May 6th, 2025
Like any man must when thrust through space and time, the celebrated Homer cuts a distinctive — yet distinctly out-of-place — figure among the gilded lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Not wrong necessarily, but certainly anachronistic and maybe even a little irrelevant. Strolling in from the red carpet, he appears just as a fragmented old bronze figurine might on solo display in the grandeur of Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern. Not only small and archaic and disparate, but in some sense receding. Homer is a poet in the age of hashtags, a reciter in the age of pop stars, an oracle in the age of influencers. He is neither a myth nor a legend. He is just a man, and more so a man out of step and far out of scale with the spectacle the culture demands that this moment — his moment — provide. And after the better part of a day spent together, one comes away with the distinct impression that all that discongruity is just fine by him.
It is true he looks the part of Hollywood’s man of the hour. With a ruggedly handsome face and a full yet fulsome beard set upon a trim figure, Homer presents as though he might be twenty-eight or twenty-eight hundred. He is outfitted with a Loro Piana fleece in gold, vintage Rick Owens harem pants, and Hermès sandals, all rounded out by a tasteful Omega on his wrist. The only mark of his provenance is the last part of his ensemble, a small ancient gold signet ring faced with a simple engraving of a centaur. Our initial greeting also demonstrates how quickly his speech has adapted from dactylic hexameter to the far more prosaic argot of the industry, as he apologizes for his tardiness to our brunch with a wry attribution to having had ‘quite the odyssey’ driving down Sunset Boulevard from Michael Rubin’s home in the Hollywood Hills. But all of it strikes hollow. The desperate artifice of a man forced to hide incognito when he should be most at home.
We settle in to brunch by the pool. Calamari to start, swordfish tacos for him, a turkey club for me, and all chased by his chosen wine, a bottle of fine Agiorgitiko that runs as dark as the sea. It is the ideal lubricant, and after a few minutes of idle chit-chat he preempts me to broaching the obvious topic of the day: after numerous tellings of his work ranging from the literary (‘Ulysses’) to the metaphorical (‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’) to the nostalgic (‘Cold Mountain’) to the bombastic (‘Troy’) to the juvenile (‘Percy Jackson’), how does it feel to have one of the great auteurs of the era take on the project of a truly faithful adaptation of the Odyssey? Homer admits his instinctive response was trepidation. Should it fall flat, any more creative interpretation of his source work necessarily shoulders much of the blame upon itself. The critics, he notes, ‘invariably reach for what was different to explain what went wrong’ with no more than a passing note that his work may be ‘unadaptable’, which can hardly be blamed on him given that his work was never meant to be adapted — at least not by mortal minds. As he recounts, ‘for Troy I wanted Dionysus, not David Benioff, to write the screenplay, but Wolfgang Petersen was worried he just couldn’t stay sober long enough to keep the process on-schedule and under-budget. Which turned out to be foolish of course, as Dionysus’ industry and genius just shone through his later work on The Hangover.’ But like his Laocoön he lost the argument, and Roger Ebert and the rest of the critical press bit the whole enterprise with all the writhing ferocity of a slither of sea serpents. One can tell the wounds still fester.
With ‘Chris’ Nolan, however, everything is different. Homer admits he did not foresee just how easy and exciting the collaborative process would be. One topic on which they effortlessly aligned was the limited use of CGI — and most especially the complete avoidance of Generative AI — in the production process. For Homer ‘it is a moral question. Do you respect human ingenuity? Do you respect divine inspiration? I’ve always had the most immense respect — and I reuse the word “respect” here with absolute intention — immense respect for the great artisans and builders: Phidias, Hadrian, Ray Harryhausen, even the almighty Hephaestus. That capacity to immanentize what only they can perceive within their mind’s inner eye. And in Chris I’ve found someone who similarly respects the importance of those arts and, crucially, the artisans who undertake them.’ I asked whether he expected this of Nolan going in, and he admitted it wasn’t until after their first meeting that it came into focus. According to Homer, he’d never actually seen Oppenheimer until learning of the rights pickup on the Odyssey and an ensuing casual lunch with Nolan (‘I’m not a two films in one day type of person, and just absolutely adored Barbie. And then I guess I just never quite got around to it…’). As Homer sees it, there are two images he could most see being justified in approaching through CGI: the detonation of a nuclear bomb and the collapse of the great walls of Troy. The fact that Nolan was still committed to (mostly) practical effects for the former was the ‘siren song’ that brought Homer fully committed to their collaboration.
As the morning drifts away and we prepare to take our leave a rather humorous occurrence — a classic ‘only in LA’ moment — presents itself. As Homer deals with the check, all of us — waiter included — can feel the attention in the room shift towards the door, that true blue Hollywood energy only the entrance of a genuine movie star can engender. We look over to see the star in question is the radiant Anne Hathaway, recently announced to be a player in none other than The Odyssey itself. To this point in our meal our little table has, near as I can tell, received no more than a passing glance from the rest of the clientele. The aforementioned waiter, though professional and diligent, has also shown no sign of recognition of my dining partner’s literary notoriety. But as Hathaway crosses the room she spots Homer, and briefly detours to say hello. It is a quick greet, very friendly and appropriately intimate, but taking no more than a dozen seconds. Still her beneficence transfers the attention of the room onto us. Now Homer is a temporary celebrity, though earned not as one of the great figures of artistic history, but rather as a friend of — or at least a knower of — Anne Hathaway. Only now does he have a room full of suitors desperate for his attention. The absurdity of the moment is not lost on Homer himself, as we head for the door with numerous eyes and more than one phone camera fixed upon us, he whispers to me ‘sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns who briefly chatted with Anne Hathaway.’ I laugh, he grins, and passing the lobby we walk the red carpet back out to the parking lot, each step for Homer the next in his picaresque journey twisting and turning towards a long overdue filmic fame.