‘Star Wars’ shaped ‘The Odyssey’ in a ‘very profound’ way, Christopher Nolan reveals
Christopher Nolan says Star Wars was key to how he approached The Odyssey — and he explains why that galaxy loomed large.
Instead of opening his epic with a wall of exposition, Christopher Nolan says he reached for a simple line to put viewers in the right headspace for The Odyssey ’s Bronze Age world: “It was a time of apparent magic.” The idea, he explained, was to tell audiences up front how the people in the story understand what they’re seeing — not as fantasy, but as the way an ancient culture explained a mysterious, often frightening reality.
“‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’ was a very profound thing for me as a child because it immediately told you how to engage with what followed,” Nolan recalled.
Borrowing a page from Star Wars
Speaking with the Korean outlet Cine21, Nolan pointed to the famous opening of George Lucas’ original Star Wars (1977 ) as his model for setting the rules fast. He said the challenge with Homer’s tale was ushering modern viewers into a distant era without stopping the movie to explain it.
He told Cine21 that “It was a time of apparent magic.”
Nolan said that line was meant to cue how people of that period interpreted the unexplainable — storms, monsters, signs from the gods — and to frame the film ’s supernatural touches through the eyes of its characters rather than as overt sorcery.
He’s also emphasized that despite being nearly 3,000 years old, the story’s spine — love, loss, family, survival — is universal. Pairing those themes with the kind of wide‑eyed awe he remembers from his earliest trips to the movies was his way of making the myth feel immediate.
The connection is personal: Nolan has said he watched the first Star Wars repeatedly in theaters as a kid, and that it helped shape his sense of what movies can do. That early jolt of wonder, he added, informed how he welcomes audiences into The Odyssey from its very first moments.