iMacs, not Imax: An exclusive interview with Christopher Notlan, director of the Oddersy

‘Have you seen The Odyssey yet?’ you’ll have heard across pub gardens, office cubicles and family group-chats this past couple months. The divisive film earned over one-and-a-half billion dollars at the box office, drawing in hordes with the promise of epic storytelling, giant battle sequences and the spectacle of seeing Matt Damon’s face larger than you’ve ever seen it before. It’s what they call an event-movie, filled with A-listers and the kind of budget that only the crème de la crème of Hollywood can get their movie-making hands on. But what if The Odyssey was made with way, way less money? Do you still get Travis Scott and Anne Hathaway, Trojan horses and a giant Cyclops?

No, we’re not interviewing Christopher Nolan today (sorry!), but Christopher Notlan, the entirely self serious director behind London-based mini-epic The Oddersy. Clips of the flick went stratospherically viral on Instagram, taking the piss out of your average talking heads on behind-the-scenes interviews – experimental filmmaker and jester Will Norman plays the douchey auteur as he tell the audience “I’ve always, since I was a little boy, wanted to shoot a film entirely on iMacs,” and that’s exactly what he did. The cast is decked out in costume-shop apparel with brush heads glued to football helmets, Helen of Troy becomes a Helen of Tottenham and several scenes make use of the iMac’s Photo Booth effects.

And why not? The Oddersy (which premiered at Close-Up Cinema in London) isn’t just a complete piss-take, but quite an oddly touching reminder of home-made film that you make with your friends, of the microbudget and the alternative ways that movies could and can look – what better movie than The Odyssey to invert and recreate Be Kind Rewind style? It’s Nice That sat down with the visionary himself to talk about the epic journey to make this future classic.

It's Nice That (INT): Great to meet you, Christopher, big fan. What inspired you to create The Oddersey?

Christopher Notlan (CN): My cinematographer came to me offering a camera with 4k, then 8k and then 12k resolution, but I am not focussed on the megapixels, I am focussed on the mega-performance. I wanted to create a film where we were not bound to ideas of technical limitations such as ‘cinematic quality’ or ‘clarity’ and instead, we could let the actors immerse themselves in the scene.

INT: You’re one of our finest auteurs, what’s the Christopher Notlan spin on such a classic text?

CN: My Oddersy puts a subtle modern twist on Homer’s classic. Odysseus is stranded on a remote island with the immortal Calypso, who, after seven years of looking after him, is beginning to tire of his shit.

Back in Ithaca, his wife, Helen of Tottenham, holds down the throne while fending off evil suitors and overzealous fuckboys. Odysseus must piece together how he ended up on the island, find his way home and reclaim his throne.

INT: With such a huge movie, I’m sure there were so many obstacles you had to overcome…

CMH: We were filming on the webcam of a 2009 iMac, so there were of course challenges. The first was that the processing power of the iMac could barely handle video recording. It would lag every time we hit record. To get around this, we rigged an iPad to the back and used the screen record feature to capture the live view of the iMac’s photobooth webcam view. This presented yet another challenge, the actors would have to become the characters from Homer’s text, whilst a 21-inch mirror image of themselves appeared just inches away from their face. But even when the actors would overcome this barrier, we’d sometimes experience yet another challenge, the iPad screen recording would capture everything from the iMac screen, and occasionally this would also involve an unwanted software update notification. Of course, I can’t blame the iMac, I mean it had not had an update since 2009, but several sensational performances were lost to this technical challenge. In the end though, these limitations just motivated us all to dig deeper and finally deliver what we all consider to be ‘absolute cinema.’

INT: Why did you choose the story of The Odyssey?

CMH: I chose to tell the story of Homer’s Odyssey because, after discovering a 2009 iMac, I felt compelled to tackle an equally ancient piece of technology.

The story of a heroic man fighting to return home after years at war resonated deeply with me. Odysseus had to defeat a giant Cyclops, outsmart an evil witch and escape the souls of the underworld. I had to persuade an entire production team to use a 720p webcam from 2009 as our principal camera.

We all have our battles.