Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” was released in July, and since then, the famed filmmaker has sat down with the biggest names in the interview sphere.
He’s chatted with Jimmy Fallon, Jon Stewart, BBC Radio 1, and Entertainment Weekly, among others. But a 17-minute interview with a Chinese scholar who’s relatively unknown in the Western media landscape is quickly becoming the most-talked-about.
Nolan appeared on a podcast hosted by Yiyang Zhuge, a Boston College doctoral student and Chinese podcaster who interviews Western academics for her audience in China.
The interview didn’t touch on the filming or production processes. The word “IMAX” wasn’t uttered once.
Instead, Zhuge started the interview by posing a philosophical question to Nolan: “Are you a bard for a civilization at dusk?”
The interview, which she posted on her X account on Friday, has been viewed more than 6.8 million times.
The video of Zhuge’s interview also went viral on Chinese social media. Her video, posted on the Chinese platform Bilibili — China’s version of YouTube — has notched over a million views.
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People on Weibo — the country’s version of X — are giving her kudos for her insightful questions, and expressing pride that a young Chinese woman could hold her own with a titan of the film industry like Nolan.
A chance 15-minute timeslot
“I have no media credentials, no experience in entertainment journalism, and no particular expertise in film,” Zhuge said. She told Business Insider she requested a 45-minute to hourlong interview with him, which she said would be the bare minimum for a meaningful conversation.
The day before the Chinese premiere of the movie on July 30 — which Zhuge was invited to — she was told that she would get 15 minutes with Nolan the following day.
During the interview, she asked Nolan a series of academic questions, such as whether he had Christianized Homer’s “Odyssey” by introducing the concept of atonement, and whether gods are “figments of imagination or necessary noble lies.” Nolan complimented her questions more than once.
But Zhuge told Business Insider in an email interview that the interview process was “remarkably makeshift,” with virtually no production team. She had her cousin edit the video.
‘A thinking human being’
Zhuge said her preparation for the interview took less than a day, but the “underlying preparation took about 15 years” as she started studying ancient Greek and reading Homer when she was 15.
She watched the film at the premiere, opened her notebook, and wrote down two pages of questions as she watched.
“I treated the interview as I would treat a conversation with a professor after a lecture: I identified the intellectual choices that interested me and asked the person responsible how he understood them,” she said.
In a podcast episode released on Sunday, where Zhuge broke down why the interview went viral, she said she didn’t treat Nolan as someone to be idolized or criticized.
“I simply saw him as a thinking human being, and expected him to see me the same way,” she said in a summary of the podcast. “Today, such dialogue has become a luxury.”
She wishes life would go back to normal
A trending topic on Weibo about her interview has also been viewed more than a million times, with hundreds of comments lauding her for her performance.
Zhuge said this virality in China and the West alike is “too much exposure” — and she wants to enjoy her life as a “largely unnoticed scholar” in the US.
“Although I am grateful that people in both China and the West responded so warmly to the interview, I hope my life can still consist, for the most part, of thinking, reading, writing, and teaching,” she said.
“If this unexpected virality creates more opportunities for me to have serious conversations with scholars and writers, however, I would be very happy about that,” she added.
“The Odyssey” premiered in China on July 30 and rolls out in IMAX in the country from August 14.
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