Christopher Nolan calls out 'Amateur Critics' over 'The Odyssey' criticisms
- By Sarah Brohi -
- Aug 03, 2026
Christopher Nolan slammed back at the ongoing trend of criticism on his recently released movie The Odyssey, calling them all “amateur critics”.
Nolan appeared on a Beijing, China podcast, where he gave an interview to Zhong Shu and launched his criticism of amateur film critics, calling them “a real problem.”
The 56-year-old British-American filmmaker told Shu that there is a “very accessible modern language of storytelling” that they do not see as necessary to filmmaking. He said, “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.’”
“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.”
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“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,” Nolan explained in detail.
The Interstellar creator went on to emphasize that amateur film critics need “to understand the necessity for the mechanisms” because the “lingua franca of storytelling” that Hollywood has created is now considered the only way of storytelling.
He stated, “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,” the Oppenheimer maker remarked.