After bringing Homer’s epic “The Odyssey” to the big screen, Christopher Nolan says there is one genre he still wouldn’t dare take on- Romantic comedy.
Event Context
During an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the Oscar-winning filmmaker admitted he would be “terrified” to direct a rom-com, even though he enjoys watching them.
In the show, Fallon joked about Nolan directing a romantic comedy, but the Oscar-winning filmmaker said it would be much harder than people think.
Nolan said, “I think doing a rom-com would be incredibly difficult. I love watching those movies. But, no, I think comedy, like, people who direct comedy, people who do comedy, I think that’s one of the hardest things in the world to make people laugh that way.”
He explained further, “Particularly the risk they take. When you make a film … you know, if I show a film to people and maybe they don’t respond to bits of it, I’m like, ‘Ah, they don’t get it. Whatever.’ There’s no hiding behind that when you do comedy.”
Because of that, he admitted he would be “terrified” to direct a romantic comedy.
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While rom-coms scare him, Nolan wasn’t afraid to take big creative swings for “The Odyssey,” an adaptation of Homer’s epic poem. As per The Wrap, he oversaw a production with thousands of people, filmed across six countries over more than 90 days and used a 60-foot animatronic puppet.
Nolan told Fallon, “It was a massive amount of film cans,” but reassured that “they did not actually expose it,” and the footage was saved in time. When Fallon asked if he was nervous, Nolan said, “Big time,” to which Fallon joked, “You were like, ‘I can’t reshoot this, buddy. We were in a cave.’”
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As per Daily Beast, the film cost around $250 million to make and was shot over 91 days using two million feet of IMAX film, with locations including the Moray Firth coast in Scotland.
The film’s hard shoot also led to some on-set struggles for the cast. Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus, told Radio Andy host Andy Cohen, “A lot of us are middle-aged people and what we got was back pain,” adding that wearing sandals for long hours as the Greek hero left him with several cuts on his feet.
Match Outlook
Tom Holland, who plays Telemachus, said it was his first time working with IMAX cameras and that he didn’t know they could only run for about three minutes at a stretch, which made him think Nolan was cutting his scenes due to bad performances. Holland told Fandango, “I thought I was totally s–tting the bed.”
