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Believe it or not, it is still Odyssey Week! It’s a lot, I know, and if you’re wearing thin on all things Greek, I wanted first to offer you a break: I’ve got a new essay up on Fatherly — about gym class — for their “Back to School, Back to Sports” package. It’s very much in the Trying! vein; in fact, my editor specifically asked for “a Matt Gross-style thought piece.” Well, he came to the right guy! Here’s a brief excerpt:

Now go read the whole thing! The photos they illustrated it with are brilliant, by the way.

Okay, now that you’re done, let’s turn our attention back to The Odyssey. Today we’ve got a Q&A with another of my favorite Odyssey-adjacent writers, Zachary Mason. His 2007 novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, picks up where Homer left off, channeling Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges to imagine dozens of different extensions of the epic, from side quests to epilogues. My favorite: Odysseus returns to Troy as an old man to find himself at a tourist mecca, just one of hundreds of visitors to that famous battlefield; escaping the scrhe wanders into the underbrush, where he finds… Achilles’s shield, forged by the god Hephaestus himself! Amid teary nostalgia, he doesn’t realize the truth — it’s a souvenir replica.

Recently, Mason — who has a new book of short stories, Fabrications, coming out in early December — and I caught up to talk about how he imagines an Odyssey movie. Our discussion has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

MG: Do you have a first visual memory of The Odyssey or Greek mythology?

ZM: I think my first or my earliest memory of Greek mythology on screens is the Ray Harryhausen classic Clash of the Titans. So I guess I would start by saying that I hope Nolan has not pursued the path of making it look like a kitschy '80s movie.

But that's just me. He's the auteur. I've generally been not terribly impressed by classical matter brought to the screen. It feels sword-and-sandal-y, and a lot of directors feel that the material calls for gravitas, and that beats the life out of whatever they're doing. That said I thought The Return was great. It was really visually intelligent, and they were taking motifs from the red and black pottery and putting them out onscreen. It felt oddly like something I would have done almost for the Lost Books, which was kind of fun.

Where would the Zachary Mason Odyssey movie open?

Well, first I would have to wrestle with the fact that the things I'm most drawn to, like the layered postmodernism and 800 B.C. quality, probably don't translate so well to the screen, or if they do it's going to be a tricky and complicated process. So I would spend a lot of time doubting my instincts and working really hard to find a way to make them not be horrible. I feel like if I just went off and did it, then the default outcome would be something that some film school people and a scattering of other randoms would think, "Oh, wow, that's really cool. I haven't seen much like that before." But no one else would get it.

Why don't you elaborate on the postmodern elements? What feels knotty and complicated and hard to represent?

The best thing I can do is reference the Calvino essay, “The Odysseys within The Odyssey.” It suggests that The Odyssey is fundamentally composite, and there are obviously lots of different threads which feel really different, which were sort of merged together. Like there are the fairy tales and the monster stories, and then a much more realistic frame where Zeus is in a war against philosophy, and then he comes home and there was domestic trouble. And so that almost begs you to think, "Well, okay, since it goes from pretty realistic to fairytales to back to realistic, is he telling the truth? Was he just with some woman on an island and eventually it didn't work out and he thought, Ah, I'll go home?"

And he's an inveterate liar in any case, and he can hardly give you a straight answer if you ask him the time. It feels like it just needs a little push, and then it all starts to come apart, because what actually can you trust? Kind of nothing. I would want to play with that and have lots of layers of story in a Cloud Atlas-y vein, except instead of randomly piled on, they would all be building the narrative in some meaningful way.

Actually, that's really a fun idea. You could have realistic ones and then more supernatural or noumenal ones, and there could be an ambiguity about which is actually real. Like, it's kind of boring if it turns out that if it's the Scooby-Doo…

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I'm trying to imagine how get this down if it's gonna be a screenplay. Would you start with Odysseus telling a story?

None of this is believable unless you choose to believe what you're being told.

I feel like it would be a little clunky to just start with a frame — but maybe not so clunky. Like, he's on a beach and the fire is burning down, and the only light is the coals in his face. And he says, "Listen, I'll tell you how it happened," something like that. Maybe that'll work. Or we'd start with some resonant part of the story, like the moment of the homecoming, they're reuniting with Penelope or someone lost at sea, and it's just one interpretation, a certain resonance. But then you go out of frame, and then it all gets recontextualized, and then there's more material, then you go to another frame. That would be fun. Instead of just randomly adding layers for the sake of being postmodern or being a Calvino super-fan, for it to really work, it would all have to be some very clever, rather ironical, deeply nasty plan to attain an end. Maybe it's a way to kill the suitors. Maybe it's a way to escape Ithaca. Maybe to borrow from myself it's a way of making himself into a hero. Naturally, he was a rationalist and kind of a coward.

The story is not, as it's written, an obvious three-act structure. You have a lot of tale telling. You have the fairy tale monster stuff. You have the revenge plot. Are there parts of that that can go? Where does the monster fairy tale stuff rank in your list of necessities?

They're, they're definitely up there. Even though it's this Frankenstein's narrative, I feel like the monsters are important. And even though it's probably a bunch of stories that were just stitched together, there's still a resonance when you put the things together. And so this is a long-winded way of saying the monsters have to stay, obviously.

You could do it like a kids movie and heroic bravery in the face of various obstacles. I think it's much more interesting to try to find some depth of feeling in the monsters. Like with Circe like it's just below the surface. You could say she's just a witch. She wants to capture Odysseus and his men and turn them into swine because she's mean, and that's what witches do. But is this some sort of feminist thing? Is this just her misanthropy? Or is the market for swine so strong it's worthwhile?

There are all sorts of unanswered questions to which there are ultimately, I'm sure, no answers. But it's still interesting to engage with them.

What elements can we lose? Are there anecdotes, side moments, side quests, characters that for a movie version you can just skip them?

Yeah, we can cut the fetch quests. Those are never fun. All the gift exchanges, which I guess were interesting 3,000 years ago but now one reads them and thinks, "Oh, this is very cultural." Nausicaa never made a big impression on me. I haven't actually read The Odyssey in a long time. I deliberately was just working from whatever was left in memory even 15 years ago. But as I recall, Menelaus's story gets told secondhand by a bard, I think in Nausicaa's court. And that could go. The Telemachiad can go, though I feel bad for Telemachus because he's second string even after all this time.

He just never quite rises to the occasion until — and this is something I'm really curious to see how Christopher Nolan handles — it's Telemachus's idea at the end to string up and hang the 12 slave girls who were disloyal. Which your usual Hollywood movie the hero would spare, give the girls a stern telling to or maybe kill the ringleader and let the rest off.

I can see it, though. They allied themselves against the house to which they had normally pledged their loyalty and from which they'd gotten their food. I mean, I'm not advocating employee murder, given that Telemachus probably wouldn't have lived very long had Penelope up and married.

You see how they've turned their coats and how they're against the house of Laertes, and can feel how betrayed he is and at how much risk they're putting him and then his family.

I assume it's an R-rated movie, so I guess you might lose some viewers/box office that way, but I hope he kills the slave girls in Nolan's world.

What about the gods? They’re not as much of a presence in The Odyssey as they are in The Iliad, but there's still Athena showing up. Is she necessary, or is Odysseus's inbuilt wiliness enough to get him by?

That's an interesting question and, of course, there are lots of ways to read it. In fact, another pretty ancient postmodern thing, it seems almost like it's written that way so that you're allowed, you can read the gods as literally there or as aspects of personality. There's one bit where I think Athena grabs Achilles by the hair when she wants to keep him from doing something. That's a good image. So you could cut Athena, and Odysseus's wiliness will see him through. But I feel like something's lost. She doesn't get a lot of screen time, but it's still an essential aspect of the book.

He is, after all, her favorite, and she has a choice of heroes. But even the others are just athletes and aristocrats and of little real interest to a god who can think. And so Odysseus — I always thought it seemed like he would be her only company. I like it. You only ever see the two of them in a shot together. You know? And maybe it would always be Odysseus leaving, not her leaving.

I always wonder if in a movie version, putting a god on his side stacks the deck too much in his favor.

Well, I think it depends how you do it. I mean, the god isn't giving him destructive superpowers. She's just whispering advice. Did you see the Battlestar Galactica remake some years back? Yeah, like interior Six would be pretty interesting.

Oh, okay. I can see that.

And to borrow from myself again if you want to go to the realist path, I think it would be prudent to to have Odysseus purport to be the favorite of Athena and say, "Oh, the goddess is speaking to me. She's right there, and she says...” He's a manipulative cynic and an atheist materialist, and everybody else is, like, primitive man and deeply superstitious. This would be very effective.

I wonder if there's a way in the movie — since it's a movie with a big star — to play on Odysseus himself being a famous person in his own world. He is the equivalent of a movie star in his universe. I love when he's is he with the Phaeacians, and the bard is telling the story of what Odysseus did in Troy, and he's right there. I wonder if there's gonna be some Matt Damon meta references.

Is Matt Damon playing Odysseus?

Yes.

Oh, wow. I saw a trailer, and I saw Matt Damon pop up. I didn't realize he was the lead. Interesting.

He is the lead. Tom Holland is playing Telemachus. Who would you cast in your version of this?

So it will sound like I'm just trying to grab an A-lister, but I think a really interesting choice would be Ryan Gosling. He's the full movie star, but he also doesn't strike me as a bimbo. There's kind of a cerebral quality. and also seems to have a potential for violence, or at least he can project that onscreen, and that's a pretty good recommendation for the role.

Who's Penelope?

Anne Hathaway.

So for reasons I can't explain, she's never really done it for me. I mean, she's very pretty and everything, and she's a good actress, but somehow not terribly engaging, and it seems like kind of a miscast to me, but I hope it's awesome. Charlize Theron would've been interesting and she's age appropriate.

I think the thing that makes sense to me about Anne Hathaway is that she is very good at looking put-upon. She just always looks like she's dealing with a whole bunch of annoying suitors. People who want things from her. I don't know if I like her or dislike her, but she always looks like she's a bit harassed. Charlize Theron, she's actually playing Calypso. She's a little too tough, I think, to play Penelope.

I does feel like Charlize Theron would kick your ass if you tried to impose on her.

She will definitely kill you. She will definitely kick your ass. Who else do we have? Zendaya is playing Athena.

Not an immediately obvious choice, but I think a good one. To the extent, obviously, my, my opinion is very important to Mr. Nolan.

I'm surprised they didn't, you know, consult you for this.

They were probably too shy.

I'm trying to imagine what the voyage to the land of the dead looks like. Does that get your David Lynch thing going?

So if you're going to do it with a David Lynch slant, that would definitely be one way. God, I would love to see that film, but I think it would be dangerous to fatal for anyone else to try. If it's the Lynch version, then perhaps instead of getting on a boat and sailing off to an island, it's some sort of mundane thing which opens a portal. I don't think Lynch would favor a big Stargate-type thing which takes you to Hades, but rather maybe it's in a dream, and there'd be some beautifully designed, ambiguous, enigmatic, compelling space which would reference the description of Hades.

Are there other directors you think would have an interesting take?

I would happily see Fellini's if that had been a thing. Also, if Kurosawa had adapted it, like Ran was from Macbeth, The Odyssey set in feudal Japan, that would be awesome. God, that would be great. The giant one-eyed oni is not such a stretch.

Where does your ideal movie end? The Odyssey itself ends in a weird place with the very sudden truce between Odysseus and the families of the suitors that he's killed. They're about to continue the war on Ithaca, and then Athena's like, "All right. No, guys, stop."

I think that's kind of a beautiful ending. Aristotle in Poetics said that drama is about people like to see cause and effect unfolding, and so we've seen that unfolding and unfolding, and Odysseus gets the upper hand. It's going to keep unfolding. It's going to butcher all these other people. But then Athena says, "Stop, enough." And even though the light of battle is in his eyes and he's ready to butcher them, he still listens. And so the causes stop. It's like karma being stilled, and then, you know, it's not like time has stopped, but there's a moment of peace and potential. And then the credits roll. Stop. Cut.

I mean, that would be the Fellini version, right? Athena yells cut, and then we pull back, and we see that it is a film, and she has brought things to an end. That's a really fun conceit: Athena is the filmmaker, but only Odysseus can see her or talk with her, and the Trojans, they don't know what he's talking about — maybe they don't even know what film is. 🪨🪨🪨