Nolan Says Without Oppenheimer Success, There Would Have Been No ‘Odyssey’

“I will never get a chance to get high with you in a dorm room,” said Jon Stewart on The Daily Show tonight, preparing Christopher Nolan for his somewhat unusual questions about The Odyssey.

Among the queries: Why didn’t the cyclops tell a joke? What happened to the wheels on the Trojan horse? And is this all just happening in Odysseus’ head?

More broadly, Stewart asked Nolan why he decided to tackle an epic poem written down around the 8th century BCE that just happens to be one of the foundational texts of Western civilization. Turns out, the filmmaker did it because he could.

“Coming out of my last film, Oppenheimer had way more success than I think we had any right to expect,” explained Nolan. “And that gives you an opportunity to get something made that you might not otherwise be able to get made.”

Stewart was shocked that the man who generated billions with the Dark Knight films would need to prove himself.

“You would have had trouble, Christopher Nolan, after everything — after Interstellar, after Inception, after Memento, after Batman?”

“I think it helped that it was very successful,” replied Nolan.

“You think the Oscar thing helped,” nudged Stewart.

“I think the Oscar thing helped. I think it all helped to go to the studio and say — because being The Odyssey, it needs a massive budget. It needs a massive cast. It needs a lot. I like to say it was a very hard movie, but hard for all the right reasons. It’s The Odyssey. It should be hard. It shows up on screen.”

Hard as it was, Nolan said they got it done early.

“Someone was telling me that you actually completed it ahead of schedule, as you had with all of your movies, and under budget,” queried Stewart.

“Yes. Never happens,” replied the Oscar-winner. “The reality is, we went in at a hundred days. And by day 91, we couldn’t have taken another step. So we finished — we finished at the right time…Everybody was done. I mean, people were just exhausted. They’d been through it. So it took the right time to make the film. We had enough time to make it.”