The “massively important” epic that inspired Christopher Nolan: “Absolutely floored me”
After pre-sale tickets for The Odyssey shattered records for the most cinema tickets booked in advance, it’s safe to say that audiences would do just about anything for the chance to witness another spectacle from Christopher Nolan, with his adaptation of the classic novel becoming the most anticipated film from his slate of work.
His stories are a way for people to immerse themselves in the fantasies of an alternative world, a world so similar yet detached from our own in the rules and logic that slightly skew the everyday experiences of the characters, with people who can move backwards in time or float through the dreams of other people. It might seem familiar upon first appearances, but as soon as you unpick his films, all the common threads to our own lives begin to unravel, presenting an entirely new reality that we can lose ourselves in.
Despite having a clear and consistent style, Nolan has gained inspiration from a myriad of genres over the years, describing his fascination with the work of directors like Ridley Scott and Alfred Hitchcock, who have both become keen influences on his own cinematic palette. However, while everyone knows about Nolan’s undying love for Alien and North by Northwest, there is one film that he has given the ultimate stamp of approval as his all-time favourite.
During his early years in the industry, Nolan found himself stumbling into a screening of John Huston’s 1975 film The Man Who Would Be King, with Michael Caine and Sean Connery starring as two former British soldiers who visit the mountains of Afghanistan and proclaim themselves to be rulers, with their reign shortly disintegrating and falling apart as quickly as it was started.
Adapted from the original story by Rudyard Kipling, it’s an adventure epic that perhaps sparked Nolan’s widely proclaimed love for Caine, with the Cockney actor becoming a guest star in many of his films, and another nod to Nolan’s home country.
However, it wasn’t just his discovery of Caine’s talents that led him to love the movie so much, with the director saying, “It absolutely floored me. It is one of my favourite films and a massively important film to me. There’s a romanticism to that film, a great sense of romantic invention and adventure, very much like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre many years before. Huston shot the film in Morocco, which obviously is a very, very long way from the country in the film, but he used a real-world texture to lend credibility.”
Perhaps we will see influences from the movie in Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, a project of similarly epic proportions that seems to be blending some of the techniques used in Huston’s masterpiece to create an authentic story world. Nolan opted to shoot on location, as the entire cast and crew have been spotted filming in various countries around the world.
It’s the kind of thing that adds to the lived-in texture of a story world, something that Nolan has adopted for his latest venture as he pays homage to his favourite movie.
