Christopher Nolan has revealed he tried and failed to include one of the oldest jokes in Western literature in his epic adaptation of The Odyssey, a nearly 3,000-year-old pun that simply could not survive the translation process.
The admission came during an appearance on The Daily Show, where host Jon Stewart praised the film enthusiastically before raising a complaint from a colleague who had studied the original Greek text.
“Apparently, there is a joke that Odysseus makes with the Cyclops,” Stewart said. “He was very upset that was not in the movie.”
Nolan took it in good spirit. “I understand. It’s a pun. Puns in translation are tough. I tried. It was not possible to work in it.”
The joke in question is a cleverly constructed bit of wordplay rooted in Odysseus’s cunning.
In Homer’s original, when the hero encounters the murderous Cyclops in his cave, he gives his name as “Nobody”, Outis in Greek.
Later, when Odysseus blinds the creature by driving a stake into its eye, the Cyclops screams for help.
Other Cyclopes arrive and ask who is attacking him. The blinded creature’s answer, that “Nobody” is doing it, causes the others to misunderstand and walk away.
It is a deception that pays off in much the same way as the Trojan Horse. The wordplay deepens further in the original Greek, but that is precisely where the translation problem lies.
Stewart’s response to missing out on the ancient gag was to offer Nolan one of the more memorable compliments of the film’s press tour: “I guess what I’m saying is: Homer ain’t got shit on you.”
Nolan also discussed his unconventional depiction of the Trojan Horse, which appears in the film half-submerged on a beach rather than on wheels outside the city gates.
He revealed the idea came to him years earlier when he was briefly attached to direct Troy.
“I came up with this idea of the horse half buried in the sand, about to be destroyed or carried away by the waves. So that when the Trojans find it, the last thing it looks like, there’s no wheels, it doesn’t look like something that’s meant to be carried into the city. That image stuck with me for decades. How can we present this to an audience in a way that they can believe it? And that became the mantra for everybody on the film with every sequence.”
The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon as Odysseus alongside Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron and Samantha Morton among others, is in cinemas now.
2026-07-15 00:59:00
