan not only reminds everybody that he’s an affably fastidious oddball—reiterating the fact that he doesn’t own a smartphone, and pulling a flask from his briefcase so he can save every drop of a leftover pot of tea—but that he has the profound confidence of a man who’s spent more than 20 years proving wrong the kinds of people who felt damn sure they could diagnose problems with his movies before ever actually seeing them. “Comes with the territory,” he says when asked about Musk and the YouTube rage machine’s anger at him casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, or Elliot Page as Greek soldier Sinon. “Remember,” he adds, “I spent 10 years of my life dealing with Batman.”
Nolan acknowledges that, when he signed on for 2005’s 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. What you have to do is honor the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can.” Dismissing conversations had about a film before anyone’s actually seen it as ultimately meaningless, Nolan says the only approach he knows is to tackle the material in the way that feels sincerely best to him. “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. 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.”
Of course, you can argue pretty persuasively that modern Odyssey “fans” getting mad about Nolan’s movie aren’t going to be especially susceptible to sincerity, since their own objections so clearly lack it: Musk has not been shy about making it clear that he’s attacking the film in large part to advance his own preferred narratives around race and gender identity. (Notably platforming the idea that the “only” reason Nolan could have cast Nyong’o in the part is in order to curry diversity credit with Oscar voters.) None of which is going to bother Nolan, clearly, who’s going to just keep on making some of the 21st century’s most commercially and critically successful films, instead of getting bogged down in bad-faith discourse.
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