On this podcast, rather than reviewing movies two thumbs up or two thumbs down, we talk about what we can learn from them as screenwriters. And along the way, we learn the tools we need not only to write better screenplays, but to live better lives as artists.
This episode, we’re talking about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
The Odyssey is not a perfect adaptation, and we’re going to get into some of the strengths and some of the weaknesses of this script. But the thing I want you to keep in your mind as you work on your own adaptation is how Christopher Nolan’s clinging to the thing that mattered to him affects every aspect of how he approaches the writing and the direction of this movie.
What God Are You Serving?
This is the most important question you can ask as a screenwriter any time you embark on an act of adaptation.
Whether you are adapting a novel, a short story, a play, a true life story, a memoir, a news article, or even an epic poem like Homer’s The Odyssey, that question of what god you are serving is the one you need to come back to again and again.
I like to think of revision and adaptation as two sides of the exact same coin. In every act of revision, just like in any act of adaptation, we’re looking at something that is not yet a screenplay and translating it one step closer to being a screenplay.
And as we do that, it means we are both changing things and keeping things. Losing beautiful elements and keeping beautiful elements. It means we are making sacrifices that have costs. And it means that on some level, we are pissing somebody off.
In fact, Emily Wilson, the preeminent Homer scholar whose translation of The Odyssey is what made Christopher Nolan want to make this movie in the first place, has responded to the final result by saying she “would have been ashamed to have written any part of this script.”
And yet The Odyssey is having a tremendously successful run with both critics and audiences.
So one of the choices you have to make whenever you’re working on an adaptation is: what are you going to keep, and what are you going to lose? You’re going to keep things and lose things in relation to what is important to you. Sometimes that means pissing people off. And sometimes it means sacrificing things you truly love in order to serve the bigger picture of what you’re building.
How Nolan Actually Approached the Adaptation
Christopher Nolan had an interesting approach to adapting. He didn’t begin by rereading The Odyssey.
He began by identifying what he saw as the cultural images and incidents that were already in the zeitgeist, in the collective unconscious of the audience. Elements like the Trojan Horse, the Cyclops, the sirens, the lotus eaters.
He then wrote his early drafts from his memory of the poem, before getting into deeper translations of it. And once he had read multiple translations, he took that source material, set it aside, and continued to write from that original draft and from the impressions the poem had left on him.
I’m certainly not a scholar of Greek poetry. But if you’ve seen The Odyssey, and you know Homer’s The Odyssey, you’ll notice that it isn’t just The Odyssey that Christopher Nolan is adapting. He’s also adapting elements of Virgil’s Aeneid. He’s integrating elements of other Greek dramas and Greek tragedies.
He’s not doing the book. He’s doing the world of the book.
Writing Inside the Audience’s Cultural Memory
And he’s doing this for a reason. Part of that reason is commercial. His audience has a view of what they think The Odyssey is, which may or may not be what the actual Odyssey is. And part of his job in making a hugely, hugely expensive film is making sure the audience walks out going: yes, I got what I expected.
So there are certain elements of The Odyssey that have to be part of this movie because they are part of the cultural memory of this piece, even if they’re not in the book.
This is a normal thing, especially if you’re a commercial screenwriter. If you’re writing big Hollywood epic blockbusters, thinking about the needs of the audience is important. And if you’re developing IP, you’re also serving the needs of the IP owners. If you’re making The Lego Movie or Barbie, you’re asking what does Lego want to say about Lego? What does Barbie want to say about Barbie?
This is not the case if you’re writing a character driven drama for Sundance. This is not the case if you’re building something out of your own imagination rather than out of existing IP. And this is not the case when you’re working at a smaller budget and don’t need everybody in the world to love your movie.
When you’re working smaller, you get different kinds of options. You can surprise the expectations of your audience, because you don’t need everyone in the world to see it. You need a subset of the world to see it.
But when you’re working at Christopher Nolan’s budget, everyone in the world has got to be able to see it. Everyone in the world has got to be able to see themselves in it. And if you’re doing a good job, you have to balance that against somehow telling the story you actually want to tell inside the cultural memory this project already inhabits.
Think of it as a playground you get to play in as a professional writer. Part of the art of being a screenwriter is learning how to tell your own story inside of that.
But the God Has to Be Yours
Because the god you’re ultimately serving has got to be your own god.
If you spend all your time serving your imaginary audience and their expectations, or your producer and their expectations, if you make the god something outside of you, it becomes extremely hard to trust any decision you make. Adaptation is rife with incredibly hard emotional choices.
So we need to find the one thing. The main thing.
And this may evolve over time. You might need to write a draft just to see what excites you. You might then need to go do more research, and come back to your draft and let that research wash over you and inspire you. You might need multiple revisions before you start to figure out what this piece is really about, what you’re really trying to say, what really matters, and what is going to be sacrificed.
The Gods Christopher Nolan Is Not Serving
He Is Not Serving the Gods
If you know Homer’s epic poem at all, the first thing you’re probably going to notice is that the first god Christopher Nolan is serving is certainly not gods.
There is one god in the entire adaptation, and that god is Athena. And Athena in this piece is more of a Jiminy Cricket character for Odysseus than she is a god who shapes the lives of human beings. She is not a god playing with fates the way the Greek gods generally do. She’s an externalization of Odysseus’s internal self doubt.
Every other element of the gods from Homer’s epic poem is stripped out of The Odyssey. We don’t get to see scenes of gods scheming and planning. We don’t get to see a Poseidon who genuinely hates Odysseus and genuinely wants revenge.
Instead, much more like in our own society, we get to watch characters ascribe their beliefs to gods. If the seas are rough, they may ascribe that to Poseidon’s vengeance, and believe that Odysseus has brought that vengeance down upon them.
In this way, Christopher Nolan is leaning into anachronism in order to make his Odyssey more of a reflection of our world than of the world of the Greeks. This is not a world where gods mess with the events of human beings in a way that we can see. This is a world in which gods are a projection of human belief.
He Is Not Serving Faithfulness
Nor is he serving the god of doing a faithful adaptation of The Odyssey.
He’s doing an inspiration from The Odyssey, pulling in a bunch of other Greek material and a bunch of his own ideas, serving the general sense of The Odyssey that already exists in the world of his audience, and then playing inside that in his own way.
He Is Not Serving Character
The other god Christopher Nolan is clearly not serving is the god of character. This is a very risky choice, and it’s not one I’d encourage you to make as a newer writer, because character is one of the primary gods we generally follow when we’re thinking about screenwriting.
If you’ve read anything about The Odyssey, you’ve seen him come under attack for his portrayal of women in this piece. That his women don’t have a lot of interesting things to do or say. That they’re not written with a lot of complication.
But I think what that criticism misses is that Christopher Nolan isn’t really doing that for the male characters either.
We’re not talking about super complicated characters throughout this. We’re talking about archetypal characters who exist in service of a larger theme. And this is an unusual way to build a script. Usually, even successful action movies are built primarily on the engine of character: a character on a clear journey of change in relation to a theme.
But Odysseus’s journey is not clean and linear. And outside of Odysseus, most of the characters are relatively paper thin. The bad guys are really, really bad, and the good guys are really, really good. Every line is charged with a level 10 emotion. We don’t get a lot of three or four out of ten nuance. Lines are either expositional or charged with meaning, and there is very little in between.
To some degree this is a Christopher Nolan thing, part of his style and how he writes. But we’ve also seen him do more nuance in projects like Oppenheimer, and even in a project like Inception.
In fact, part of the reason Emily Wilson is upset is that her Odyssey literally starts with the words “tell me about a complicated man.” And that is not the prompt Christopher Nolan is following.
Odysseus Doesn’t Quite Add Up
There are elements of Odysseus’s complication and his journey that are very well executed, and there are others that are a little more all over the place.
You may notice that the character bounces. He’s described as the smartest of all of Agamemnon’s men, but he consistently makes really, really dumb mistakes.
He is a man who lives by Zeus’s law, which Nolan distills out of some actual Greek ideas down to something close to the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have others do unto you. For the most part, he lives by that rule. He twangs his bow before he shoots anybody, so they have a chance to defend themselves, down to even an animal.
So there’s a part of him that is very rigid about that. But then we watch him defy the rules of his society multiple times, for example by failing to bury the dead, even when his men are telling him, dude, you have to bury the dead.
So we have a character who doesn’t always play by his own rules, and doesn’t always play by the rules of his society. Who sometimes lies and sometimes doesn’t. Who is sometimes very smart and sometimes very dumb. We have a character cunning enough to architect the entire plan of the Trojan Horse, and who also repeatedly goes through the world going: well, hey, we just landed at a random place, they’ll probably be nice to us. Oh crap, they weren’t nice to us. Run, run, run, run.
And you’ll see this happen again and again. We landed in a new place. Well, we’ve got the law of Zeus. They’ll probably be nice to us. Oh my gosh, they weren’t nice to us. Run, run, run, run.
So we have this repetition of a naivete in him that doesn’t quite fit with the cunning in him.
With the exception of Odysseus, we can probably agree that most of the human characters here are drawn with Crayola crayons, in primary colors. The men of Odysseus’s crew are good men we have seen before, who also doubt their leader sometimes. His son is a young prince not yet ready to fill his father’s shoes, but trying. We’ve seen him before. His wife is a grieving widow who doesn’t want to let go of her true love’s memory. We’ve seen her before.
The main goal of this project is not to create nuance in these characters. The main goal is something different.
Where Nolan’s Eye Actually Is: The Monsters
I want to contrast all of that with the way Christopher Nolan treats the monsters of the piece.
Because what I’d like to suggest to you is that the god he is serving is not the gods. Anything from the gods is basically going to be transformed into a human projection, a human wrestling with something. And it’s not the humans either, for the most part. That’s not where his eye is.
He’s got two hours and fifty two minutes, and most of the love is going to the monsters.
And I’m not just talking about the production design. The monsters in The Odyssey are actually the most humanized creatures in the whole piece.
This is worth sitting with, because this is how your own process is often going to look. Often you don’t fully know what your theme is. Christopher Nolan himself has talked about feeling like he bit off more than he could chew at times in this adaptation, and this is true for all of us.
We take this big thing that is so much bigger than a script, and even if you are Christopher Nolan and you have three hours instead of the hour and a half that normal beings who walk the earth get to make a movie, even if you have all the time in the world, you’re taking an epic poem and you’ve got to shrink it down. You’re going to lose so many things.
And sometimes you don’t know exactly what you’re saying yet. You just know there’s a playground you’ve got to play in, and there are certain things you find yourself attracted to, and certain things you think you should be interested in, like Greek gods messing around with the lives of humans, or the complications of a complicated character. But for some reason, you’re not. Your eye is somewhere else.
Where is Christopher Nolan’s eye? It’s on the monsters.
And when your eye is on something else, and you find yourself fascinated, and you’re doing good work there, do more work there.
At the beginning, you want to look more at what you already love and what is already working than you look at the things that are not working. And you certainly want to look more at what’s already working than at other people’s concerns about your adaptation.
That doesn’t mean you couldn’t complicate these characters later, in a revision. Of course you could. Of course there’s always more that can be done in a script. But you’ve got to know what god you’re serving. And the chances are, in early stages, there’s one god you can serve at a time.
Nostos and Xenia: The Two Ideas Underneath the Movie
Before we get to the monsters themselves, there are two Greek ideas that get simplified in Nolan’s version, and that everything else hangs on.
The first is nostos, the problem of returning home. The problem that even if you go back home, the journey itself has changed you. In Nolan, this gets complicated even further by an Odysseus who maybe, on some level, doesn’t want to go home.
The second is xenia, the obligations between strangers. This is a real part of Homer’s poem: the idea that hosts and guests owe each other something, and that anybody could be a god. And over the course of Nolan’s movie, that mutual obligation is being violated again and again.
Our characters may be beyond belief here, because they’re operating more in a thematic universe than in a character driven one. A genuinely brilliant, cunning man would probably, the first time xenia is violated, go: huh, maybe I shouldn’t set my weapons outside anymore. Maybe I shouldn’t trust anymore.
But a thematically driven character might keep repeating the same mistake because of his connection to what the movie calls Zeus’s law, his belief about how the universe is supposed to be built. Because on some level, what Christopher Nolan is trying to show us is that Zeus’s law is breaking down in this society.
Agamemnon, the First Monster
So we have a man with a very strong moral belief about how the universe is supposed to work, and he has gone off to war to follow Agamemnon.
Agamemnon is almost exclusively seen from behind. Not exclusively, but close. He has an interesting gold braid running down the back of his black helmet, and he’s a huge, almost godlike man. In a world where there’s only one god bouncing around and she’s basically Jiminy Cricket, he is the most godlike figure in this world. And he may not be a kind god.
This isn’t from the actual Odyssey. This is taken from other Greek myths. But Agamemnon in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation has sacrificed his own daughter for favorable winds, and he has declared war on the Trojans.
There is a provocation for this, which is that Helen has been kidnapped. It isn’t mentioned in the movie, but it’s fair to say that’s also a violation of the idea of xenia. Guests violated that sacred honor and took her. And Agamemnon, who wants control of the trade routes, is going to use this as a pretext to go to war against Troy.
So Agamemnon is actually the first monster. A monster that Odysseus knows is a monster.
In fact, when Odysseus tells his wife Penelope that he’s going to follow Agamemnon into battle, Penelope basically says: dude, no. Let’s just flee. Let’s get on a boat and head west and chase the setting sun together. That’s me paraphrasing. This is really Penelope’s one great line in the whole piece, and it will be used again later.
And as much as he loves Penelope, Odysseus thinks that’s a ridiculous idea. An impossible idea. You can’t just flee. You have to serve. And so he follows Agamemnon.
Then, when we meet him after the Trojan War, rather than deciding to follow Agamemnon home along the traditional trade routes, Odysseus says he’s going to take his own faster route. But the reason is interesting: he is not going to follow Agamemnon anymore.
So obviously something has happened. A little mystery is being created for us as an audience, and we’re going to wrap around to it later.
Part of the way Nolan tells this story, like a lot of his stories, is complicated chronologically. We circle around again and again to the same events in different ways, learning a little bit more about them each time. We’re not moving linearly through time.
And there’s a reason for that inside the adaptation, because The Odyssey is a poem, a story about a story with stories inside of it. So he’s taking that piece and using it for his own purpose.
Agamemnon is the only monster who is not going to be humanized. He’s barely going to have a face. Agamemnon is a symbol. A symbol that Odysseus has been following, and is now choosing not to follow.
And along his path home, Odysseus is going to encounter monster after monster after monster. But unlike Agamemnon, the monsters he meets on his travels home are going to be the most human creatures in the whole piece.
These are the creatures Nolan is actually fascinated by. These are the tell me about a complicated man creatures in this piece.
The Cyclops, and the Choice to Humanize a Monster
Light spoilers from here on.
Having taken their own route, Odysseus and his men decide to stop for food. They find an island. They think they’re so lucky. And on that island there’s a sheep. Being cunning, Odysseus knows that sheep come in flocks, and he decides to follow it.
They follow the sheep into a cave. And in that cave there’s a whole herd of sheep, and unfortunately also a Cyclops.
Odysseus’s men, understandably concerned by the size of whatever must live there and by the fire, think they should get the hell out of there. But Odysseus, who is wedded to this idea of xenia, this thing the movie calls Zeus’s law, assumes that no, we are visitors, and this host will host us and give us food and take care of us.
And of course, that is not what the Cyclops does. The Cyclops ends up eating the men.
From a plot perspective, this could be about what we expect. Show up on a new shore, new monster, new horror, fight sequence, get the hell out. But what we actually watch is Nolan drilling down with great specificity.
The first place you see it is in the production design. He’s taken the traditional Cyclops and turned his eye vertical, and presented the Cyclops in such a way that the eye doesn’t look like it’s supposed to be there. It looks like his face has been deformed. Twisted up in some way.
This doesn’t look like an evil creature. This looks like a suffering creature. Even as this creature is eating human beings, the production design alone lets us feel empathy for it.
The Cyclops eats a couple of humans and lies down to sleep. It could be argued that no creature has ever fallen asleep as quickly as this Cyclops, but hey, this movie is already two hours and fifty two minutes long, so we’ll go with it.
The humans decide they’re going to kill it, but the problem is there’s a giant boulder blocking the door. So instead of killing the Cyclops, they blind it.
And in the way their escape is depicted, we are feeling as much for the Cyclops as we feel for the men. Maybe even more. We watch this Cyclops stumble around in horrific pain, its home having been invaded by these little creatures who have now blinded him.
And in case that wasn’t bad enough, as he’s leaving, out of rage for the death of one of his men, instead of leaving the creature alone, Odysseus shoots one last vengeful arrow.
This causes all kinds of problems. Rather than licking its wounds, the Cyclops ends up running after them and almost killing them. We get this race to the boats.
We also get this interesting little beat about Odysseus, where this guy who is cunning and smart and bound by certain laws is also vengeful and capricious. That level of complexity is good, even though it never totally resolves. Generally we want to build patterns that let us understand how and when a character is changing, and I would argue we don’t really get that for Odysseus. Again, because that’s not where his eye is.
His eye is on the suffering of the Cyclops.
This is the first thing that’s really interesting in The Odyssey. This is the first thing we haven’t seen before. We haven’t seen this humanized, suffering Cyclops.
And when you have something like that in your script, you want to do more of it.
The Famous Sequence He Cut, and Why
There’s a very famous sequence he cuts around the Cyclops, which is the Nobody sequence. The one where Odysseus tells the Cyclops that his name is Nobody, so that when the Cyclops calls out to the other Cyclopes that Nobody hurt him, they don’t understand what he’s saying.
That sequence gets cut, and it gets cut for exactly the reason we’ve been talking about. What god is Christopher Nolan serving?
He’s not serving the dumb Cyclops trope. He’s serving the suffering Cyclops trope. So he cuts a famous piece of the cultural memory of this story, and focuses us entirely on the suffering instead.
Repetition vs. Redundancy
When you start to realize that’s the god I’m serving, whether I’m serving it consciously or subconsciously, whether I planned it or not, this is where my writing got really interesting. And to help you understand what to do with that, I want to talk about the difference between repetition and redundancy.
Repetition is when you do the same thing in a different way. In other words: we’ve got a humanized Cyclops. So when we come to Circe, how are we going to humanize Circe in a different way, so that we start to understand that these monsters are also suffering monsters? Even when we come back to Agamemnon in Hades, who has been this completely dehumanized figure, how do we find that little piece of humanity in him? And if you watch the movie, you’ll see that Nolan does that too.
Repetition is doing the same thing in a slightly different way, usually in a way that outdoes what came before. And the more you repeat, the more we start to get a unified picture. We start to understand the pattern.
Redundancy is when you do the same thing in the same way, or with the same value.
Where the Giants Go Wrong
One of what I consider the flaws of this script is what happens right after the Cyclops.
If I dumb the Cyclops sequence down to its plot shape, it’s this: show up, think they’re going to be nice, discover they’re really nasty, fight your way out, run, run, run to the boats while being chased, finally get in the boat, a lot of people die, and you escape.
Their next stop is the giants. Nolan knows giants are part of the cultural memory of this piece, and he’s going to serve that.
But he also knows he has a problem, which is that these are flesh eating cannibalistic giants, which is an awful lot like the flesh eating, human eating Cyclops. It’s too similar. It’s redundant.
So he does make a choice in order to create a change. He puts the giants in armor and doesn’t focus on their man eating nature. Instead he focuses on their badass, cool armor, and on an army of giants rather than the one Cyclops, to try to make them different. And he does a cute little thing at the beginning, one of the few attempts at humor in the piece, where the first giant they find is a little baby giant, a little boy who screams for help, and suddenly they’re being chased by all of these giants.
But the scene still feels redundant. And the reason it feels redundant is that it has the exact same shape.
You show up. You think they’re going to be nice. It’s just a child, he won’t hurt us. You think they’re going to follow the laws of Zeus, but they don’t follow the laws of Zeus. Instead they come after you. And now you’re running to the docks. And now you’re running to the boat.
What’s hard about this is that we know your main character is the smartest dude in the world, and he’s starting to look dumb, because he’s making the same mistakes in the same way, facing the same creatures in the same way. This is the moment where I started to feel like this piece was dragging a little bit. It started to feel long, because I was watching the same thing again.
The Problem Isn’t the Giants. It’s the Focus.
But what I would argue is that the problem is not the giants. The problem is actually the focus.
Unlike what Nolan did with the Cyclops, and what he’s later going to do with Circe, where he doubles down and drills down on the humanity, with the giants he doesn’t look at the humanity at all.
In improv, we’d call this anding without yesing. He’s not saying yes to the god he’s serving, which is the humanity of these monsters. Instead he’s getting distracted by the problem of: oh, I have two things that are too similar, how do I make them different?
When what the piece is really calling for is: where’s the humanity among these giants? How is it different from, or how does it outdo, what we’ve just seen with the Cyclops and what we’re about to see with Circe?
Because this is part of the larger god Nolan is ultimately going to serve. The larger god that maybe, at this point in the writing, he doesn’t even know he’s serving yet. The larger god of Odysseus’s responsibility for making the world the way it is.
This is the amazing thing. When you just drill down on what’s already beautiful about your writing, and you ask how do I do repetition and not redundancy, how do I do more of what’s already working, it will start to create a path for you toward where you’re going.
So you have a completely inhuman monster in Agamemnon. You’ve got this oddly humanized, suffering Cyclops. And then you have a beat with the giants that doesn’t do any of that. What ends up happening is that the sequence ends up feeling extraneous. It ends up feeling like it could have been cut from the movie and nothing would have changed.
Whereas if you find some way, some different kind of humanity, and I’m going to make something up here, the little boy giant dies and we get to see the mother suffering, then the audience can start to see the pattern.
The other challenge is that we’re also getting redundancy in Odysseus, where he makes the same decision without the impact of: hey, last time I did this with the Cyclops it didn’t go real well, so maybe I’m going to try to do something different. Or, how does the world force me to do the same thing anyway? Or, how do I build a reason for Odysseus to trust again?
We’re getting redundancy, and that redundancy is causing the character to feel like he isn’t playing at the top of his intelligence. Even though he’s complicated, we’re not able to see the pattern by which he’s complicated, and fully understand him.
Now, I’m not saying that this breaks the movie. This movie is having tremendous success that nearly any movie would kill for. But what I am suggesting for your own writing is that even successful movies have opportunities where they can become stronger. And if you start to think about what god am I serving, and how do I do repetition and not redundancy, we can deepen and strengthen and build that pattern that’s going to allow the ultimate god you’re serving to reveal itself. To you, and to your audience.
What to Take Into Your Own Adaptation
- Ask what god you’re serving, and answer in the singular. In the early stages, there’s usually only one god you can serve at a time.
- Adaptation and revision are the same act. Both take something that is not yet a screenplay and move it one step closer to being one. Both cost you things you love.
- Make the god your own. The moment the god lives outside you, in your imagined audience or your producer, you lose the ability to trust any decision you make.
- Follow your eye, not your plan. Nolan’s eye landed on the monsters rather than on the gods or the humans. When you find yourself doing good work somewhere unexpected, do more work there.
- Look at what’s working before you look at what isn’t, and before you look at anybody else’s concerns.
- Repetition, not redundancy. The same thing in a different way, ideally outdoing itself. The same thing in the same way is where a script starts to drag.
- Cut the famous thing if it serves a god you’re not serving. The Nobody sequence is beloved, and it went, because it belongs to the dumb Cyclops and not to the suffering one.
- Yes, and. When two elements feel too similar, the fix usually isn’t to make them superficially different. It’s to find the deeper thing you’re already doing, and do it again in a new way.
Coming in Part 2
Stay tuned for part two of this podcast, where we’re going to get even deeper into The Odyssey, these ideas of repetition versus redundancy, and this big idea of the god that’s being served. We’ll talk not only about the additional monsters of the piece, but also about the great thematic god that ties everything together.
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