With Letterboxd at the palm of our hands, everybody truly is a critic these days, much to Christopher Nolan‘s annoyance.
The 2x Oscar winner recently unpacked “a real problem” with amateur film critics today, explaining there is a “very accessible modern language of storytelling” that they don’t see as necessary to filmmaking.
“The criticism that’s 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,’” he told Beijing, China podcast host Zhong Shu. “And that’s a fundamental flaw of film criticism in a way, or storytelling criticism. Because to be able to identify the mechanism does not invalidate the mechanism. And that’s a real problem in criticism today.”
Nolan continued, “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.”
With his latest film The Odyssey following that storytelling format through Homer’s ancient epic, to the tune of nearly $1B and counting, Nolan explained that amateur film critics need “to understand the necessity for the mechanisms.”
“So, you’re looking at a lingua franca of storytelling created by Hollywood for the last hundred years that is effectively universal. And so, it is its own language, and that language is understood by people all over the world, which is what’s incredible about it,” added Nolan. “And it is a very, very accessible modern language of storytelling, and it has certain rules, it has conventions. You can break those conventions. You can bend them. You can move them. But you have to be aware of them the whole time.
“I’m thinking more of amateur criticism, because they feel they’ve identified the mechanism, they feel that it invalidates it. That can be true of certain elements, and film grammar, film language evolves with that. So when a trope becomes too familiar to an audience, then it has to be changed. But we do, as filmmakers, avail ourselves of that common language. We build on that understanding. Our audience has seen many films and they understand that language,” he said.
Despite a lively online discourse around Nolan’s latest, The Odyssey currently holds a solid 94% critic rating and a 97% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Odyssey follows Odysseus (Matt Damon) through the incredible trials and mythical encounters he faces on his decade-long journey home to wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland) after the Trojan War.
The film also stars Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, John Leguizamo, Elliot Page, Himesh Patel, Bill Irwin, Samantha Morton, Jesse Garcia, Will Yun Lee, Rafi Gavron, Shiloh Fernandez, Mia Goth, Travis Scott and more.
