Christopher Nolan responds to some of those Odyssey criticisms

He based his choices on two time periods: The Bronze Age, in which The Odyssey is set, and Homer’s lifetime, hundreds of years later. He did this because “the oldest depictions of Homeric characters tend to be depicted in the manner of people living in Homer’s time. So there’s a pretty strong case there for portraying things that way because that’s the way the first audience received the story.”

With The Odyssey, Nolan compares the film’s production to Interstellar. “For Interstellar, you’re looking at, ‘What is the best speculation of the future?’ When you’re looking at the ancient past, it’s actually the same thing. ‘What is the best speculation and how can I use that to create a world?'” Plenty of scientists “complain about Interstellar,” too, he said, but he hopes they know he didn’t make any decisions it “frivolously.” The theory doesn’t exactly carry over to his decision to cast Travis Scott as a bard. That was more of an artistic license thing. “I cast him because I wanted to nod towards the idea that this story has been handed down as oral poetry, which is analogous to rap.”