SerpApi.Org
It took Odysseus 20 years to secure his kingdom: one decade of thumping Trojans, then another on the eventful homeward commute. As of this week, Christopher Nolan has pulled off the filmmaking equivalent in around 26.
The release of The Odyssey confirms the 55-year-old London-born director as a member of an extraordinarily rare species: the British director so successful they can tell Hollywood what to do.
Alfred Hitchcock was another, David Lean a third – and honestly, that’s about it. Like Nolan, those two directors were able to bend the studio machine to their will while remaining true to their own particular style and proclivities. Vertigo, Rear Window and North by Northwest couldn’t have been made under any other conditions; nor The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. And for a director in Hollywood, to be able to work like that makes you as powerful as any creative gets.
Hitchcock, Lean and Nolan are, quite obviously, three completely different filmmakers. But their individual approaches to their craft aren’t as far apart as all that.
All three deploy some of the world’s biggest stars in commercially savvy yet also cunning, even unexpected ways. They traffic in peculiar, cerebral, psychologically dense ideas, like the nature of identity, the tides of history, humanity’s noblest and basest impulses. And with the notable exception of Vertigo – whose standing has, it’s fair to say, somewhat rallied in the meantime – all of the above films, like Nolan’s, were glowingly reviewed and made an absolute killing.
Beyond these three, it’s hard to think of any other British director who’s pulled off the same trick. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger? The duo otherwise known as The Archers (the name of their production company) are unquestionably among the best British directors of all time – perhaps the best – but had minimal dealings with the Hollywood machine.
One could certainly make a case for Ridley and Tony Scott: two wildly successful blockbuster stylists and nimble wranglers of vast productions and budgets. But the Scott brothers’ success stemmed in part from their gung-ho versatility, rather than their determination to keep ploughing the same furrow over and over. They could turn their hands to almost anything – Ridley especially, whose knack for evoking entire cinematic worlds through meticulous camera and production design has lent itself to everything from Blade Runner to Gladiator to Thelma and Louise. (Tony’s work existed in a stylised and kinetic micro-genre all of its own, but which was still wide enough to encompass Top Gun, Crimson Tide and Unstoppable.)
What elevates Nolan to the Hitchcock-Lean tier is his ability to simultaneously embrace and defy a system – the Hollywood studios – built specifically to mulch down distinctive artistic voices into a maximally palatable and floggable composite.
Yet in both Hitchcock and Lean’s cases – like Nolan’s – little to no mulching ever occurred. Instead, the two constantly defied conventional industry wisdom: in Psycho, Hitchcock killed off his heroine 40 minutes in; in Vertigo he gave away what for almost any other director would have been the big twist with over half the film left to go. As for Lean, he built Lawrence of Arabia as a historical epic whose hero becomes less obviously heroic the more we see of him; as its three-and-a-half hours roll by, the audience waits in vain for a climactic moment of redemption, or a part when the contradictory puzzle pieces of his nature all click neatly into place.
Who’d want to watch that? Almost everyone. On its release in 1962, Lawrence grossed $70m worldwide, the equivalent of three-quarters of a billion today. (Watch The Odyssey match it: advance ticket sales point towards a $200m (£150m) opening weekend alone.)
How does Nolan get away with it? Because he always makes the risk seem like sound business sense. On set, he is efficient and exacting: he gets a shot then immediately moves on to the next. (He once told me that he had a recurring nightmare in which he reaches the end of a day’s filming with nothing to show for it.)
This is rarer than it should be. Hollywood increasingly relies on costly, edit-scrambling last-minute reshoots to whip blockbusters into shape – a function of poor planning, or writing, or both, which can add an eight-figure sum to the budget. Meanwhile, Nolan is out there completing filming on The Odyssey nine days ahead of schedule.
The commercial risk is minimal, the artistic daring immense – a formula almost no British filmmakers have ever managed to crack. Nolan makes three. The pantheon had better budge up.
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The Odyssey, review: An astonishing reimagining that gets to the soul of the story
