Next week, Christopher Nolan’s hotly anticipated The Odyssey is finally coming to the 2026 movie schedule. It is, of course, the director’s first film since 2023’s Oppenheimer, which not only blew up at the box office but also took home a slew of Oscars. That included Best Picture and Best Director for Nolan. It wasn’t a clean sweep, however, and Nolan’s son was all too keen to point that out his dad while the director was writing the script for The Odyssey.
Nolan Didn’t Win One Oscar He Was Nominated For
While Oppenheimer was nominated for an incredible 13 Academy Awards, it “only” won seven. Of the seven, Nolan won two. He was nominated for a third. As he was writing The Odyssey, which has so far been met with positive reactions ahead of its release, his son visited him in his office one day, as he related to the BBC:
My son walked into my office while I was writing on The Odyssey and said, ‘Where are your Oscars?’ He’d been away for the whole time.
Nolan had a very reasonable response to why he didn't want to have the Oscar statues in front of him, saying:
I said to him very seriously, I was like ‘Well, I’m trying to write a new project, and if I’ve got the Oscars sitting there on the shelf, think about how daunting that would be.’
As any kid might be, he wasn’t impressed by Dad’s answer. Nolan admits:
He looked at me [and] he said, ‘But you didn’t win for writing.’
Now, that is a roast! Sure, Oppenheimer was the most-awarded film of 2023, and Nolan took home his first two Oscars in his illustrious career. And sure, it makes sense that Nolan wouldn’t want to be constantly reminded of the pressure to create a fantastic follow-up to that. But neither Oscar was for writing (Cord Jefferson took home the award for Best Adapted Screenplay for American Fiction), as his son so eloquently pointed out, so why hide them? Only a family member could get away with such a burn, and Nolan clearly appreciated the barb.
The Pressure Must Feel Very Real
Christopher Nolan's films have been some of the best movies in Hollywood for decades now, and with each movie, his ambition and scope have grown. At the time, Oppenheimer seemed like the pinnacle of that ambition, but now comes The Odyssey. Adapting the epic has been an epic undertaking, by all accounts. It is the first movie shot entirely on IMAX cameras, for example. Not to mention the poem being one of the most beloved works in history, and a foundation of Western culture.
It’s easy to see just how daunting it would be and why someone would want to forget about past successes for the moment as he struck out on this epic journey, much like Odysseus does in the story. Also like Odysseus, Nolan has his family to keep him in check and grounded.
