Full Transcript: Jeff Wright on Homer, Nolan, and The Odyssey

A fun and educational interview with a modern Homeric storyteller

Seldon Crisis Episode 48: Jeff Wright on Homer, Nolan, and The Odyssey

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[Opening theme music with voiceover]

Jeff Wright

“I really have no problems with anything that Nolan did. He had to make an Odyssey, and he made an Odyssey. And as far as I’m concerned, the conversation about Odysseus and these stories is 3,000 years old, and Nolan’s is just another contribution to the conversation.”

Joel McKinnon

Welcome back to Seldon Crisis. This episode marks a pretty significant departure from anything previously on this podcast. It’s not at all about science fiction, though I’m pretty sure Isaac Asimov would have taken an interest in the topic, as he was very well versed in history and it is very much about history and a great expanse of time and the human experience.

About 10 years or so ago, long before I’d had a glimmer of an idea of starting a podcast of my own, I encountered one that centered on a topic of deep interest to me, the stories from Greek mythology, and particularly one such story that had a profound effect on the cultural memories of the ancient Greeks, that is the stories of Homer about the semi mythical Trojan War. The podcast was appropriately titled Trojan War, the Podcast with the alluring history’s most awesome epic. It started with the tale of a marriage on Mount Olympus between a God and a mortal, and a contest that precipitated a compelling drama, the kidnapping of the most beautiful woman in Greece, Helen, and the horrific war that ensued to bring her back and punish her captors.

The author and narrator of the podcast was a natural born storyteller himself, a man named Jeff Wright, and I immediately took a strong liking to his approach in telling the tale, at once scholarly and respectful and wildly humorous. His first episode had me hooked, and I rapidly listened to every One of the 19 episodes that followed up to and including the Sack of Troy. He followed that up with another podcast covering the other great epic from Homer with the Odyssey: The Podcast.

I emailed Jeff and got to know him through a series of exchanges, discovering that he and his wife were avid canoeists who were in the habit of engaging in regular aquatic adventures of their own. Recently, I became aware that Jeff had published a novel covering the entire Trojan War in greater depth, entitled the Full Disclosure Iliad. When Christopher Nolan’s film of the epic was released this summer, I got in touch with Jeff and asked if he might come on Selden Crisis and talk about his view of these great epics and his take on the film, and he readily agreed. I think you will enjoy our conversation.

Joel McKinnon

Well, welcome Jeff!

Jeff Wright

Hey Joel, it’s great to be here and to finally meet you at least virtually in person after chit chatting online for years.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah, this is the first time I’ve heard your voice since the last episode of the Odyssey podcast. And so I’ve kind of missed it for a while. You know, I was listening to you narrate, as I went to sleep at night and on while I hiked and just, just an amazing breadth of content in those two episodes or those two podcasts. The Trojan War: The Podcast and Odyssey: The Podcast. Brilliant stuff.

Jeff Wright

I guess it would have. I was doing the math once. I think you likely then got stuck with me inside your head for well over 35 hours in total. I know I tell that to my wife and she says, those poor people. But anyway.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah, well, the format was really interesting how you did half of it as the narration of the story, and then the last half of each episode was, commentary about it. And that’s where you got really interesting to me. It’s like the additional insight that you have from having read this so long and having studied this so long.

Jeff Wright

You know, the funniest thing about that is that when I was creating the podcasts, that wasn’t part of the original plan. I was figuring I’d just tell the story. But it was a former high school history teacher in me. I just couldn’t resist. People need context. People need a little bit of a framing for this because of course, that’s what teachers do all the time. And so I tried integrating my framing and context into the story itself and I kept pulling myself out of the story.

Joel McKinnon

Right.

Jeff Wright

So essentially I decided, well, we’ll put in the post story commentaries and I can take off my omniscient narrator hat and put on my Jeff the teacher hat. And. And then the lovely thing is, and what I frankly had expected with Trojan War: The Podcast is that, oh, likely about 75% of listeners would just skip, you know, jump to the next episode. And in fact, if you listen to the podcasts at the end of the narration of every chapter, I’ll say, and some of you are likely to head on to the next chapter. And for those of you who want to stick around, here’s what you can do.

What surprised me, Joel, was I started getting feedback from the listeners. And my guess is about 90% of listeners listen to the post story commentaries. And actually for a lot of listeners, they’re the highlight because they’re, they’re what differentiates my telling from just the standard telling. It’s sort of that value added thing or whatever.

Joel McKinnon

Well, probably a lot of them were like me, familiar with the story already and you know, had read it or, you know, knew a lot about it and so it was the commentary that was really interesting, was the, the real value of it. But I loved both. I mean, your, your storytelling is, is awesome. I, I have to say my favorite thing, and we’ll get back to this probably is the trial of Odysseus that, that you did late in the Odyssey podcast.

Jeff Wright

Let’s put a pin on that and get back to it because I can tell you a story about that which, which will be fun when we get there. But no, the post story commentaries worked and actually, and again we’re leaping way ahead here. But when I eventually sat down to write my book, The Full Disclosure Iliad, and I was playing around with formats, ultimately I ended up going, well, you know, don’t, don’t try to fix what’s not broken. So the end of every 20 of the 22 chapters of the Full Disclosure Iliad, where I narrate the story of the Trojan War epic, omniscient third person narrator, you flip the page at the end of the chapter and you get Jeff’s notes, which are essentially my new name for post story commentaries.

And I do the same thing. I pull back the curtain and talk as the author and discuss not only all of the things that you get inside the podcasts, but I spent a lot of time talking about the competing sources or the challenges I faced in compiling the chapter and telling the chapter and that sort of thing. So it’s sort of a little bit of how the sausage is made kind of thing, which and so I’ve yet to get enough feedback from the book to find out if people like that or not. The book is so new, but it’s a very same format and it’s very liberating for me.

Joel McKinnon

That’s great. Well, I’m really enticed to read it now and review the whole wonderful story. And a lot of people don’t understand and realize that’s the Iliad and the Odyssey are only a part of the story.

Jeff Wright

Oh, I know.

Joel McKinnon

There’s so much more.

Jeff Wright

Oh, I know.Tthe number of times on the live stage when I’ll be waiting in the wings in the background and whoever is up in the stage introducing me. And they’ll sort of say, and this evening, our featured performer, Jeff Wright, will be telling two of Homer’s most beloved stories from the Iliad. The story of the wedding on Mount Olympus and the story of the Judgment of Paris. And of course, neither story exists inside of Homer’s Iliad. But the general public doesn’t know that. And I’ve got tired of stepping onto the stage and upstaging myself by correcting the generous and warm introduction. So I just lean into the story and we figure it out with the audience later. But yeah, it’s a standard misconception.

Joel McKinnon

And the big shocker is that there is no Trojan Horse in the Iliad.

Jeff Wright

Oh, that one. That one is even more of a shocker for audiences. I was, I was party to a live performance of the Iliad years ago and a Director pulled together 18 really good professional storytellers and generously included me in the mix and said, we’re going to do a full 18 hour performance of the Iliad. We’re going to start on a Saturday morning at the National Arts center in Canada’s capital city and each teller will get 45 minutes to tell a section of the Iliad. So we had to pare it down a little bit, but basically every teller would get up, they’d do their 30 to 45 minute memorized reading of a section of the Iliad, bow, the audience would politely applaud, the lights would dim, the next teller would come up, and we worked our way through it from morning to afternoon into the evening.

When we got to the final teller about 9pm at night said, “and so they buried Hector, tamer of horses,” which you and I know is the final lines of Homer’s Iliad. He bowed, the audience politely applauded and then sat in their seat waiting for the next teller to come out and continue the story. And when the cast came out and did their collective bow and the house lights came up, there were people in the National Arts center saying, where’s the freaking horse?And you know, it was a little awkward. The poor director had to come out and explain that, no, you have to go home now, the story is over.

Joel McKinnon

Right, I know. Well, it’s not a problem with your podcast because you get there.

Jeff Wright

Yeah, eventually. Yes.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. So I have a couple questions to start off. What got you interested in this in the first place? What pulled you into thinking about ancient history and the Trojan War stories and the Odyssey and how’s it kept you going, how has it become such a huge part of your life, all these years?

Jeff Wright

It’s a very humbling origin story. It all happened quite by accident. I was a high school English teacher and somehow, full confession, I got through an honours English degree and a literature degree without ever being aware of Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey. Yeah, Four years of university, took all the literature courses and the closest I got was, I remember in the third year, a prof gave us this poem about a guy named Ulysses and apparently he’d been off at sea and poem by Tennyson. And he’d been off at sea and now he’s coming home and thought his kid was boring and his wife was dull and, you know, but I had no context for it.

So I was now happily teaching grade nine English and had got through, you know, Kill a Mockingbird, Macbeth, a bunch of other stories. And then the day came when the department head told me, on Monday you begin teaching Greek epic and copies of the Iliad are in the book room. So not knowing what the Iliad was, I wandered down to the book room. And it was a busy time in my life. I had two very young kids. I was overwhelmed with school prep. So I committed a cardinal pedagogical error. I thought, I’ll just grab the books, I’ll bring them back, we’ll hand every kid a copy of the Iliad and then I’ll stand at the room and for the first period I’ll just read out loud and get them into the story.

So 30 grade nines on a Friday afternoon, I trundled into the class, opened what was a really bad, I later discovered, translation of the Iliad. It was a free one that had been sitting in my school’s English department for pretty well a century. I opened it up and I started to read out loud. And within three paragraphs I was entirely lost. And you know, “Sing goddess the rage of Achilles.” And it made no sense at all to me. And the kids were baffled too.

I ran to my department head at the end of the period and said, how do I teach this? And he said, why don’t you — there was an eminent teacher in the department, about 25 years older than me, named Mr. Pritchard. He said, “Pritchard seems to have figured out how to teach Greek epics.”

So I wandered into Pritchard’s class the next week and I watched this guy come into the room, this teacher, 30 kids trundled in, wide eyed and excited. Mr. Pritchard came in, closed the door, dimmed the lights, leaned into the kids and said, “So do you remember where we were when we left the story? Hector’s Trojans were in terrible trouble. They’d been trapped behind their walls for 10 years. The city was starving. They didn’t have enough forces to come out and confront the Greeks. And it looked as though Agamemnon and the Greeks were going to win the war. And then, right on the cusp of victory, a solitary boat sailed into the Greek camp. A priest of Apollo got off the boat and made a simple request of Agamemnon, which Agamemnon refused. And within days, the Trojans were winning the war.”

And then Pritchard smiled with a wink in his eye and said, “So, shall I tell you what happened next?” And all the kids, of course, were leaning in.

And the weird thing, Joel, is I knew none of the backstory. Yeah, I was already leaning in. And so what I realized is, oh, there’s a story here. So I got Mr. Pritchard’s permission to sit in the back of his class for the next two weeks, listen to his class, during my preparation period, frantically take notes, then run into my classroom and try to replicate Pritchard. I’m sure that my first year or two of telling the Trojan War epic were a complete disaster. But even in spite of the fact that I didn’t know the primary source, and I was basically trying to parrot somebody and fake it, I realized there’s something here.The kids were leaning in. This is a kick ass story.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah, well, enthusiasm, passion for something like this is contagious.

Jeff Wright

Exactly.

Joel McKinnon

If you have it and you’re up there reading it and you’re showing your passion for it, you know, people are going to get interested.

Jeff Wright

Exactly. So essentially what happened is I realized that the trick to telling this story was, well, eventually to actually learn it and do some scholarly research as a professional teacher, but essentially to hook the kids in the story and the plot and the characters. So we do that for a period, and then we take the next period to take out the primary text, and I’d select a passage and we’d look at the text and we’d look at all the things that Homer does that are particularly special or unique or scholarly. And then just when the kids were beginning to suspect that I was actually an English teacher and not a storyteller, I’d be back into telling more story.

And it worked like a charm. And it was so much fun. I mean, I was gifted with, I argue, the best primary source story ever written. And I got to teach it. So I was so passionate about it, within a couple of years, I’d gone back to my colleague, Mr. Pritchard and said, “Hey, what about if I were to be the guy that took the lead on learning how to tell the Odyssey and we can tell it to the grade nine English students so they can do the Trojan War epic and the iliad in grade nine. And then when they come in to grade 10, we’ll give them the Odyssey, the sequel.” And I built that story, and it worked just as well.

So that was the start of my career as a storyteller. And then it just kind of exploded from there. I was teaching it in classrooms. Eventually there were more classrooms in my school than there were time slots in my available teaching time.

So a principal said, “You’re going to have to bring all the students to the auditorium and you, Jeff, are going to have to stand on the stage.” And I had to turn my Trojan War story into two full performances of two hours each. So I got the Trojan War epic down to four hours on stage and the Odyssey down to four hours on stage. And I did that for a few years for my own high school. Eventually other schools called and said, “Hey, we have to do the curriculum. Apparently you have this guy that can make it interesting.”

And so I started touring all the other high schools. I did that for a few years and then dropped in an open mic night and thought, I wonder if adults would like this stuff? And kind of ran a version of the Judgment of Paris beauty contest, which I told to the students — by an adult audience. And that gave me the latitude to spice it up a little. I didn’t have to worry about 15 year olds, you know, getting too much information on an Aphrodite and turned out that well, as you know, this is an adult story.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah.

Jeff Wright

And the adults loved it. And eventually I learned how to tell it to adults on the professional stage and then eventually thought, you know, I can only keep them in the seats for so many hours, so maybe I’ll try doing what Charles Dickens did and doing a serialized story with his. You know, he used to send out a chapter a month or something like that. So that was the genesis of Trojan War: The Podcast.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah.

Jeff Wright

And then Odyssey: The Podcast followed.

Joel McKinnon

It’s just perfect for a podcast.

Jeff Wright

Yeah, it is.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. And the Judgment of Paris, the Wedding on Olympus, is just the perfect intro to the whole thing.

Jeff Wright

Oh, I know.

Joel McKinnon

Good. So good.

Jeff Wright

Yeah.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. You bring that to life in a big way. So before this big Christopher Nolan film that just came out, how many adaptations had you already seen?

Jeff Wright

Of the Odyssey itself or —

Joel McKinnon

Of either the Odyssey, the Iliad, and anything like that?

Jeff Wright

Quite a few. If we go beyond the Iliad into the whole Trojan War epic, that allows me permission to include plays by Aeschylus or things like that. Also, the ones that stick out in my memory, because they’re the ones that podcast listeners and book readers refer to the most, are Wolfgang Peterson’s big blockbuster epic Troy, right. Starring. I think it’s Brad Pitt, right? Yeah, yeah, the man of a thousand abs. Kind of, you know, like a really buff Brad Pitt and everything. And that seems to be the touchstone calling card for most what I call the classically curious people that don’t have a formal education in the classics, but just get into this stuff. I think most of them start with the movie Troy. It’s just a big, easy to digest sword and sandals blockbuster of a movie.

Joel McKinnon

Can you guess what my biggest complaint about the movie Troy is? What is missing from the story in the movie Troy? That’s in the Iliad, the big thing that’s missing?

Jeff Wright

Well, the big complaint all the time is in Troy, they go and kill Menelaus early in the plot in the duel with Paris.

Joel McKinnon

Oh, yeah, that’s true.

Jeff Wright

So.

Joel McKinnon

There’s a lot of bad —

Jeff Wright

Yeah, but the real thing that’s missing is Peterson’s completely removed all the deities. There’s no. There’s no gods.

Joel McKinnon

That’s what I’m talking about.

Jeff Wright

There’s no divine intervention.

Joel McKinnon

And I loved the gods. That was like my favorite part of reading the Iliad. I mean, it was a huge part of reading the Iliad. This interplay between the gods and the humans, you know, and how the gods were constantly messing with them and just like, you know, making things hell for humans.

Jeff Wright

Yeah. And you know what’s so fascinating about that is I remember watching Troy and going, yeah, where are the gods and the goddesses? And then back about 10 years ago, Netflix produced a miniseries called Troy Fall of a City. You can still watch it, folks on Netflix —

Joel McKinnon

I forgot about that one. I haven’t seen it.

Jeff Wright

I actually did a podcast on it aspirationally, basically four episodes on what I think is going to happen and what I think the perils and the pitfalls and the opportunities will be. And I released those episodes before I saw the Fall of a City. And then my commitment was I’d watch the episode in real time and I’d release the podcast with my podcast response to the episode within 24 hours. So I didn’t really. I had to kind of knock them off. So I watched. Watched it in an hour long episode. And then I produced, you know, my response to it in real time.

The problem was that I had a brilliant marketing plan. I thought it would work brilliantly because Netflix had said we’re going to release one episode per week, so I was going to have time to build suspense and everything like that. But Netflix had cut some deal with BBC that had co produced the series. And BBC released the entire eight hours of Troy Fall of a City in one block weeks before it came to North America. And the critics absolutely panned it. They said it was garbage.

And so Netflix, trying to recover their losses, just dumped the entire thing onto the North American audience all at once. And my plan for having a week between episodes for conversation with listeners, listeners and, and everything like that all just went up in smoke. Netflix tried to do the gods in Troy Fall of a City. And I realized why so many directors shy away from the gods. Because the gods in Troy Fall of a City are ridiculous.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. And that’s the problem is you. It’s too easy to make them a caricature and, and just, you know, jokes.

Jeff Wright

And if, even if we want to leap forward right into Christopher Nolan’s recent Odyssey, you could say that Nolan’s Odyssey includes the gods, but that’s being generous. Nolan’s Odyssey doesn’t really include the gods. He’s got, he’s got an Athena wandering around and I think, I’m not even sure she gets one speaking line at most in the entire movie. She’s just sort of this vague presence in the background that Odysseus can see. We don’t know if anyone else can see her, but, but Nolan has stripped Athena of everything, of her entire delightful, witty, conversational personality from the original primary source of the Odyssey. None of the other deities are ever depicted.

Joel McKinnon

Her love of watching massacres.

Jeff Wright

Yeah, yeah, I know. Or precipitating them.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. So she has no agency.

Jeff Wright

She has no agency. And none of the other deities make an appearance in the movie, so Nolan couldn’t find a way to make them work either.

Joel McKinnon

Right, right, I know, I hadn’t thought about that.

Jeff Wright

I think deities work really well in non visual media where you can graft onto your imagination what they might look like or sound like.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah.

Jeff Wright

But as soon as you try to bring them to the big screen or the television screen, they end up looking silly. It’s hard to take them seriously.

Joel McKinnon

I mean, I guess that’s a lot. That is culture and you know, how, how different we are than the audience that heard these epics in the first place because they took them seriously.

Jeff Wright

Exactly. And even then, we don’t know in what ways or how they took them seriously. I think our challenge is likely that, particularly inside, you know, North American, European culture, loosely Judeo Christian, in our understanding of monotheistic deities, we don’t really quite know what to do with 12 dysfunctional anthropomorphic gods. And you know, that’s what Homer gives us. It’s really hard to know what to do with them.

Joel McKinnon

I like to think of them as like the Marvel superheroes. You know, like, they’re this cast of characters that all have some superpower and you can just make all kinds of different stories with them.

Jeff Wright

It’s likely a good way of thinking about them. But even when you. Even when you look at. When Marvel tries to give us a really powerful deity, either they have to water them down to Thor. You know, he is a thunder god. You know, that gives him some cred, but they have to put him into human form and he doesn’t look omnipresent or omnipotent or anything. Or you get like, I don’t know, Thanos in the last of the Avengers movies. And to my mind, he doesn’t look scary. He looks sort of a little ridiculous on the big screen.

So it is a problem. On the other hand, I think as soon as you take the gods out of the plot, you’ve significantly watered down a lot of the pleasures and the joys of reading Iliad and Odyssey.

Joel McKinnon

Yep, yep. Absolutely.

Jeff Wright

Yeah.

Joel McKinnon

So let’s talk about the guy — Odysseus. Odysseus himself. Really. Who was he? What was he all about? Nolan kind of gave us one version, not exactly what Homer gave us. And I’m kind of curious what your take is on the one Homer gave us. You know, what was he. Was he an action hero like Nolan gave us? Or was he, you know, was he more of a strategist, a nerd, you know, a war nerd? Was he a romantic hero? More of a philanderer, because he liked to sleep with goddesses. And he did do some nasty things like killing a lot of people. And there were questions about his leadership abilities based on the stats, you know, of what happened to his crew. So what do you. What’s your take on him?

Jeff Wright

Well, I’ll start with this as a storyteller, so somebody who’s behind a microphone or standing on stage or writing a book, telling the story. By far and away, Odysseus is my favorite character to tell. I just absolutely delight in a storyteller in having a character like Odysseus. So I think the reason why, just in broad pictures before I get into specific elements of them, is I actually think Odysseus is Homer or if we assume different Homers, really in Odyssey.

I think Odysseus is Homers’ — plural — most interesting character. He’s certainly my favorite to tell. And I think the reason why is because a lot of Homer’s other characters, you can pretty well get them down to a fairly stock description on what makes them tick. They, they’re standard. So let’s take somebody low hanging fruit like Ajax. Okay. Alpha male heroic warrior in the old school, you know, believes in honor. Achilles, alpha male warrior in the old school with an overweening arrogance and a complete lack of any interest or empathy for anyone but himself.

But not Patrlocus.

Oh yeah, sure, okay. Yeah, the one outlier there. Yes. And we could get back to that. But I mean, you know, Hector, I guess he has a couple of moments. You could say that he’s less than one dimensional, but I mean he’s largely a pretty, you know, everybody likes Hector all the time, so.

And then you get to Odysseus and the thing that makes Odysseus so interesting is that you can’t help but be intrigued and cheer for him because he’s so clever and witty and his, his ability to use language and to manipulate language to his advantage or to be opportunistic is delightful. He’s a classic trickster in that sense. He’s really, really sharp. But then just when you’re beginning to delight in him, he uses those same skills, his same incredible wit and intelligence to do some absolutely horrifying and abominable things. I mean he’s, he’s, he can be delightful and then despicable —

And stupid things —

And then turn around, and his mouth, which is his greatest asset, sometimes he should just learn how to shut it up because he gets himself into all sorts of trouble. I mean, you know, you know, announcing to a cyclops he’s just blinded who, who thinks, you know, the cyclops thinks the guy’s name will blinded him is “No one,” and you know, Odysseus could sail away from the cave happily with Polyphemus the cyclops trying to, you know, curse “No one.” But instead Odysseus can’t resist it. He gets onto his boat and he says, “Hey you stupid cyclops, guess who blinded you? I Am Odysseus, son of Lauraides of the island of Ithaca. Here’s my address, my mailing address, my postal code, my DNA. Curse away.”

Joel McKinnon

And tell your dad.

Jeff Wright

Tell your dad. It’s. It’s staggering, staggering stupidity because — so I think the reason I find Odysseus interesting is let’s go back and use the very controversial, but I personally love it. Emily Wilson’s translation in her Odyssey of the Greek word polytropist, she refers to Odysseus as “complicated.”

Joel McKinnon

Yeah.

Jeff Wright

And I, for my money, that pretty well sums it up. You look at him one way, you love him. You look at him another way, you despise him. You look at another way, you just show. Shake your head at his brilliance. Another way you shake your head at his gross military incompetence. You know, that he genuinely, passionately cares for Penelope and wants to get home, but well, “That goddess’s bed looks kind of interesting. I think I’ll stay a year.” He’s maddening. Delightful. I don’t know about you, Joel, but for me, Odysseus strikes me as the most, for a modern 21st century or late 20th century audience, the most accessible or recognizable of Homer’s characters.

We have characters like this all over our popular imagination. Tony Soprano from the Sopranos. I mean, yeah, you can’t help but cheer for the guy, but he’s a mob boss. Walter White from Breaking Bad. They’re Dexter Morgan, the serial killer, but he only kills bad people. You know, we have all these types that we, we really enjoy, but they make great characters. I’m not sure I’d really want to be their friend or married to them or anywhere near anything that they’re doing, because they’d be charming one moment and they’d be stabbing in the back the next. And I think that’s Odysseus.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. And how do you feel Nolan did in creating, or Matt Damon’s character reflected that? Who Odysseus is supposed to be?

Jeff Wright

That’s a really — that’s a million dollar question. After the movie came out, I got lucky. Universal Studios gave me advance tickets to an advanced screening of it. I guess I’m now inside of the small world of Canada, an influencer of these things. So I saw it, and then people kept writing and podcast listeners and book readers saying, “Jeff, we want your review. We want your review.” When I finally got the review down from the 8,000 words that I’d originally composed down to 2,000, which was, you know, more digestible. And I was looking for a title for my review. The title I chose was “Nolan’s Odysseus. A Hero Made Easier to Love.”

Joel McKinnon

Right. That’s a good way to put it.

Jeff Wright

And I think that what Nolan did is realized, “I’ve got two hours and 58 minutes. That’s not a whole heck of a lot of time to do Homer’s Odyssey. I have a particular character,” and we can discuss later whether Nolan had a particular agenda or thesis behind his character. But even if he didn’t, you’ve only got a certain amount of time. I think what Nolan did, or the result of what Nolan did is he buffed away or airbrushed away the elements of Odysseus’s personality which would have been most problematic for an audience to access or have to confront inside of the confines of a three hour Hollywood blockbuster movie made for the general public and not made for, well, classical geeks like you and I, Joel. My sense is that what Nolan did is he, he took away all the places from the primary source where a viewer watching the movie would be troubled and conflicted on whether they were cheering for Odysseus or liked Odysseus or not.

Joel McKinnon

Right.

Jeff Wright

And so what Nolan gave us was a striving, earnest, sincere man desperately trying to get home, doing his very best to get his men home, haunted by guilt, which is a Nolan invention. There’s nothing of that inside of Homer’s Odyssey, but haunted by guilt for what he had done at Troy. And therefore Nolan created an Odysseus to serve Nolan’s directorial or arguably polemic needs. And, and the Odysseus of Nolan’s film is an integrated character and I have no problems with it. The Odysseus of Nolan’s film is certainly not Homer’s Odysseus.

Joel McKinnon

Let me just say I, I watched Emily Wilson on a couple of her interviews about this and there’s one out there. I wish I had that name. I’ll try to put it in the show notes. But she, she introduces him as a complicated man right in, at the very beginning. And she said her biggest problem with him in the Nolan version is he’s not complicated, he’s. He’s a guilt ridden action hero, you know, and that’s, I think that’s very true. I think she’s not really taking into account the challenge Nolan had in creating a character, a real version of Odysseus that has all the attributes we’ve talked about.

But I can understand why she would notice that. One thing that was really interesting is she said Matt Damon has played a very interesting character like Odysseus in Ripley. The Amazing Mr. Ripley.

Jeff Wright

Yes.

Joel McKinnon

I forget that.

Jeff Wright

Yeah, yeah.

Joel McKinnon

I have never seen Matt Damon’s version. I’ve seen the — there’s a Ripley series. It was on some streaming service, And it was great, with Andrew Scott playing him. But she said, you know, that’s more like the kind of character Odysseus is, you know, that’s like charming but dangerous and like, you know, you know, really cunning and charming and cunning at the same time. And you don’t know whether you want to cheer for him or. Or what. You know, you feel bad about cheering for him. Sometimes you’re feeling for him and you know that.So she said, you know, Matt Damon can play that kind of character, so it’s a shame that he didn’t get to.

Jeff Wright

I understand. I mean, I know one of the things I. One of the things I confess to in my. My Nolan movie review, which you get in my newsletter, is that in my stage performances of telling the Odyssey, the shortest version of the Odyssey that I’ve ever managed is four and a half hours. And I do it over two, two hour and 15 minute sittings or in two consecutive days. So I have four and a half hours and I’m already having to cut the Odyssey down to fit four and a half hours over, you know, two performances so the audience has a chance to refresh themselves and go for a pee and everything like that, you know, and I couldn’t get it down under four and a half hours.

And so here I’m complaining about a director trying to do it in under three hours. It’s very difficult. But even if you take that aside, there are some real problems with the primary source text. The primary source text of the Odyssey. And I presume we’re not worrying about plot spoilers inside of this conversation because anyone listening to this is likely been up and down this a hundred times already. But the primary problem. Am I correct there, Joel?

Joel McKinnon

Yep, feel free.

Jeff Wright

Okay, fair enough. So the primary problem that I used to have, even with my four and a half hours on stage, is at the ending of the Odyssey. Modern readers with a very good feel about Odysseus at all. I know in my live stage shows, what I really wanted to do is I wanted to, you know, tell the two parallel stories, Penelope or Odysseus fighting demons and monsters and temptresses, you know, in his Great wanderings and, well, at parallel, Penelope was fighting her own demons, monsters and temptations back in Ithaca. And then the two plots come wonderfully together at the end of the Odyssey.

And what any reader wants, what any viewer wants, is they want Odysseus and Penelope to meet. You want them to pass a couple of tests. You want to see an engagement of wits. Penelope is the only equal to Odysseus in the entire Odyssey, save for the goddess Athena. But you want them to pass all the tests. You want that intellectual jousting between them until Odysseus is satisfied that Penelope is faithful and Penelope satisfied that this man claiming to be Odysseus really is her husband. And then what you want is, you want the Hollywood reunion. You want the two of them to meet in their wonderful olive grove tree, round bed kind of thing and throw themselves into each other’s arms.And then you want the credits to roll.

And in my live shows, I wanted, you know, you know, my audience to walk out and I wanted, you know, when I had control over the audio, I wanted Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” blaring at full speed through the speakers as my audience pointed out into the good night, going, yes, what a wonderful story. The problem is it’s not Homer’s story. You get that? And then Odysseus slaughters 108 suitors, most of them defenseless and almost all of them having surrendered. But that doesn’t matter. He slaughters them anyway. And then he brings in a bunch of teenage slave girls who are the very bottom of the social pyramid in this hierarchy, have no choice whatsoever over what they’re going to do and orders the slave girls to mop up and clean up all the blood, and then turns to his son Telemachus and says, oh, and now kill them all.

And Telemachus the pervert decides, I’m not just going to kill them, I’m going to hang them by their necks because that way, father, they will suffer more. And then you get this stupid scene at the end of Homer’s Odyssey where the entire population of Ithacus decided, we don’t like this Odysseus guy. He’s dangerous. He killed her husbands and now he’s killed her sons. So the mob rises and it’s a standoff. Up there in the, you know, up there in the grape grove. You’ve got, you know, Odysseus, his son, Old Man Lorades, who must be almost 900 against the entire mob.

And the weird thing is Athena, who’s been egging them on to slaughter the suitors and to like. It suddenly becomes John Lennon and starts singing, “All We are Saying is Give Peace a Chance.” And orders both sides to sort it out. The translator, Stephen Mitchell, in his introductory essay to his translation of the Odyssey, refers to the audience, and I’m quoting from the translation, “the Odyssey’s sputtering finale.” And that’s Mitchell’s phrase for how the story ends. It’s not the way an audience wants a story to end. And so I understand why Nolan didn’t do it, because it’s a rough way to send your audience home.

I understand the problem that Nolan faced. He’s a director. You don’t want to send your audience home on a downer. Which means contemporary audiences are going to have a problem with the slaughtering of the suitors. At least the way Homer tells it, where it’s arguable that the suitors had surrendered and were weaponless. So Nolan throws a lot of weapons into their hands, deprives Odysseus and basically has Odysseus then on the defensive, which is a twist from Homer. But that means that Odysseus kills the people that he needs to because he’s overwhelmed and outnumbered. And this way he gets to be an action hero and kill them all anyway.

Joel McKinnon

Right. And, of course, Telemachus is spotless. He has no — he’s a charming young lad.

Jeff Wright

Yeah. You don’t have anything wrong. I don’t know what you do with Telemachus, because the Telemachus of Homer’s Odyssey is a little bit milquetoast, as far as I’m concerned. And, yes, Athena tries to, you know. You know, help the guy to grow a pair during the course of the Odyssey. But I don’t think really any readers of the Odyssey come away going, well, if Odysseus leaves, the kingdom’s in really good hands, because Telemachus has figured out how to be a leader. I mean. Nope, he’s still a, maybe he’s, you know, maybe Homer’s drawing a sensitive portrait of a young man who’s grown up, you know, in the shadow of a father hero he’s never met. I mean, I could see the psychologist saying, you get two kinds of people with, you know, until I make this situation, you get the milquetoast little boys who cling at their mother’s skirts. Or you get, you know, you get complete bullies. And the Odyssey shows us one of each.

But I don’t think Homer was really doing modern, you know, you know, a treatise on modern parenting or, or, or role models or absentee fathers inside of the Odyssey. I don’t know what you do if you’re Nolan with Telemachus. He’s kind of the third party too. He’s not even there. I mean, he’s kind of in the way of, of the reunion between mum and dad. You know, he’s got to be 20 years old, you know, hey, mom, dad, you know, okay, you’re going over to the olive tree bed. I guess I’ll just stand here and wait till you figure out what you’re doing next, dad. You know, it’s, it’s a, it is a really problematic ending that Homer’s given us.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah, I guess Nolan made the best of it. I’m kind of glad he didn’t show him stringing up the slave girls.

Jeff Wright

I entirely agree and I, I’ve heard people complaining about it. The problem is you can do that sort of thing in a podcast because then you have a post story commentary and your listener has an opportunity in a podcast format or in a book to turn the page. And there’s the Jeff’s notes, and you can put it down, you can think about it, you can reread the passage, you can reflect on it, you can let the ideas and the concepts settle. A movie doesn’t allow for that. You get one impression in real time and then the credits roll.

So with anything that Nolan did, he had to make an Odyssey, and he made an Odyssey. And as far as I’m concerned, the conversation about Odysseus and these stories is 3,000 years old. And Nolan’s is just another contribution to the conversation. And I mean, I’m not being fair to him. His cinematography, his visual scenes were breathtaking. And yeah, I found —

Joel McKinnon

I was blown away. Did you get to see it on IMAX?

Jeff Wright

No, I didn’t. And it’s on my list like you did.

Joel McKinnon

Same here. No, I didn’t. I, but, but I definitely want to rewatch it on IMAX.

Jeff Wright

And, and that’s great. I mean, so, so you can’t. It’s another Odyssey.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. Yeah. And here’s one thing that I wanted to defend him, defend Nolan on is that there is no, like, there. The Greek myths, the ancient Greek myths aren’t like the Bible or something where there’s like a dogma, there’s one source, and you have to stick to it. You, you can’t vary from it. The way it was used by storytellers, by bards, by playwrights at the time in ancient Greece was to use these kind of known characters and entertain their audience in different ways and kind of come up with new wrinkles in the story, you know, whatever it was that would, you know, make them popular entertainers and get the cash they needed.

And Nolan’s no different in that. It’s kind of like a, you know, in that tradition, you know, he knows his audience and he knows what he can get away with, and he knows what can inspire the audience. And, you know, it doesn’t have to be the same story identically as what was told in 700 BC, or later.

Jeff Wright

I entirely agree with you. I mean, one of the things that we do also is, I mean, if you think about when I was writing The Full Disclosure Iliad, which is sort of a much more scholarly, rigorous, and experienced veteran voice of Trojan War: The Podcast. I had there, 15 years between the two, and I’ve learned a few things, but one of the things I realized is that, you know, things that we now consider canonical parts of the story were actually written four or five hundred years after Homer.

Look at the classical Greek playwrights, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. They all wrote what we would call classical reception or fan fiction plays based on knowing that their audience already knew Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. But Euripides, for example, takes the character of Odysseus and does a complete hatchet job on him. Every play that Euripides writes featuring Odysseus turns him into a despicable, cunning, manipulative liar who, you know, turns the straight into crooked, and truth into lies, and on and on and on. And these are now part of the canonical text in stories that we tell. And I, I don’t know whether in Euripides day, you know, Athenians going to see one of his plays would go, “Well, hold on. I’m really, really offended by the way that you presented this Odysseus character, because this wasn’t Homer’s. And, and that costume, that’s historically —”. I don’t know.

But I think we assume we forget that people have been using the raw material of these stories for 3,000 years. And honestly, Homer, this all came out of the oral tradition. You could have people reading the Iliad the first day it was committed to papyrus and saying, “What the hell do you think you’re doing here, Homer? This isn’t the way the story’s been told. This is not the canonical way. The way you’ve presented Achilles here isn’t accurate.”

And, you know, they’d be citing the 500 prior years of oral tradition, and, you know, Homer would be the guy that came in and messed it all up and got it wrong. So if you want to go back to my original question of why I love telling this stuff so much, it’s because it’s very liberating to tell a story where there’s nothing you can do to the version of the story that hasn’t already been done over the last 3,000 years. It’s just — it evolves.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah, yeah. Speaking of Euripides, are you familiar with Medea?

Jeff Wright

Yes.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. What’s really fascinating to me about Medea, I learned, is that up until that point, Medea didn’t kill her children.

Jeff Wright

Right.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. You know, Euripides threw that in there as his big, you know, like, shocker. And now that’s how we see Medea. You know, she’s guilty of matricide.

Jeff Wright

Yeah.

Joel McKinnon

Or whatever you call it.

Jeff Wright

Yeah.

Joel McKinnon

Killing kids.

Jeff Wright

Oh, matricide works. Yep. Or patricide or infanticide.

Joel McKinnon

The infanticide. Yeah, yeah, kid killer. And, you know, that had to be really shocking. But it was popular, apparently. You know, he. He did well and had a good career.

Jeff Wright

And, you know, going back to the Trojan War epic story or the Odyssey, I. I thought it was really interesting in the Nolan film that Nolan departed from Homer’s Odyssey’s text to show Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia in order to launch the fleet, and then Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra, killing him in revenge for it. The story of Iphigenia doesn’t exist inside of the Iliad or Odyssey, and there’s absolutely no allusions to it. And for the reason that the story hadn’t been invented yet, or alternately, Homer decided this isn’t going to help the Agamemnon character I want to portray.

But obviously, as soon as you add the Iphigenia story, which shows up in. In Aeschylus’s trilogy and in Euripides play Iphigenia at Aulis, it completely changes the framework of how you view the Agamemnon character. And now when you’re reading the Odyssey and Agamemnon’s in the underworld complaining to Odysseus about faithless wives, and, you know, I bet you my wife, she went and killed me when I got home from the war and everything. If you already know the Iphigenia story, you’re going, that’s not why she killed you. She killed you because you went and killed her, set up her daughter and then slaughtered her daughter.

Joel McKinnon

But that’s not in Homer. Homer’s Agamemnon is a lot cleaner guy than the Agamemnon you get if you include Aeschylus and Euripides in your, in your biography of Agamemnon. And yeah, again, these are the things that make it so much fun as a storyteller.

Right. Like, kind of the worst thing he did in, in the Iliad was steal the, the slave girl of Achilles, you know, and that caused the rift.

Jeff Wright

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I mean, boneheaded military move to begin with, you know?

Joel McKinnon

Yeah, he did. He was boneheaded.

Jeff Wright

Let’s, let’s, let’s first alienate the God Apollo by refusing to return Chryseis, and then let’s, let’s alienate my best fighter Achilles by taking Briseius. I mean, I mean, yeah, Agamemnon doesn’t really look too sharp inside of the Iliad. And he also has this habit of all the time, whenever he does something wrong, afterwards apologizing and saying, it wasn’t me, the gods made me do this. I, I’m an innocent third party. Blame the gods, but don’t. I mean, it sounds like some particular politicians that we hear when they make mistakes, but we won’t name names in this podcast.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. Although it is tempting.

Jeff Wright

It is, yeah.

Joel McKinnon

So what do you think of the other. The rest of the cast of Nolan’s film? Penelope Hathaway’s Penelope?. We’ve talked a little bit about Telemachus, but Samantha Morton’s Sirce and Charlize Theron’s Calypso, Pattinson’s Antonis. Do any stand out to you?

Jeff Wright

Let’s start with Calypso and Circe. I was shocked when I first saw Circe on the screen because the Circe of my storyteller’s imagination was a very powerful enchantress.

Joel McKinnon

Drop dead gorgeous.

Jeff Wright

Drop dead gorgeous. And the minute that she realizes, oh, this, this man who can defeat my magic is Odysseus, who was prophesied would come to my island, she suggests that Odysseus metaphorically sheath his sword. I don’t know if the joke works in the ancient Greek. It certainly does in the English translations, but. But Odysseus agrees to join her in what Homer’s translation calls her gorgeous bed. Once he gets a promise that she will in no way do anything to damage his manhood.

Another hoot inside of the English translations that. But as soon as Odysseus says, got, you know, I’m going to be safe.You’re not going to do anything to my sword, he hops into bed with her before he even asks his men to be restored from pigs back to humans. And then he spends a year there. And finally it’s his number two, Eurylochus, who comes and says, “Odysseus, the boys were just wondering, have you forgotten, you know, your homecoming?” And Odysseus is so angry inside of the Homeric text that he pulls out a sword and threatens to kill Eurylochus on the spot for bothering his, I don’t know, his Club Med vacation with this goddess. And so I was all excited to see what Hollywood or what Nolan would do with Circe.

And no offense to middle aged, embittered Crohn’s, but my gosh, that’s not what I was expecting. When that actress appeared on the screen, he had removed anything sexual from her deliberately and removed any sexuality from the scene. Once I got over the shock, though, the work that she did on transforming those men into pigs by grabbing their heads and physically kneading their forms in a very tactile fashion, yeah, that was one of the most visceral and powerful moments of the movie for me. And so I forgave Nolan everything just for what he did with Circe. And I mean, it’s really hard to transform men into pigs without it looking like some tacky special effect or something that happens off screen. She made it uncomfortably visceral. And yeah, yeah, I’ll give credit, Nolan, brilliant credit for doing that. Like that took some real thinking. And apparently then Odysseus, she turned them in, back into humans again. And Odysseus spent the afternoon on the island and sailed on from there.

Joel McKinnon

Right.

Jeff Wright

So, so then we get to Calypso and I thought, okay, here’s where we’re going to lean into, you know, the seven years with the goddess who, you know, however consensual it might have been at the start. Eventually Odysseus gets bored and wants to leave and she won’t let him. And he’s very explicit in the Odyssey that he becomes her, you know, unwilling sex slave. And it’s only, you know, Zeus or Athena going to Zeus and saying, come on, let the guy go home. And then Zeus sending Hermes to, say, Calypso, like, you got to let the guy go.

When I saw Calypso, the alpha male testosterone in me red blooded side said, oh yeah, okay, there’s somebody I could spend seven years with. My wife watching it with me leaned and said, okay, I get it, she’s a babe. And then the entire scene in Calypso was asexual again. Again. I think I know what Nolan was doing. In my live shows, my four hour live Odyssey show, everybody in my audience is cheering for Odysseus in his homecoming journey. And I’ve already, I’m running the two plots in parallel. So they already know what Penelope is facing at home.

And their hearts are going out to Penelope like 108 strapping young men and you don’t even know your husband’s alive and you’re staying faithful and doing all this weaving, that’s physically hard work. And so everyone’s cheering for Penelope. And when Odysseus arrives on Cersei’s island in my live shows and Circe approaches and says, would you like to sheath your sword in my, you know, in, you know, in my, in my charming bed? What my audience expects is for Odysseus to use his gift with words to find a way of saying, “Dearest goddess, while you are undoubtedly ravishing and more ravishing than my wife Penelope could ever be, still my heart is attached to her alone. And so while it regrets me and pains me, I must say no to your offer.”

And that’s what my 21st century audience is expecting because they expect a marital quid pro quo. You know, Penelope’s, you know, keeping her pants on, so will Odysseus. But then Odysseus turns around, says, let’s go shake that sword. My audience on stage will boo.

Joel McKinnon

Really?

Jeff Wright

They will boo?

Joel McKinnon

Imagine.

Jeff Wright

Yeah, and they go, and they’ll go, f you. You know, like they’re really upset with the guy because inside of their sensibilities. Now in my live shows I have time to step out and provide some context. Nolan doesn’t have that. Is Nolan supposed to pop up in the corner of the screen with a little note saying inside of Bronze Age culture? Well, Penelope was expected to be faithful. Odysseus had no such expectations. And Penelope might even celebrate that her husband got to have sex with goddesses because that raises her honor because her husband gets to sleep with deities.

It’s not going to work.

Joel McKinnon

Right, right, right.

Jeff Wright

So we, we got a weird babe, Calypso, with absolutely no whiff of the fact that these two had been shagging like bunnies. And then shagging like captive bunnies for seven years, which was really weird.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah, yeah. What’d you think of the last Lastragonians? The big armored giants. Yeah, yeah. Did I say that right — Lastragonians?

Jeff Wright

Yeah, you did. Well, at least that’s what I’ve, who knows what they were called in my — ancient Greek pronunciation is seriously lacking. But, you know, I don’t want to dump on Nolan here and man, you just —. We’ve been talking about Odysseus’s dubious leadership inside of the Odyssey and how yes, he loses a lot of his men, but a close reading of the Odyssey makes it pretty clear that they weren’t all lost through third party misfortunes. A lot of them were lost through Odysseus making bad military decisions.

So just to refresh your listeners inside of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus and his 12 ships and 600 men, none of who have died yet or only a few have died, arrive at this island of the Lastragonians. And the way the island is situated is there’s a narrow, high cliffed channel leading directly in, wide enough for one boat to row down the channel and then it opens into a large inland or a large sort of internal in the island lake or harbor, if you will, surrounded by high cliffs.

Joel McKinnon

And if you’re visualizing this as you’re listening to our conversation, this is military death trap 101 territory. You’re going in someplace where you can’t get out in a hurry. And then you’re going to be at a low point surrounded by high cliffs. Inside of the Odyssey, Odysseus sends his 11 ships into the harbor while conveniently leaving his own ship safely out on the Mediterranean side. Then Odysseus watches looking down the channel as giant Lastragonians throw rocks down into the harbor, capsize his 11 ships, and then spearfish the crew. Of his 11 ships are all, you know, destroyed and then stacked up on the cliffside like so many speared salmon.

Jeff Wright

And Odysseus is outside the harbor safe. And then the Odyssey says, grieving and bemoaning the loss of his men, he sails on. It’s a problematic episode. I understand why Homer includes it, because in any quest story, ultimately the quest is about one hero. And as a live performance teller, I was. I’m always really, really happy when I get to the Lastragonians story because it means I don’t have to keep accounting for 12 ships and, you know, 600 men. After the Lastragonians massacre there’s only one ship and a small crew. It’s a much easier story to tell.

So these are expendable cast members. They’re all red shirts. We don’t know their names. And so I understand why Homer and why Nolan wanted to kill off most of them in one episode because it’s economy of storytelling and it focuses on Odysseus, who is all we really care about anyway. But inside of the Odyssey, Odysseus looks suspiciously like, at best a sloppy commander sending his men into the death trap, and at worst, a commander who recognized it was a death trap and so prudently keeps himself outside. Nolan, I don’t think even wanted to go there in his movie because as I said, he’s trying to create a hero made easier to love.

So instead he puts the Lastragonians into a standard, you know, raiding a beach in the forest scene. And Odysseus then fights a noble, heroic rear guard with all of his companions back to the ships. And it removes from Odysseus any culpability whatsoever in his military leadership. And Nolan does that throughout his movie. Whenever there’s a place where Odysseus might look like, oh, the guy is really a bad military commander, Nolan removes the scene. Yeah, economy, but also creating a more attractive character.

Joel McKinnon

And Aeolus had to go because. Yeah, that was one of his biggest dumb idiot moves.

Jeff Wright

Oh yeah, you’re right. Aeolus has to go. I read a commentary once that said it’s remarkable the number of times Odysseus falls asleep or claims to be asleep when his men do bad or stupid things, because it happens with Aeolus and it then happens, and it happens on the island of the cattle of the sun god. Odysseus. In both cases. “Well, I was asleep at the time.” Good. You’re the commander in chief of the forces. Maybe somebody should be waking you when something bad is happening, Odysseus. But, you know, again, I understand why Nolan was doing it. He’s making Nolan’s movie and has Nolan’s agenda and a time frame

Joel McKinnon

Going back to the Lastragonians just for a moment. What I really liked in that, the way the treatment they did of it, even though, you know, the, in the, in Homer, they didn’t, they weren’t armored and all that like, like they were in this one. But just the horror, the feeling of, like utter horror of those, that complete domination of those giants over, you know, the rest of the people and the futility of fighting them.

Jeff Wright

Oh, and again, we’re back to what Nolan does brilliantly. And I’ve never seen any version of the Odyssey or frankly, any movie of that, you know, genre done so well. It was visceral.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah.

Jeff Wright

I mean, I, I’m being. I hope I’m not sounding too much like the petulant. “Well, it’s not in Homer...”, because I don’t really care. This is Nolan’s Odyssey, not Homer’s Odyssey. But you’re right. Watching those humans, the tiny humans trying to get back onto their boats and escape and. And these giants just come, lift them up and it. And the humans having — it was sickening and disturbing. And with the storms, the later storm, when the men are hanging on for dear life as their boats falling apart around them. As you know, I spend my summers, all my life, wilderness, canoe tripping. And every once in a while, in spite of one’s very best efforts to read the wind and the waves and to do all the responsible things, you end up on a very large body of water in a very tiny craft and you’re desperately fighting tooth and nail to keep from that craft being completely overwhelmed by the waves and it’s a scary feeling. And it’s a scary feeling. You’re fighting for your life. And when I was watching the ship —

Joel McKinnon

I’ve been there and I’ll tell you that story sometime, I nearly, yeah, got taken by the sea.

Jeff Wright

So you know what, you, you share what I’m talking about. And when you, when you were watching the Nolan film in those shipwreck scenes, it was all coming back to me. I’m sitting there and I’m gripping the seat in the theater really tight, and my wife was my canoe trip paddling partner all my life. She’s gripping. And then she looks at me and we’re both recounting a particular storm. And I mean, obviously we’re in a 17 foot Kevlar canoe. It’s not in the Mediterranean, but in relative proportion, we weren’t on quite as, you know, big a lake as a Mediterranean.

But Nolan did that sort of thing so brilliantly well. And not only the exteriors, the interiors, the great hall inside of the hall where the second half of the Odyssey takes place with the suitors and everything. That, to me didn’t feel like a prop or something set up on a sound stage. That felt to me like what it would likely have been to have lived in one of these stone hewen Bronze Age palaces. It. It looked dank, it looked dark, it looked covered in centuries worth of soot. I, I think I say in my review, I could almost smell the wet dog off stage. You know, like, it was visceral. And Nolan did that better than any movie I’ve seen in a very long time.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. Oh, let’s talk about the dog.

Jeff Wright

Poor Argus.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah.

Jeff Wright

What did you think of the dog?

Joel McKinnon

I, I thought he did it pretty well. You know, it’s, I mean, any, any dying dog is gonna grab my heart, you know, and, and one that holds on for 20 years for his master to come back, you know, and, you know, it worked.

Jeff Wright

And the beauty of what I admired in Nolan is when I’m, when I do Odyssey: The Podcast, or when I’m telling the Odyssey story live on stage, even more so. Homer tells us in the Odyssey, the story of Odysseus encountering Argus, the faithful retainer dog, after 20 years. And if you read Homer, it’s brilliant because Argus is basically out in a dung heap covered in mites and termites and ticks who are sucking away his lifeblood. And it’s analogous, of course, to the suitors who are in the palace sucking out the lifeblood of Ithaca. And it works in so many levels.

But then Odysseus arrives. For folks who don’t remember the story, he has to get into the palace and reconnoiter. But Athena has warned him, there’s one hundred and eight suitors in there. Odysseus, you don’t likely want to just stride in and say, “Hey, honey, I’m home!” You better go in and disguise and case out the joint. So Athena disguises Odysseus as a beggar. And when he gets to the gates of the palace in the Odyssey, he’s suddenly, his mind is on everything but Argus, who he hasn’t seen in 20 years. He’s got a son and a wife in the palace he’s more worried about.

But then he sees the dog and he remembers. And there’s this horrible scene where Odysseus can’t reveal his identity, right? He can’t reveal his identity because if he goes, hey, Argus, Argus is going to get up from his death throes and his arthritic little legs and go, master, his home. Master is home. I’ve been a good dog and wag his tail and it’s going to give away the whole, you know, disguise. So Odysseus has to be kind of cold and look at Argus and shed a tear. But then why walk by and then in Homer’s story, Argus rolls over and dies.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah.

Jeff Wright

And when that happens, live on stage, dog stories, I mean, I off I used to turn when I tell this to high school students and they’re all in tears. Poor Argus. Odysseus, you didn’t even stop to hug your dog. And, and I’ll remark to them, I’ll say, you realize that so far in this homegrown journey we have killed 600 men in horrifying ways and you haven’t shed a tear yet. And now we kill one old dog and you’re bawling and, and then we look at why this works as a literary device.

And, I think that Nolan did a really good job because he did. What I do in my live shows is I set the Argus scene up early in my live show when Odysseus is leaving for the Trojan War and he gets to the gates, he said goodbye to Penelope, he said goodbye to Telemachus, and then at the gates of the city in my story, and this is my own invention, it’s not in Homer, I have Argus following Odysseus, wanting to go with master to the Trojan War. And Odysseus gets to the gates of Ithaca and says, “Argus, sit.” And Argus, of course sits because he’s an obedient little puppy. Then “Argus stay. Argus wait for master.” And Argus sits, stays and waits. 20 years, 20 freaking years.

And, and then the audience in my live shows forgets about Argus until three hours and 45 or 50 minutes later, when suddenly Odysseus is walking up to the gates and then I say, and there’s a dog there. And my audience goes, holy shit, it’s Argus. He’s still alive. And then you have the scene where Odysseus has to walk by Argus. And Nolan did the same thing. He shows Argus before Odysseus goes to Troy and he sets us up for Argus at the end.

And when I was watching that, I thought, Nolan’s a craftsman. I mean, he understands this is going to work. Everybody loves a puppy story. Everybody loves a loyal dog story. I mean, we’re suckers for them. And I imagine in Homer’s time, bards created the same thing that I do. And then Nolan did, which is the Argus as a puppy story. Because any bard in any century is going to go, this is, this is low hanging, easy, performative through fruit. I’m going to tell this story.

Joel McKinnon

That’s awesome. So would you like to see Nolan tackle the Iliad? I haven’t heard about whether he plans to or would consider it. But I’m just curious.

Jeff Wright

You know what I really want in my fantasy world? I want Nolan to be given massive dollars by Netflix or Amazon or one of the big ones and told, we want you to create a 20 hour miniseries. We don’t want a three hour movie, we want 20 hours. And then you’re not going to tell the Iliad. You’re going to tell what I tell, which is the Trojan war epic. You’re going to do the Iliad, but you’re going to do all the pre story that provides a necessary context. And then you’re not going to end with bearing Hector. You’re going to end down in the beaches of Troy with the Trojans following, following for the wooden horse disguise and the Greeks sailing home in victory.

So you’re going to tell the full story and we’re going to give you 20 hours, 20 one hour episodes to do it. And then we’ll release only one episode a week so that the audience has a chance to just think it through. And here’s your unlimited —

Joel McKinnon

And you can do a podcast and monitor each one week by week and —

Jeff Wright

No, oh no, no. Since, Joel, we’re into pure fantasy territory, then I will be sitting at home Sunday and the phone will ring. It’ll be, “Hey Jeff, you got a moment? My name is Christopher Nolan. I need somebody to write the screenplay. Could I fly you to Hollywood for you know,” and or better. “Hey Jeff, I’ve just read your Full Disclosure Iliad, which tells the whole story and provides me with the context my audience needs. Would you be willing to turn your book into a 20 hour mini series where we’ll do 50 minutes of episode and then you’ll come on for the last 10 minutes and geek out and tell people all the context they need?”

“And we can’t afford to pay you a lot, Jeff, but we could do you like a mil an episode.” Yeah. Okay, so now we’re in the fantasy.

Joel McKinnon

I wasn’t reaching far enough.

Jeff Wright

Oh no, you weren’t reaching far enough. “Oh, oh, and by the way, I’d like you to meet my executive assistant. Her name is Calypso.” No, I mean, no, but, but seriously, to go back to why I’d like to see it done as an extended length miniseries. I have a hypothesis that the most compelling cinematography and storytelling being done in this century and in the latter half, the latter decade of the last century wasn’t done on the big screen. It was done in the genre of the television miniseries.

Yeah, so I’m thinking of shows where I’ve deeply engaged with the characters, The Wire, perhaps the greatest show ever done in television. But you could even throw in, if you want to go to the other end of the spectrum. Game of Thrones, up until they got to the stuff near the end, which wasn’t written by the author. But Game of Thrones started like Game of Thrones. Any miniseries where you have time to let the characters develop and slowly breathe, and particularly for characters like Odysseus, who are so multifaceted, that would give your viewers time to see all the different facets.

You wouldn’t have to squeeze it all down. You could make a complicated character and you could do it really well, and then the audience between weekly releases of the episode would have a chance to think about it and let the ideas breathe and percolate. The Sopranos, the Wire, Game of Thrones.

Joel McKinnon

Well, I’ve got one that for my audience is — Foundation by Asimov. And it’s a TV show now and it’s the same thing. Yeah. I mean, there’s enough room there to really build it out and, and you know —

Jeff Wright

You’re right. I’ve completely forgotten that one, and the critical reviews of it have been great. What do you think of it? Have you been happy with it?

Joel McKinnon

The first season was a little uneven, and I think that was — during the pandemic they were filming it, so they had problems with getting enough extras on stage and things like that. But the second and third seasons were really good, in my opinion. And I think it’s really amazing. Innovative in that. In how David Goyer, the showrunner, solved the problem, the big problem of — it’s an anthology in the books.

Jeff Wright

Yes.

Joel McKinnon

And so the characters die out. They only live normal human lifetimes. So, you know. And it covers 500 years in the book. Yes, in the books. So that won’t work in tv. You know, you need to keep the audience engaged and come back and see the same characters. So he found really innovative ways of handling that by creating this clone dynasty of the emperors that, you know, they’re different characters, but they’re played by the same actors. It lets them have different personalities and different. Different variations on those characters. But then there’s also a robot that lives forever and it’s a central character. There’s one of the characters sleeps, goes into hibernation and sleeps and comes back repeatedly. Yeah, lots of different ways that they. Oh, and the main one is Hari Seldon, the principal guy who created everything. And the guy who named my podcast Seldon Crisis is, you know, the inventor of psychohistory. In the books, he just dies, in the first story.

Jeff Wright

Yes.

Joel McKinnon

But in the, in the show, he becomes a hologram, you know, and then he becomes — another version of him, becomes flesh and blood again. And, you know, so he lets Jared Harris be, you know, continue the story and he’s great.

Jeff Wright

So, so I think we’re both on the same page. The, the advantage of the extended miniseries is that you have to get around some of the technical problems and, well, Asimov’s Story is particularly difficult with that because, yeah, it takes place over like 500 years or more, but, but once you get that in place, then you can really take the time to drill down on the characters. And you’re not, I imagine, poor Nolan or, well, even myself. I’m doing a four hour version of the Trojan War epic on stage, or the Odyssey on stage. The stuff you have to leave in the cutting room floor, even if you have four hours to tell the story, it kills me.

It’s, it’s why I created the podcasts, because I didn’t have to leave anything on the cutting room floor. But, and the same with. But you’re right. I mean, so I don’t want to see Nolan do the Iliad. I want to see Nolan do the Trojan War epic, the Iliad, plus all the necessary bookend content. No, I basically want Nolan to, as I said, I just want him to buy my book and, you know, give me a million dollars for the rights and then use it. But, but I seriously think that that’s a way to actually do justice to Homer’s story and all the stories that have developed around Homer’s story.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah, yeah. Or you could do the Denis Villeneuve Dune thing — huge long movies, a whole series of movies to cover, you know, a series of books. Yeah, that approach is kind of interesting.

Jeff Wright

Well, I guess my example of if you want to do it on the big screen. The thing I thought they got the big screen movies when you did series that I think got closest to the source material was the Lord of the Rings. I thought the three movies did admirable justice to the books, which I was passionate about. And then when they got to the movies, I never felt as though the director of the Lord of the Rings movies had betrayed the, the tone, the gravitas, the magnificence of the books.

Joel McKinnon

Well, another thing with the Lord of the Rings is there is kind of the equivalent of deities in that.

Jeff Wright

Yes.

Joel McKinnon

Magic. And it’s not, it’s not silly, you know, it’s. It’s really well done.

Jeff Wright

Really, really well done. Yeah.

Joel McKinnon

So you, you buy it, you know, and you, you feel it.

Jeff Wright

Yeah. So that was.

Joel McKinnon

Maybe Peter Jackson should have a try.

Jeff Wright

So. So what was that like? Those movies are about three hours each, I seem to remember.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Wright

So nine hours. Okay. So, sure, I’d be happy to let Nolan do the Trojan War epic cycle if he had nine hours of big screen time or if he had maybe 15 hours of small screen time. But, but no, I don’t want him to dare touch the Trojan War epic in under three hours. You just can’t. You can’t do it justice because it’s an even more.

Joel McKinnon

That’s a much bigger story than just the Odyssey/

Jeff Wright

Vastly larger story.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah.

Jeff Wright

Far more sweeping canvas, more characters which if you leave them out, it all falls apart. A much more complicated plot. If we use word complicated in that context. Yeah, I, I don’t know. I think, I think all that Nolan should do is take a look at what the movie Troy had to do inside of a under three hour time frame and recognize those trade offs and go, yes, I might be a better director, I might have a better screenplay, but can I overcome the fundamental problems? You could make a great sword and sandals movie, but that’s not what we want from Nolan. We want something else.

Joel McKinnon

So we should wrap up pretty soon, but I’m, I’m going to come back to you and what you’re doing now. You’ve just come out with this book, this big book that I really want to read and then. But I miss your podcasts, man. Are you. Would you consider doing another one? Jason and the Argonauts?

Jeff Wright

Maybe if you. Full honesty or full disclosure. Right now, the book. I just released the book in May 26th. So you’re asking somebody who’s had his first book out there in the real world for under two months. My, my entire mental energies and thoughts now are in what I have to do, which is marketing and promotion, simply because that’s the only way that anybody will ever find out about my story. And I think it’s a kick ass good story. I’m really proud of it. But if I don’t tell people about it, then it doesn’t matter how kick ass and good it is.

So, so right now, that’s it. And if I look at the emails coming in from listeners now and from book readers right now, their first demand of me is that I turn the Full Disclosure Iliad into an audiobook it seems to be the way that more and more people are consuming their literature is by listening to it through Audible. And I fall into that camp myself. I listen to a lot of audiobooks, so I. My next project, once the book sales give me enough budget, you know, return that I can afford it, is to step into a professional studio and produce a really high quality Jeff narrated version of the Full Disclosure Iliad.

I think it’s got to be me because everybody associates these characters with my voice and personality. And frankly, I’m too jealous to let anybody else, you know, be Achilles or be Agamemnon or, or be Penelope. So I have to do the. I have to do it and I want to do it. So once that’s done, then the next podcast, the two that people push me on the most are either Virgil’s Aeneid or Jason and the Argonauts. And out of that, for me, it’s a no brainer. I would be doing Jason and the Argonauts. I think it’s a more compelling story and I’m a man of very simple tastes. I’m a storyteller. I’m not an expert of literature or poetry.

Joel McKinnon

Great episodic adventure.

Jeff Wright

My watchword, whenever I’m. When I was writing the book, my watchword is always, I want my readers or my listeners to finish a chapter and go, what happened next? And want to read. I’m not as concerned if my readers or listeners go, oh, that was a lovely Homeric simile or oh, what a clever translation from the Latin, simply because I know I’m a storyteller. I’m the what happens next guy.

And so when I look at either the Aeneid or I look at Jason and the Argonauts, Jason and the Argonauts gives me vastly more what happens next content. And what I want to do do, Joel, is I want to do Jason and the Argonauts and then weave it into Medea the play.

Joel McKinnon

Oh, wow.

Jeff Wright

Because Medea is Jason’s wife and she, she’s obviously critical to Jason and the Argonauts, but if I weave a —

Joel McKinnon

The hero, really, she’s the driving force of a lot of it.

Jeff Wright

Yes, she is in fact there. And so I, I know how I’m going to tell it because it’s going to be Jason and the Argonauts, but it’s really Medea’s story with Jason along for the ride because I think Medea is really a really compelling character. Obviously not inside of the Argonautica, but Certainly inside of classical plays. We’ve already talked about it. So I want to do the whole thing somehow pull it all together as a story, because I think it’s a compelling, captivating story and it also mirrors so many sections. I mean, Jason’s visiting Circe’s island well before, you know, Odysseus ever shows up. There’s so many cool things there that would just fit into that universe. And I’m not honestly, a big fan of the Aeneid as a what happens next story.

Joel McKinnon

It’s, it seems so contrived for political purposes.

Jeff Wright

I was talking to some scholars the other day in a podcast and I confessed this and I thought they’d rip my throats open. And they basically said, no. The Anaed is many things. It a thing of beauty if you read Latin. And it’s a fascinating polemic if you want to do the history of the Roman Empire, it’s, you know, their foundational work. But as a page turner, gripping. What happens next? Or a really complicated Odysseus like character. Well, no, Aeneas isn’t. Aeneas makes lots of cameo appearances inside of the Full Disclosure Iliad, because he shows up in Homer’s Iliad as a lead character or as a lead minor character.

But already we’re setting him up for his own big adventure and his own epic. So I’d say Jason and the Argonauts/Medea, when I get back into my podcasting booth, strikes me as the tastiest place to go next. All right, well, is that okay?

Joel McKinnon

I’m very pleased to hear that. I’m very pleased.

Jeff Wright

Great.

Joel McKinnon

I’m going to hold you to it. If I haven’t heard, if I haven’t seen it come out in, in a couple of years, I’ll be nagging you.

Jeff Wright

Well, you won’t be the only one nagging me. I had somebody email me this morning and said, I’ve listened to everything you’ve done and I’ve read everything you’ve written, and now I’m bored. Could you just hurry up and do something else? And, and you know, you kind of, the creative person, you would understand this. As a podcaster. The creative person’s going, you want to write back and say, do you have any idea how many hours it takes to try to.

But as a consumer on the other end, it’s like, “Come on, get on with the next episode. Come on, give me more.” Yeah, so I, I take it as the genuine flattery, but there are days when it’s overwhelming, like, you know, I’m supposed to be retired. This is supposed to be my hobby. Yeah, anyway, all right, I’m grateful I’ve got it. I’ve got a huge fan base, and the podcasts have done embarrassingly, absurdly, beyond my wildest dreams in terms of listenership, so I have no complaints.

Joel McKinnon

Well, congratulations on completing the book. I know that’s a huge effort and. And getting it published. And your timing is awesome.

Jeff Wright

Yeah, this is.

Joel McKinnon

Everybody’s into ancient Greek mythology now.

Jeff Wright

Oh, I know. And, you know, the funny thing is, when I. When I first sat down to write the book in the first year of the pandemic, it was because a small publishing house had liked my Trojan War podcast and said, we’d like you to just turn this into a book. And it was, I think, August. And they said, ideally, we’d like it on the shelves by Christmas. So if you could just basically get a written transcript of Trojan War, the podcast, hire somebody to do it. This was in the days before AI was good enough to do it for you.

And then just clean up the spelling and grammar and send it to us, we’ll have it published in two months. And, well, they wanted to get it published by Christmas because there was some Trojan art show, The Art of Troy or something like that, or Agamemnon’s Treasure, busy touring Europe and heading off to North America. And they said, we want to capitalize on the buzz for all things Greek, album epic.

And well, obviously I missed that buzz by five years. But the beauty of what I do is this is evergreen material. There’s been a constant buzz, either low or up. Cranked up to 11 right now with Nolan about this material for pretty much 3,000 years. So you know, if you wait long enough, eventually people are going to start talking about this stuff again. And I just happen to get very lucky. I wasn’t writing the book in response to Nolan. I was into my third pass through the book before I even got the first whiff that there might be an Odyssey movie. So, yeah. Yeah, that was just. It was lucky timing. It wasn’t skill.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. It was similar with me with Foundation, because, yes, I had no idea that there was going to be a TV show when I started the podcast.

Jeff Wright

Yeah. Yep.

Joel McKinnon

And.

Jeff Wright

And you’re going, yay. And I know it’s wonderful when these things happen, but. And in, you know, it’ll. It’s. Again, you’re dealing your material is not as old as Greek epic, but inside of the canon of science fiction. Well, you’ve gone to sort of ground zero with your material.

Joel McKinnon

And there’s echoes of ancient history in Foundation because Asimov was — he had read the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire twice, apparently, all the way through before.

Jeff Wright

Makes sense.

Joel McKinnon

And. And it was largely what inspired the idea of Foundation.

Jeff Wright

Yeah. And that’s given. Right. It’s been a long time, but I thought I read that once. I think it was part of a course I took. Yeah, yeah, I didn’t read it twice.

Joel McKinnon

I read it once and I shouldn’t have been. I read it during my college courses in geology, which had nothing to do with Edward, you know, with Gibbon and. And ancient history, but that’s why I didn’t get great grades. One of the reasons.

Jeff Wright

Yeah. Well, it’s come back to pay off in the long run.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. Yep. All right. So great talking to you, Jeff. I’m so glad we could have you.

Jeff Wright

This was so much fun. Thank you for reaching out. And this was just such a fun conversation. I mean, I’m happy to get together with anybody, anytime and geek out over Greek epic. I mean, it’s just. Yeah, we’re gonna get off this.

Joel McKinnon

Do you still do live shows?

Jeff Wright

Yes, I still do live shows. It’s a bit of a challenge now with touring because simply the cost of me going someplace. I mean, I. I can do my live shows locally, but I’ll get invites and somebody will say, hey, we’d love to have you. Could you come in and do, you know, your Iliad or your Odyssey or something like. Like that. We’re in Atlanta, Georgia, and, you know, we’d be happy to pay. And then you say, okay, so that’s flights, hotels, accommodations, and then my professional, like and performers fee and everything like that. It just gets really, really pricey, particularly when you’re dealing in Canadian dollars.

My live shows now tend to be closer to home simply because then I can drive there, I can do the show. I do an awful lot. The other thing I do an awful lot of is I’ll step into an awful lot of. I was. I was at the Canadian Classics Conference a few months ago. I was keynote speaker on — they were doing a Homer day, and they brought together a lot of university people. So I’ll do an awful lot of that kind of thing where I’m going in and reflecting on being a 21st century bard and that type of thing.

It takes less staging and it takes less customizing of a script. So that travels really, really well. The live shows. The last big live show I toured was a two hour show called Blame it on Zeus’s Thunderbolt. The true origin story of the Trojan War. And it was a lot of fun and it was just beginning to tour well and do really, really well. I just booked a whole bunch of American gigs and woke up one morning and there was this disease that was spreading across the world and. Well, yeah. And all of those gigs vanished in the next few months.

So but I mean that hit a lot of performers now it’s largely now it’s exchange rates and fuel prices.

Joel McKinnon

Are you doing a book tour?

Jeff Wright

I am, yeah. And so far it’s all within, within Canadian destinations that I can get to without. I’m a self published author, so everything that I, everything that I do, I’m paying out of pocket and hoping to reap the rewards later. And I mean I’m lucky. I’ve got, I went into this eyes wide open on self self publishing. I’ve got 1.8 million podcast listeners, and a long, long mailing list. So I’m a self published author who already has an established devoted fan base that have sent me donations and I know their email addresses. But I have to be very careful on extending myself too far afield on speculative ventures because that way bankruptcy lies.Kind of, if that makes sense.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’d love to, to, to meet you in person and you know, see, see your show in any form or any kind of like even if it’s just a book tour and you’re just —

Jeff Wright

Well, if I’m in California, I will expect appropriate zinia from your household, Joel.

Joel McKinnon

Absolutely.

Jeff Wright

Yeah, absolutely.

Joel McKinnon

Yeah. Zeus’s law/

Jeff Wright

Although my feet won’t likely need washing. Okay. But anyway, it was so much fun talking to you though. This was great. So thanks for the invitation. Okay. Have a great day.

Joel McKinnon

All right, you too.

Joel McKinnon

Well, that was certainly a blast. I’m so pleased that Jeff had time to come on the show and talk about the Iliad and the Odyssey and so many related topics. Some of you might be thinking this was pretty far off topic for this podcast and considering that it goes far in the opposite direction of the future of humanity, you may have a point.

I don’t want to understate, however, the impact of that Jeff’s podcasts had on me and on the eventual trajectory of Suldlin Crisis. He introduces it, like I said, as history’s greatest Epic, and in my opinion, foundation is a great candidate for future history’s greatest epic. That was on my mind when I began telling the story of foundation, and I definitely was influenced a lot by Jeff’s storytelling ability and his additional commentary when developing the format for my show. In a sense, then, I consider Jeff’s podcasts, as well as the incredible inspirational work of Doug Metzger on his ongoing literature and history podcast, to be the godfathers of Selden Crisis and entirely worthy of an appearance here. I hope you all enjoyed it.

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