Christopher Nolan defends human creativity over AI ahead of The Odyssey release

When it comes to whether their upcoming epic, The Odyssey, will be the last of its kind in Hollywood, director Christopher Nolan strongly disagrees with his star, Matt Damon.

Given Nolan’s steadfast dedication to realistic, large-format cinematography and on-location shooting, Damon frequently noted during the film’s press tour that making The Odyssey felt like his final opportunity to work on an old-school Hollywood epic.

“It was a really weird movie for me personally, in the sense that I had an almost nostalgic feeling the entire time I was making it,” Damon said in a GQ conversation earlier this year. “It felt like the movies from when I first started working, and I know that style is going away. I knew this was the last chance I was going to have to do something like this… I don’t think directors are going to be given the resources to shoot movies that way for much longer.”

In a recent interview with The Telegraph, Christopher Nolan stated that while he understands Damon’s point of view, he ultimately disagrees.

“I think I know what [Damon] was driving at, because it does seem like a long time since someone made a film like this, in this type of way—where you travel the world, gather a cast of thousands, and so on,” Nolan remarked. “But there’s a defeatist aspect to viewing it that way, and I don’t agree with it. I think cinema is vital and essential and continues to transform itself. We’ve got all these great, new, young voices in movies making the medium their own and moving it forward.”

Nolan cited two of the summer’s surprise hits, Backrooms and Obsession, as proof that it is too early to write off the future of cinema.

“This is why I never bought into the argument that young audiences’ attention spans are too fried to enjoy a three-hour Greek epic,” Nolan explained. “Those films are so mysterious and ruminative. I mean, parts of Backrooms are like David Lynch at his most obscure, yet young people can’t get enough of them.”

Furthermore, the fact that younger audiences appear to be actively rejecting “AI slop” in favor of handcrafted films like Backrooms has given the Oscar-winning director renewed hope.

“I’ve never seen a more rapid, wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime,” Nolan commented regarding generative AI. “So much energy has been expended on implementing AI, but if you look at that generation’s reaction, they are utterly rejecting it.”

Reflecting on his own children’s interest in the latest tech, Christopher Nolan added, “My own children’s judgment of ‘AI slop’ has been immediate and harsh. They see it for what it is very quickly—and it’s much easier for them to identify it because it grew out of an online world they know incredibly well. While that doesn’t mean every aspect of the technology is useless or meaningless, in filmmaking, it’s hitting at exactly the wrong time. After years of driving toward heavily virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling.”

Nolan reiterated his critique of AI in a separate interview with AFP, via The Guardian:

“The interesting thing with AI is that I’ve never seen a technology so successfully adopted by Wall Street, investors, and tech companies, yet so thoroughly rejected by the public. It’s a very odd thing. Young people, in particular, coined this term ‘AI slop.’ There’s a distinct disdain for AI-generated things… The idea that it can wholesale replace human beings and human creativity, to me, is total nonsense.”