It was written an estimated 2700 years ago. It has inspired films for more than a century. And this year and next, Homer’s Odyssey has two movies depicting the plight of its hero Odysseus. Right now, Christopher Nolan – director of brainy blockbusters such as Oppenheimer and Dunkirk – is filming his version of The Odyssey between Italy, Greece, Morocco and Britain. With a reported US$250 million budget and due for release mid next year, the film is being shot using Nolan’s favoured Imax technology. Its cast includes Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Tom Holland, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron and Robert Pattinson in undisclosed roles, but Matt Damon has been confirmed as Odysseus.
Given Nolan’s epic leanings, the size of the production and ensemble, it’s likely the film is tackling the two-decade Odysseus story from Homer’s epic poem in its entirety, complete with the Trojan War, wooden horse and encounters with gods and monsters on his haphazard 10-year journey home.
But before that comes The Return. It’s an Odysseus movie with a much smaller budget, narrower focus, but possibly higher artistic aims.
It has no grand battle scenes, deities, titans, sirens or cyclopes. It’s set against a rocky Bronze Age version of ancient Greece, rather than the classical one depicted in many movies. Its production might be, well, spartan, but it has Ralph Fiennes playing Odysseus in a powerhouse performance that might cause Damon some shaking in his sandals. He plays him as a man whose return from war is not as a triumphant warrior king but as a man who hates himself, thinks he failed those who served under him and the family he left behind for so long. He may well be suffering from Post-Troy Stress Disorder.
In her first film opposite Fiennes since 1996′s The English Patient, Juliette Binoche plays Penelope, the wife of Odysseus and queen of Ithaca, who in her husband’s absence and presumed death, has been beset by suitors wishing to marry their way to the throne.
The film is directed by Uberto Pasolini, an Italian-born veteran of the British screen industry. He’s no relation to Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy’s most controversial director in his day, though he is the nephew of Luchino Visconti, another giant of the country’s cinema history. As a UK-based producer, Pasolini is best known for the runaway international success of 1997′s The Full Monty. The Return is his fourth film as director and follows the acclaimed though little-seen heartbreaking adoption drama, 2020′s Nowhere Special.
He and his co-writers started working on what would become The Return nearly 30 years ago, he tells the Listener via Zoom from his London home. His attachment to the story dates to his childhood in Rome. His parents read him Greek mythology as bedtime stories. He had read Homer at school, in translation and in Greek. And as he grew older his appreciation shifted from the fantasy elements to the plight of Odysseus and Penelope’s teenage son Telemachus in the early books, to those of his parents.
“When I became a husband and a father, that’s really what ended up speaking to me more than anything else about Homer – the idea of who you are in the world, the obligations you have towards your family, your wife, in particular, your children. How do you deal with those obligations? That really became the focus of my interest.”
That emphasis on the human story was why Pasolini and his co-writers exorcised the fantasy characters.
“I wanted to focus on the human emotions and human responsibility for their actions, without the excuse or the help of the gods. The fact that he had been away for 20 years is his responsibility. It’s not Poseidon who keeps him away from home. It’s not Circe who keeps him away from home. It’s him. He is responsible, he is guilty, and therefore, no gods.”
And as a foundation figure in Western literature, Odysseus – or Ulysses in the Latin – has had plenty of reinterpretations, among the best known by Dante, Tennyson, James Joyce, and Margaret Atwood. The one in The Return, says Pasolini, is the man of pain – “the one who cries when he hears the singer sing of the Trojan War … the one who suffers and who carries suffering around him and who brings pain to his own home at the end.”
That post-war trauma theme was partly inspired by accounts of American Vietnam War veterans. A line about the destruction of Troy was from a US army captain reflecting on the Tet Offensive. Penelope speaks words that were first said by an Ohio wife of a veteran about recognising the past so it can be forgotten.
Originally, Pasolini had intended to develop and produce the film only as a directing project for Fiennes, who he had known since the early 1990s when they both worked on the Emmy-winning telemovie A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia, which had been a breakthrough role for the actor.
But after directing himself in 2011′s Coriolanus, the lesser-known Shakespeare tragedy of a disillusioned Roman general, Fiennes thought The Return might be too close and bowed out as director. Years later and after seeing Nowhere Special, Fiennes told Pasolini he’d still like to do the film and asked: “Why don’t you direct?”
Binoche was cast at Fiennes’ suggestion. Having two screen-acting greats playing opposite each other was fantastic for Pasolini the producer but intimidating for Pasolini the director.
“I was scared shitless,” he says, before turning effusive about the pair’s generous, collaborative, giving nature. While shooting on locations in Corfu, mainland Greece and a studio in Rome, their performances were such that he would occasionally forget to say cut.
“There was a scene when we were on an island in front of a real fire in a real hut with some real pigs outside. I literally forgot that this man was an actor, and I was looking at a soldier in pain, talking about his past and what he had done and what he had lived through. We got to the end of the scene, and I would say, ‘Tell me more.’ Him being that man in front of me – it’s one of the things I will always remember till the day I die.”
That Fiennes, now 62, but looking a taut mass of muscle on screen, was a decade older actually worked in the movie’s favour, says Pasolini.
“His age is so much more profound and deep and interesting for the role that he’s playing than he could have been 15 years ago. It would have been a different story. The horror of war, the weight of the guilt for somebody who looked 45 as opposed to somebody who looked 60 – even the 60 that he decides to look – there’s a depth and weight to his performance. I’m happy we made it now.”
And no, when he talked to Fiennes about his early scenes, in which Odysseus is washed up on a beach naked, he didn’t say it would require him going the full monty …
“That’s a good joke. He had no problems. He worked on his body for six months and he certainly wasn’t ashamed of sharing it. But he’s not just physically naked. He’s metaphorically, emotionally, psychologically naked and that was very important … apart from the fact that he looks like a Greek statue.”
The Return is in cinemas now.
