This is the best interview about the Odyssey - part 2. #theodyssey #christophernolan #filmcritic #chinese #interview

we live an age that demands apology from greatness. Great storytellers, when they portray greatness, Homer celebrates it. We circle around it, we dance around it, we turn greatness into privileges and we demand apologies for it. That's a fact of Hollywood. And I'm just wondering, as one of the greatest storytellers of our age, how do you approach greatness? Is it still a story of apology and that demands repentance and reflection and self-criticism? Well, I think that when you're talking about storytelling, you're always in conversation with the expectations of the audience, so it really is an energy that's brought from the audience as well as an energy that's put forward from the story itself. So when you're characterizing somebody and the trite version of this or the criticisms often leveled at movies in general is, oh, the character has to be made sympathetic, so the character is manipulated in different ways or changed in different ways. And that's a fundamental floor of film criticism and a way of storytelling criticism because to be able to identify the mechanism does not invalidate the mechanism. And that's a real problem in criticisms there because people have this idea that because I can understand why the story affects me the way it is, therefore it didn't work. That's not how storytelling works. So when we create a heroic figure in a story, as storytellers, we have to be mindful of the energy that the audience brings to that story and the interaction between our intention and the way the audience receives that. And the fact that that mechanism is identifiable to people doesn't invalidate it. Part of that mechanism is saying, are we going to treat greatness as an absolute or coming from a democratic, coming from a more idealized philosophical state that we live in in today's world where we want to view people as equal. Do we have to apologize for that greatness and the answer is, yes, we do. All the audience rejects the greatness and that is part of the mechanism. Once again, the fact that the mechanism is identifiable doesn't mean that it's invalid or shouldn't be used. And so for me, as we talk about it, there's none of these things that I try to be conscious of when I'm writing or self-conscious of. But as we talk about it, we would of course realize that my attempt to do that is to retain it within the philosophical surrounding of the breaking of Xenia that I have found interesting in the story. So I'm trying to be true to the thematics of the story as I create a character that the audience can invest in and can feel satisfied by.