It never gets any easier”: Nolan was “petrified” over audience reaction to “Odyssey

You could be forgiven for thinking Christopher Nolan doesn’t give much thought to what the audience wants. His reputation as an exacting director precedes him. His last three films before adapting a millennia-old poem were a historical epic about an evacuation operation, a time-travel thriller that’s knotty to the point of confusion and a biopic on a physicist. But despite these odd and somewhat unfashionable choices, he cares deeply about the opinion of the average theatergoer.

In an interview with the Guardian ahead of the release of “The Odyssey,” Nolan said he was “petrified” by the idea of a negative response from audiences.

“It never gets any easier, because I make films for audiences and the audience tells me what it likes,” he said. “I don’t think I’d be doing my job right if I wasn’t petrified every time I put a film out.”

In contrast to the grand, imperial scale of his latest release, a $250 million blockbuster starring Matt Damon, Nolan said that the release weekend leaves him in an incredibly vulnerable place.

“They finish the film. I don’t have anything to hide behind,” he said. “I can’t just be like: ‘Oh, people don’t get it.’”

Start your day with essential news from Salon.Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

While Nolan might not be resting easy, he told the Guardian that he plans to take a break now that “The Odyssey” is out in the world. He told the outlet that his decision to film with cumbersome IMAX cameras on location frequently left him entirely exhausted. The Oscar winner said he wasn’t trying to be “difficult” but he knew that an adaptation of such a grand story required “things that you haven’t seen before.”

“The more we talk about it, the more it feels like it was a some sort of Herzogian ordeal but that’s really not my bag,” he said. “Nature and the real world gives you a scale and a set of options and serendipity that you can’t achieve in the studio. But yeah, it was daunting physically and there were times where I felt like maybe I’d bitten off more than I could chew.”