Matt Damon left the filming of ‘The Odyssey‘ with the feeling of having done something that will no longer be repeated. Christopher Nolan, its director, believes that this pessimism is unfounded. And in fact, the easiest way to refute it is with the box office data of the last few weeks. Significantly, the most classic and traditional of today’s directors are not afraid of AI.
What Matt Damon said. While promoting the film, Damon said that I had a feeling of nostalgia while filming itbecause it looked like the movies from when he started working, and he admitted that he knew that that type of cinema is ending. He went so far as to say that this was his last chance to make a film like this, and that he does not believe that the industry will have the resources to film this way for much longer.
Nolan’s response. Nolan does not share that diagnosis, and he began to comment on the controversial topic of artificial intelligence. In an interviewthe director noted that he has never seen “a technology so successfully adopted by Wall Street, investors and technology companies, and at the same time so rejected by the public.” He aimed squarely at the younger generation: it was they, he said, who coined the term “AI slop” to describe the content generated by AI that has flooded the networks, and those who “show more disdain” towards everything related to this technology.
No, but. Nolan doesn’t reject AI entirely. He believes it can provide useful tools for working with images, but states that “the idea that AI will completely replace humans and their creativity is, in my opinion, nonsense.” Your opinionbasically, is that the creativity of cinema is stronger: “Cinema is vital and essential, and it continues to transform.”
We are with the people. To justify his words, Nolan defends the attitude of younger viewers and cites, for example, two hits of the season as proof that the twenty-year-old public has not lost interest in films made with real cameras and locations: ‘Backrooms’ and ‘Obsession’.
That is to say, they are indisputable box office hits that, in his opinion, dismantle another idea that has bothered him for a long time, that of young audiences no longer having the attention span for a three-hour epic film. Nolan defended that the films that succeed among that generation are mysterious and reflective, and even compared some parts of ‘Backrooms’ with the most enigmatic cinema of David Lynch.
The ‘Oppenheimer’ precedent. This isn’t the first time Nolan has brought AI into the public conversation. Already in 2023with the premiere of ‘Oppenheimer’, said that he saw very strong parallels between the physicist’s calls for nuclear containment and the warnings of AI experts who asked to slow the development of the technology, citing among them Geoffrey Hinton, the researcher who left Google to speak more freely about the existential risk posed by advanced AI. Already then he insisted that AI can end up being a powerful tool, but that the responsibility cannot fall solely on technology.
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