Christopher Nolan calls the backlash to 'The Odyssey' irrelevant and points to his 10 years with Batman

Christopher Nolan sat for an interview with The Telegraph, published Friday, one week before The Odyssey opens, and was asked about the pre-release pile-on aimed at his casting. He did not take the bait, and he did not pretend the anger was new to him.

"Comes with the territory," Nolan told the paper. "Remember, I spent 10 years of my life dealing with Batman."

That is the whole posture, and it is worth taking seriously rather than reading as a brush-off. The criticism has been loud since the first casting announcements, much of it aimed at Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page as Sinon, with Elon Musk among the most visible people amplifying it to a very large audience. None of these people have seen the movie. That is Nolan's actual argument.

What he said

Nolan's position is that any argument about a film that happens before the film exists in public is an argument about nothing.

"These conversations that happen before people see the film, they're always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet."

He then went back to 2005 and Batman Begins, which is the closest thing he has to a controlled experiment in surviving fan fury.

"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."

And on the adaptation question, which is the one actually under dispute:

"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."

You can accept or reject that. It is at least a coherent theory of the job, and it is the same one he has been running since he put a Gotham cop movie inside a superhero franchise and let a generation of comics readers scream about it first and buy tickets second.

The budget line, quietly corrected

The same interview took a small bite out of a number BCN has used. Nolan said The Dark Knight Rises is still the most expensive film he has made, which cuts against the widely repeated claim that The Odyssey is his priciest. Reported figures for The Odyssey have clustered around $250 million, and The Dark Knight Rises has long been placed in the $250 million to $300 million range before tax credits. Nolan and Emma Thomas are the only two people who actually know, and they are both saying the same thing. Treat "most expensive Nolan film ever" as unconfirmed until Universal says otherwise.

It does not change the math that matters. A $250 million R-rated three-hour poem still has to do Oppenheimer numbers to be a hit, and Oppenheimer did $975 million.

What we know that isn't discourse

The Odyssey premiered in London on July 6 and the first reactions ran hot, with several critics calling it the biggest thing Nolan has attempted. It was shot entirely with IMAX film cameras, a first. TMDB lists the runtime at 2 hours 53 minutes. Matt Damon plays Odysseus, in his third film for Nolan. It opens July 17.

The reviews land before the weekend. Then the conversation will be about the movie, which is the only conversation Nolan has ever agreed to have.