The Nolan AI Trojan horse analogy arrived with a laugh. Asked by French YouTuber Hugo Travers whether artificial intelligence might be a gift that conceals something darker, Christopher Nolan, director of the newly released The Odyssey, agreed, and then sharpened the metaphor. ‘I think AI is a Trojan horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside,’ he said. ‘It’s a transparent horse, it’s made of glass.’
The remark landed as more than a clever soundbite. Nolan is president of the Directors Guild of America, which secured explicit AI protections in its 2023 three-year collective bargaining agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, framing those wins as advances on ‘new key issues like artificial intelligence’ and setting the goal of ensuring DGA members would not be replaced by technological advances. When Nolan talks about AI scepticism, he speaks from inside the industry’s front line on the question.
A Scepticism He Finds Healthy, Particularly Among the Young
What genuinely interests Nolan is the public’s reaction. ‘I’ve never seen a technology advancing so rapidly [that’s been] so completely rejected by the public,’ he told Travers. He pointed to the speed with which young people coined and deployed the phrase ‘AI slop’ as a dismissal, a piece of folk taxonomy that, in his reading, signals an unusually alert audience.
‘Everybody’s suspicion of it is so extreme, particularly young people,’ he said. ‘The reaction to AI videos online and people my children’s age immediately calling it “AI slop” and coining that term and just putting it in a box.’
For Nolan, that wariness is a feature, not a failure of enthusiasm. ‘That’s a very healthy scepticism, because technology is always going to give us great gifts… but it has to be viewed with scepticism,’ he said. He went further: ‘The motives of the people giving it to us also have to be viewed with scepticism. That’s when we’ll get the best out of a new technology, rather than just blind faith that everything’s going to be great.’
He declined to specify what he considers the sharpest threat from AI, but Hollywood’s unease around the technology is well established. The writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023 both made AI protections a central demand. The Writers Guild of America ultimately won contract language that prevents any form of AI from being classified as a ‘writer’ and bars AI-generated content from being treated as source material for credit or compensation purposes.
The Nolan AI Trojan Horse and a Career Built on Techno-Scepticism
The AI remarks fit a consistent pattern. When The New York Times asked Nolan recently whether he considers himself a technophobe, he replied: ‘I think of myself as a techno-skeptic.’ His objection, he explained, is not to new technology itself but to the way it tends to be sold as a replacement for systems that still have value. ‘I embrace new technology all the time, but it tends to be sold to people at the expense of systems that might still be valid and viable,’ he said. ‘That’s what I saw in my industry, throwing the baby out with the bath water. We almost lost film!’
The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon as Odysseus in his third collaboration with Nolan after Interstellar and Oppenheimer, is the first feature film shot entirely on IMAX film and cameras. According to CBS News, IMAX film delivers image resolution up to three times higher than digital cameras, and Nolan’s team worked with IMAX to engineer a special housing to muffle the camera’s operational noise. Every cut in the film is done by hand.
Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, who won the best cinematography Oscar for Oppenheimer and has worked with Nolan on four previous films, collaborated with Kodak to produce the first stock of IMAX 65mm black-and-white film for the production. To demonstrate that IMAX cameras could capture usable dialogue audio, van Hoytema shot test footage of a child reading lyrics from David Bowie’s ‘Sound And Vision’ and presented it to Nolan as a large close-up on the IMAX screen.
It is a characteristically Nolan method: prove the technology on its own terms, then push it further. His scepticism of AI follows the same logic. The horse is transparent, he says. The question Hollywood is still working out is what happens after you let it through the gate.
