The Daily Show: Ears Edition - Jon Stewart on Lindsey Graham's Death & America's Geriatric Political Class | Christopher Nolan

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

Senator Lindsey Graham’s sudden death prompts Jon Stewart to dive into the gerontocracy problem in Washington, D.C., Trump’s backhanded tribute to his deceased “friend,” the bucket list that G...raham never got to complete, and how Mitch McConnell somehow managed to outlive his colleague from South Carolina. Oscar-winning director, writer, and producer Christopher Nolan sits down with Jon to discuss his new film, "The Odyssey." They talk about "Oppenheimer" paving the way for "The Odyssey" to be made, Nolan's process of constructing movies through diagrams and structures, his embrace of the fantastical while showing respect to the film's source material, and finishing ahead of schedule despite filming with an IMAX camera in three-minute increments. -- CarShield is offering our listeners 20% off with the code TDS at https://CarShield.com/TDS New customers can save 35% on your first month of subscription by going to https://dosedaily.co/TDS or entering TDS at checkout. -- The Daily Show airs weeknights at 11/10c on Comedy Central. Stream full episodes on Paramount+ Follow TDS: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:02:27 My name is John Stewart. Great show for you tonight. Later on, we're going to be joined by the unbelievably amazing director. Christopher Nolan's going to be joining us. Christopher Nolan's going to be joined us. A movie out called The Odyssey based on the
Starting point is 00:02:44 video console from the 1970s. It's all about Pong. But first, obviously, big news from the weekend, the sudden passing of Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Obviously, I knew him a bit from lobbying down at Capitol Hill,
Starting point is 00:03:01 but I didn't know him particularly well. So I'll let Lindsey Graham's best friend memorialize the late senator. Joining us now by phone is one of his best friends, President Donald Trump. I know you lost one of your closest friends and an ally in the Senate. How are you feeling? Well, I don't feel great. He was a great guy. He was a friend.
Starting point is 00:03:27 He would call me all the time. He'd just, I'd say stop calling me, Lindsay. I'll never forget the way that I always let him go to voicemail. It was our thing. Obviously, he's just opening the eulogy on a lighthearted note. I'm sure the poignancy follows. Love playing golf. Love being outside.
Starting point is 00:04:11 It wasn't that he was a great striker of the ball. He wasn't exactly a perfect. He wasn't Jack Nicholas. He was not Tiger. He was totally against me. He said, I'll get you in South Carolina. get you in South Carolina. That didn't work out too well.
Starting point is 00:04:26 It was a nasty campaign. He was tough and nasty. I wanted to see the war with Ukraine end. Very quickly, I think he was more into, you know, keeping it going, frankly. He was a total workaholic politician. Now, some people don't call that work. Some people will call that a lot of talking.
Starting point is 00:04:44 I think the president has zoomed through the first five stages of grief and gone straight to number six. F*** that guy. He's a lot of balls for Donald Trump to gently roast someone for yapping too much. He's the one who toasted his friend on Meet the Press, CNN State of the Union, Fox
Starting point is 00:05:20 and Friends. Trump was everywhere remembering Lindsey Graham, even when the host of the show appeared to not want him to. These people suffer from a very fine disease known as Trump to arrangement syndrome, and he was seeing that.
Starting point is 00:05:36 Mr. President, did you notice it? He was really come a long way on the terminating the filibuster. But, Mr. President, did you notice that you notice anything different. Millions and millions of balances impossible. And they didn't know in two weeks. They let it be known an hour later. So Mr. President, real quickly,
Starting point is 00:05:54 that you notice anything different from Lindsey? On the phone? These elections are very dishonest. All right, Mr. President, the TV station's going through a tunnel. His best friend Donald Trump had to concede that Senator Graham's career did have a bad moment. Now, he had one bad moment. That was, you know, in the January 6th thing, when he stood up. All right. Now I've had it.
Starting point is 00:06:25 That's it. I can't do it anymore. So I give him a 99 instead of a 100. You know, most people were, a lot of people were at 100. But he did have that one little moment. You know, my favorite part of any eulogy is when they announce the person's life score. Inter review. Yeah, Graham had a good undercarriage, good mouth feel. Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:07:02 Score. I'm doing a life score over here. Anyway, 8-2. I'm going to give him an 8-2. Solid score. If he had let the people kill him on January 6, 9-2, monster score. I'd give him a monster score. Now, before Graham passed, he was not feeling well.
Starting point is 00:07:20 I was kind of joking about how he didn't have time to die. Axis reported that several hours before his death, Senator Graham complained of feeling unwell and said, I can't die now. I still need to do the Russia sanctions, get Iran sorted out, and do Israeli-Saudy normalization. he passed away a short time later. Middle East peace
Starting point is 00:07:46 is about as ambitious as a bucket list item can get. I want to bring Israel back into the family of nations and go whale watching. But let this episode be a lesson, people. Write it down. Write your last wish is down. Write what you want to accomplish in your name down
Starting point is 00:08:09 because Donald Trump had a very different interpretation of Lindsay's last week. wishes. He was pushing the Save America act like crazy. This is a big, this is a big blow to the Save America Act. Let me tell you. And then Lindsay said to me, his voice weakening, barely a whisper. He said to me, Donald, when I die, float my body down the crystal clear, reflecting pool water so that I may lie in state in your completed ballroom. I said, Lindsay, don't, don't.
Starting point is 00:08:55 Save your strength, Lindsay. He said, no, no, no. One more thing, I want, before I leave this mortal coil, for them to put your name back the Kennedy. Now, a lot of you may be wondering, as I was, did Lindsay Graham die before
Starting point is 00:09:34 Mitch McConnell? Is that possible? Was the one who spent a lot of time in and out of hospitals since his Capitol Hill buffering episodes? McConnell was the one who suddenly disappeared for a month and nobody heard from him to the point where the governor of his own state was asking for proof of life
Starting point is 00:10:08 which coincidentally we got yesterday. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you totally believable evidence that Mitch McConnell is not only alive, but the happiest boy in the hospital. He's the happiest boy in the hospital. He's the happiest boy in the house.
Starting point is 00:10:34 It's the smile of a make-a-wish kid whose wish was that everyone else in the hospital lost their health insurance due to his fucking policies. And after that, of course, Mitch and his wife released even more photos. Here are at Disney riding Splash Mountain. Then apparently they climbed the spire of the Empire. state building and renewed their vows. And then, let's say, went to a World Cup game. Might not be out of the woods yet. Regardless, McConnell is still here, and Graham's gone. And so it was time
Starting point is 00:11:30 for the media to discuss Graham's legacy for like a couple of minutes. You know, this is, this is so tough for you and for so many there on Capitol Hill, because it really was so sudden. No one was expecting this. And we have to turn to the crude numbers of it all, right? Todd Blanche's path to getting confirmed as Attorney General just got a whole lot more complicated. Unfortunately, your majority now down to 52. Mitch McConnell's continued absence, now leaving Republicans with just 51 senators. If Collins votes against you down to 50, the vice president breaks the tie. But what if it's Collins, Emmerkowski?
Starting point is 00:12:04 Republicans were already struggling with the numbers. Add in Lindsey Graham now being off the table. I'm sorry, off the table. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we have a winner for worst dying euphemism yet. Off the take, where's old yeller? Don't worry, Timmy, we just had to take him off the table. Although I guess the numbers have been pretty tight in the Congress for a while now. I wonder why that is.
Starting point is 00:12:38 The current Congress is the third oldest in U.S. history with the average age of senators nearly 64. 131 out of the 530. Members of Congress are 70 or older. Graham is the sixth member of Congress to die this term. What the f f this term? He's the sixth member of Congress to die this term. Any other business, they'd shut it down to figure out what the f*** is going on.
Starting point is 00:13:15 Gas leak, serial killer. Six of them are dead. My God, those are pet code gerbil numbers. What are they just coming to Congress every morning with a shovel? What the f***'s going on? It's not like the job is dangerous. They're just sitting there. They're not filming deadliest catch.
Starting point is 00:13:43 Oh, wow. He really is healthy. And not to put too fine a point on it, but the last person to speak to Graham is our 80-year-old president. The governor who chooses Graham's replacement is 79. One of the candidates being considered is 78, But he backed out because he's too important at his current job in the House of Representatives, all to save the Todd Blanche hearings, which are being co-run by 92-year-old Chuck Grassley
Starting point is 00:14:16 and whippersnapper Dick Durbin, 81. The entire fucking Congress is falling apart due to a lack of not just political will, but bone density. 83-year-old Board of Democratic Congresswoman Frederica Wilson recovering from an eye surgery. 89-year-old Chuck Grassley, getting hip replacement. Senator Patrick Leahy, a broken hip. Nancy Pelosi hip replacement surgery. Jenny Hoyer is in the hospital with pneumonia. Eleanor Holmes Norton is in the early stages of dementia.
Starting point is 00:14:46 Dwight Evans, who's 71, had a stroke. Bernie Sanders is sidelined by a heart attack. Congresswoman Kay Granger lived in an assistant living facility for dementia patients while still serving in Congress and drawing a congressional paycheck. And all of those, by the way, are the ones. who were still on the table. Place is a Sky Rizzi commercial. Free samples.
Starting point is 00:15:18 Get some free samples, Sky Rizzi. Look, I'm no fucking prize. I get that people age differently. Are we tolerating this level of national frailty in our lawmaking? And it's not just anti-old people. It's not disrespect to ask this question.
Starting point is 00:15:42 In Japan, they revere the elderly. But the one thing they don't do is put them in charge of everything. What's the four argument here? Well, age is a relative thing, as we all know. His experience is an advantage to us and not to be described as a disadvantage. Oh, experience, that's right.
Starting point is 00:16:03 This is actually the most experienced Congress we've ever had. How is that working out? The most unproductive Congress in the first year of a president in history. Potentially the least productive in modern history. Fewest laws passed since at least the 1950s. As our government has gotten older, the economy has gotten worse, inequality more severe, our safety net shredded.
Starting point is 00:16:24 The irony is that this long-past retirement age government has policies that force everyone else to have to work long-past retirement age. Mostly, though, without a health care plan that covers a mysterious month in the hospital. because we don't have a system that rewards experience and competence and performance. We have a system that rewards incumbency. These people aren't brilliant. They're f***ing barnacles, utterly incapable of addressing a world moving much faster than the speed of Matlock. Why does it matter? Here's the co-chair of the House Army Caucus.
Starting point is 00:17:15 Co-chair. Congressman John Carter of Texas, explaining why it's imperative to remediate our outdated defense systems. Another issue that's very important, the department has historically relied on outdated production techniques of interjectic manufacturing, which may have remained unchanged since the Second World War. Civil War, it's a second world. The blur in my mind of having been at both. How is the
Starting point is 00:18:02 Department ensuring that investment in next generation energetics manufacturing such as AI machine learning capabilities and enabling and insurance of quality assurance. I take no
Starting point is 00:18:27 pleasure in this. But this is not right. The stakes are too high. There's no way that dude even knows how to put his phone on silent. How can our government be better to use of the chat giput? I'm going to get that chat kaput. If I can get a jackaboot, if I can get a jackaboot, we're going to get a government. We're going to get a government up and an insurance in the civil war and the chat kaput.
Starting point is 00:19:10 The people deciding rules about the most advanced technology on earth should look like they're steam powered. I'm going to shout you can put, no. Get some more coal up the ass and get me going again. Come on. Understands you cannot have the country ruled by people this old and frail. Everyone except them. Senator Mitch McConnell said over the weekend, I'm not taking a break from the Senate business that matters to you.
Starting point is 00:19:52 I still have unfinished business to complete on your behalf, and I have every intention of finishing the job you elected me to do. You don't have to finish a job. And by the way, I am going nowhere because I have unfinished business literally is what a ghost would say. What a ghost would say. I manage me.
Starting point is 00:20:24 Finished business. I must curtail your access to foodstead. No way suggesting that old people cannot be productive at their jobs. But at the highest levels of our government, there is no check on when they are no longer capable of, doing just that, but their power remains.
Starting point is 00:20:52 Advanced age is just one more way in which our government is at a remove from the needs of the people they purport to serve, and they have too much power to be this disconnected. If only there was somebody in the government who understood that. We need a Democratic Party that opens its doors to new people, new energy, and new ideas. That kid gets it When we come back Christopher Nolan will be joining in the city Picture this
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Starting point is 00:23:44 Both walk their own paths toward justice and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong, begins to blur. Don't miss the three-episode premiere of the Hulu original series Furious on July 27th, only on Hulu on Disney Plus. His new film is called The Odyssey. Please welcome Christopher Nolan.
Starting point is 00:24:39 Let me begin by saying this. Holy shit. I saw this on Sunday. Thank you very much. Your people set up a lovely screening. It's a staggering work. Just... remarkable to the point where, you know, I feel like I know a lot of the tricks.
Starting point is 00:25:01 I don't know how you did it. I honestly don't. That's all practical, right? Those are real boats. That's real water. This is not... Yeah, real boats, real water. It's the Odyssey.
Starting point is 00:25:11 I wanted to take the audience on this incredible journey. And for me, I mean, we use every trick in the book, certainly, but the basis of it is to get the actors, get Matt Damon, Tom Holland, and Hathaway, everybody, Rob Pattinson, get them out there in the world, find locations, real locations, get a real boat, you know, get out there. Get a real cyclops. Get a real cyclops.
Starting point is 00:25:38 As close as we could, yep, yep, exactly. What made you decide to take on this epic work? Well, coming out of my last film, Oppenheimer, had way more success. more success than I think we had any right to expect. And that gives you an opportunity to get something made that you might not otherwise be able to get made. You would have had trouble.
Starting point is 00:26:04 Christopher Nolan, after everything, after interstellar, after inception, after Momento, after Batman. You would have had trouble selling that had it not been for Oppenheimer? I think it helped that it was very successful. You think the Oscar thing helped. I think the Oscar thing helped. I think it all helped to go to the studio and say,
Starting point is 00:26:22 because being The Odyssey, it needs a massive budget. It needs a massive cast. It needs a lot. So you're asking a lot of the studio. You're asking a lot of the cast and everybody. You know, I like to say it was a very hard movie, but hard for all the right reasons. You know, it's the Odyssey.
Starting point is 00:26:40 It should be hard. It shows up on screen. I mean, all of it shows up on screen. Thank you. Someone was telling me that you actually completed it ahead of schedule, as you have with all of your movies and under budget. Yes. Never happened.
Starting point is 00:26:55 It was... Never happened. I mean, it just... Well, I mean, the reality is, you know, we went in at 100 days. And by day 91, we couldn't have taken another step. So we finished the right time. You were done. We were done.
Starting point is 00:27:16 Everybody was done. I mean, people were just exhausted. Right. They'd been through it. So, you know, it took the right time to make the film. We had enough time to make it. We had the resources to make it. There is, now, I am obviously, I don't want to say an expert in mythology and Greek literature.
Starting point is 00:27:33 Some would say. But some of our writers are experts. And so when we walked out, I walked out with someone who was actually studied those texts in Greek. And I was looking at them like, because for me, I was utterly absorbed and transformed by the powerful storytelling and the epic nature of it and all those things. But this is a person that, to be frank, would probably. be a bit of a pain in the ass to watch The Odyssey with. Loved it. Oh, great, great.
Starting point is 00:28:07 One note. Okay. It's a little late. Are you ready? Okay. Apparently there is a joke that Odysseus makes with Cyclops. Yes. Yes. He was very upset that that was not in the movie.
Starting point is 00:28:24 I understand. It's a pun. Pons in translation are tough. Do you do a lot of puns in your monologues every night? We do sometimes, but only because we write the show at a fifth grade level. It's a slightly different. There you go. I tried.
Starting point is 00:28:42 It was not possible to work it in. When you do something like this that so many people feel a sense of ownership over. Yeah, yeah. Or did the experience with things like Batman already kind of inure you to that experience? Hugely. Not ennure. It taught you what's at the base of it. You know, when you take on the...
Starting point is 00:29:00 the character of Batman as we did in the Dark Night trilogy. You were dealing with, at that time, 75 years of history with a beloved character who'd been worked on by these incredible writers and artists. And what we learned in that experience is if we made the best film we possibly could, if we put as strong an interpretation on the characters we could, the fans felt the respect on the love for the source material, even if we weren't doing exactly what they would have done. That was what was important was to respect the material. And I think the same applies very much to Homer.
Starting point is 00:29:32 That is a very interesting tape because I would imagine it's easy to approach it with almost a sense of defensiveness, which I've seen in those kinds of films where they say, well, these people, it's a toxic fandom and they won't. But that's a very different mindset, which is, I want to make sure that I've honored this material
Starting point is 00:29:50 in the right way, and that should resonate with that. Yeah. I mean, that's what we found at every stage with those movies. People have very strong feelings about the characters. They're interested. And that's a huge advantage for a filmmaker. I mean, the fact that people have been fascinated by The Odyssey for 3,000 years, the fact that people, you know, care about a film coming out.
Starting point is 00:30:10 You know, that's a huge advantage. It means we've got people's attention, and now we have to show them something that feels worthwhile. It feels like it does justice to this incredible story. Right. And it does have that epic nature. This is going to feel far afield. It felt like, in some respects,
Starting point is 00:30:27 the Odyssey was a sequel to Oppenheimer. And I know that sounds incredibly, incredibly dumb. So let me explain why I think that. I'm incredibly dumb. When I think about Oppenheimer, what so stayed with me in that movie was the weight that Oppenheimer must have felt when he saw the reality of what he had created.
Starting point is 00:30:57 created. And the Odyssey feels like a journey of a man reckoning with what he had done in war and what war does to men. And it made it, they felt very connected to me, both films. I was about to stop you because we don't want any spoilers. Oh, 3,000 year old spoilers. But no, I am very much, I feel like you certainly watched the film the way I intended. And I think by the that connection is made. You know, the interpretation of the Odyssey, what it could mean, the idea of these extraordinary events of the Trojan War, the force, all of this. Yeah, we wanted to try and wrestle with it, you know, in a modern sense, to try and say, okay, what if these things were real? What if we were there? What would it be like? You know, what would the resonance be? What would
Starting point is 00:31:48 the gravity of the situation be? And in micro, you know, it's things like being on a real ship and a real storm, or going into the cave of the Cyclops, what would that really be like? And the answer is intense. And as far as the effect of everything that Odysseus has been through and what part he's played in this mythic conflict of Trojan War,
Starting point is 00:32:13 yeah, it felt like the thing to do was to really try to take that on with a certain amount of weight, a certain amount of gravity. But for me, every film I do, if I've done my job right, I leave it with questions and sort of interesting things that I want to keep drilling down on.
Starting point is 00:32:27 Right. And coming out of Oppenheimer, yeah, I definitely brought Oppenheimer into this movie with me, yeah, certainly. And it's also because the movies are also well-constructed. I feel like you would have been a great architect as well if you wanted to be. Like there's such wonderful symmetry and puzzles to unfold in there.
Starting point is 00:32:49 Do you approach it as a constructor? I do. I mean, before I write, I do a lot of sort of diagramming out. I draw a lot of pictures, not storyboards, but actually diagrams of the narrative and how the structure might work. And coming to this poem, I mean, Homer's original is one of the great nonlinear structures. Which for me, you know, that's the kind of structure I enjoy in cinematic storytelling. So I really try to be faithful to that. But yeah, I do a lot of sort of visual diagramming, a lot of trying to think.
Starting point is 00:33:23 trying to find ways to think of the narrative in three-dimensional terms. Then I sit down and write when I've done months and months of that. And it does, you know, you said something interesting when you said, you know, it's this non-linear story.
Starting point is 00:33:35 And it has so many narrators and you don't know who's reliable and who is not reliable. Is that something you have to decide as you go in? Do you think to yourself? I'll tell him, because he's reliable or Penelope is or even Odysseus
Starting point is 00:33:48 are there moments where you think, did this even happen to him? Is this just his mind trying to erase the pain of what he went through in Troy. Are we going deep now? Go deep, baby. Yeah, I know. I know. Here's the thing.
Starting point is 00:34:00 I will never get a chance to get high with you in a doorway. So this is it, baby. This is all we got. Because it really, I'm telling you, this is a poignant work. It really speaks to the moment we're in and everything. No, I mean, I actually, I love the nature of the question. I'm just trying to think of how to answer it for people
Starting point is 00:34:21 who haven't seen the movie. and I don't want to... Well, I never like to define the experience for the audience. So for me, there are ambiguities. There are questions. There are layers in which things can work. But the answer to the first part of your question,
Starting point is 00:34:36 and this has always been the case for me with my work, is I have to know the answer. I have to know what I believe the answer to be. And then otherwise, the ambiguities won't be productive. There will be a sort of non-answer, as opposed to if you look at the ending of inception, for example, the spinning top. and that, you know, people often will ask me, you know.
Starting point is 00:34:57 Was it? Well, exactly. And when you approach it, though, in your mind, you know the answer. Yes. But that's not something that you put out there because that changes the experience for the viewer. First time I overtook a film, you know, really out there and did a bunch of interviews on it, was Memento.
Starting point is 00:35:13 Right. And that's a film I wrote based on a short story that my brother had written. And he came with me, came with us to the Venice Film Festival, which where we premiered it. And right afterwards, I was asked a bunch of questions, and they asked me about the ambiguity at the end. And I said, well, it's meant to be up to you, but I think it's this, this, this.
Starting point is 00:35:33 And he took me aside, and he's like, nobody heard the first part where they said it's meant to be up to you. All they hear is what you say. You're interpreting Trump's everything. You can never do that again. And he was right, and I never have since that. Because... Okay, I'm just going to cross out my McConaughey in the library, interstellar question.
Starting point is 00:35:50 Son of a bitch! Do you find yourself, because it feels like the type of project that's so literally immersive, do you have to complete a work before you begin to do those diagrams and sketches of other work? Or do you find yourself in certain phases of it beginning to plant seeds in other areas that you'll revisit? No, I very specifically do one thing at a time. Once I borrow in on a project, I, nothing else exists. I mean, family just about, you know, for you. It's, you know, one of the responsibilities,
Starting point is 00:36:34 but one of the great thrills of my job is you get to sort of live in a world for a couple of years. And I devote myself to that fully. And for me, that's never finished really until the film goes out to the audience. The audience finishes the movie. They tell us what it is that we did. And so we're right now.
Starting point is 00:36:52 you know, a few days away, and it's a terrifying time. Is that so, do you feel a little bit of the jitters from that? Or do you think you've got a pretty good idea of where you think it'll land for people? Have you seen it enough with people? I've seen it enough with people. We screen it as we go to guinea pigs, you know. Sure.
Starting point is 00:37:15 By the way, also in the movie. Odysseus fights guinea pig. He's changed some things around. Yeah, so you have an idea of how the movie's playing for an audience, but the truth is there's nothing like going out into the world for thousands and thousands of screens all over the world, you know, over one weekend. I mean, that's a very different thing, and it never gets any easier, and it's absolutely terrifying. Can I ask you one particular sequence, the Trojan horse sequence, which is something that,
Starting point is 00:37:46 I think for all of us that have a familiarity with, you know, the Iliad and the Odyssey and sort of our introduction to myth and Edith Hamilton and how that all spins off. The Trojan horse had always existed as a certain methodology for how it gets in Detroit. You take a very different approach that I thought landed thematically
Starting point is 00:38:11 the poignancy of it much better. So I guess what I'm saying is Homer ain't got shit on you. What was the process just going into that particular scene because just the mechanics of it seemed so difficult but also it just it felt like such a brilliant summation thematically of the weight that Odysseus felt like he was carrying?
Starting point is 00:38:44 Yeah, I mean a lot of that thinking for me comes about as a result of looking at it saying okay, how can we have this work and be credible for a modern audience? We all know when we see a Trojan Holes that it's stuffed with Greeks. You know, so you're starting from a difficult position. It's like, how do you sell that concept?
Starting point is 00:39:05 It's a piñata that fights back. It's a piñiata that fights back. Sure. And I had actually, 20 years ago, I was briefly attached to direct Troy, the film that David Benioff had written based on the Iliad. Yes, I read that.
Starting point is 00:39:18 That was the Brad Pitt. Yeah. So I had to figure out, because the horse was in that script, even though it's not in the earlier, they put it in the film. And so I had to sort of figure out, well, what's my approach to it?
Starting point is 00:39:28 And I came up with this idea of the horse, half buried in the sand, about to be destroyed or carried away by the waves. So as the Trojans find it, the last thing, it looks like, you know,
Starting point is 00:39:40 there's no wheels, it doesn't look like something that's meant to be carried into the city. And that image stuck with me for, you know, decades. I really wanted to do that and flesh out the whole sequence. Because to me, that was the excitement.
Starting point is 00:39:54 It's like, can we present this to an audience in a way that they can believe in? And that was the sort of mantra for everybody on the film with every sequence. Right. People want to go on this journey with us. Let's give them a reason to believe. It's grounded in a practical realism
Starting point is 00:40:06 that I think is what helps it create that epignac. Because I'm raised in the Clash of the Titans generation. You know, it's sort of like Harry Hamlin with the band and then like the Silla comes into the water. You know, it was, all like claymation and camp. And that's how I've never seen that type of movie portrayed with a sort of, like you say, grounded realism, even though they're gods.
Starting point is 00:40:33 Well, and this is the thing is, you know, when we looked at it, Greek mythology hadn't really been told in modern cinema in that way. The work of Ray Harryhaus when you're talking about Clash for the Titans and things like that. Very, very brilliant, handmade, amazing approach. But always on a B-movie budget, never with the ability to kind of. of put it out there big, you know, with an incredible cast and, you know, on that sort of scale. And I think it was those technical limitations.
Starting point is 00:41:01 Like in the great era of, you know, Swarden Sandals movies of the 50s and 60s, they don't have the techniques to be able to embrace the fantastical. And what is the Odyssey without the fantastical? You know, you want to see the Cyclops. You want to see Scy and Carbentis and the Sirens and Circe and all of the HAC. said, boy, those scenes are just spectacular. That's Samantha Morton. Incredible. I wanted to work with for a long time. And you even had to, you know, when you were talking about the technology of it,
Starting point is 00:41:28 you had to sort of create machinery that didn't exist because IMAX is notoriously loud. Yes, cameras are, I mean, it's like a generator. Yes. It's a crazy thing to have to act in front of. So in the past, we'd always used it for the action scenes. I saw IMAX first, I was about 16 years old, at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. And I wanted, right then, I was like, if I could ever...
Starting point is 00:41:52 At 16? Yeah, yeah. I wanted to make a film entirely in IMAX. On the Dark Night, I had the opportunity to meet with IMAX and say, can we use your cameras and do the action scenes that way? So the introduction of Heath Ledger's Joker, truck flip, all that stuff. All that's IMAX. But because the cameras are so loud, we couldn't do performances.
Starting point is 00:42:11 We couldn't capture the dialogue. And so finally, finally, with this film, I'd call them up, And I said, look, if ever there were a film to do the entire film in IMAX, this is the one. So can we find a way to silence the cameras? And they built this blimping system. This kind of high-tech box. You put the camera in, and then you can... So you're filming done that.
Starting point is 00:42:29 But that IMAX has got to run out. How long... What's the cartridge on an IMAX? A little under three minutes. So every three minutes... Yeah. Every three minutes you're saying to the actors, just stay in that mode. Stay in the water.
Starting point is 00:42:40 Incredibly dramatic scene. And you came in nine days faster and underbubes. Even with that? Well, I think actually sometimes the limitations give everybody a real focus. So I went to the actors earlier on and I said, in the middle of your most intense scene, is it okay if we
Starting point is 00:42:58 just stop the camera? Reload it. Keep everybody quiet. Here's what I'm going to say. You're a wizard, Harry. And the film is spectacular. And as always, you are my favorite filmmaker. And I just so appreciate
Starting point is 00:43:13 the intention that you put into it and the craft of it and the beauty of it and it's just spectacular. And I do hope everybody rushes out to see it in the way that it was intended because it's really a remarkable piece of work. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Christopher Nolan. We're going to get a quick break. Managing cholesterol health has become a major wellness focus across America. Yet a significant number of individuals hesitate when presented with traditional health care options. There's often a reluctance to rely on standard lifelong capsules, driving a clear demand for choices that allow individuals to retain personal autonomy over their daily wellness routines. This shift is leading more consumers to look
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Starting point is 00:46:50 women. Who knew? I assume you're talking about this parasite's been in the news kind of sweeping across America, is it? Yes, John. At least 32 states have reported cases. And while it's still unclear how people are getting infected, previous outbreaks have been caused by
Starting point is 00:47:10 raspberries. Lettuce, John. And petri dishes. But, hey, that's not going to stop me from enjoying my three favorite foods. Michael Costa, everybody. Good luck, yeah. Here, it's the moment is that.
Starting point is 00:47:35 Sean Duffy, this guy, Sean is exceptional. And you know what people don't know, he was the world record in going up logs, going up to the top of these stupid trees. I never saw anything like that. And Sean had, how many years were you
Starting point is 00:47:50 the champion of that? Five? Five. For five years, he was the world champion. He was a lumberjack. Who the hell knew that about Sean Duffy? Explore more shows from the Daily Show podcast universe by searching The Daily Show,
Starting point is 00:48:03 wherever you get your podcasts. Watch the Daily Show weeknights at 11, 10 Central on Comedy Central, and stream full episodes anytime on Paramount Plus. This has been a Comedy Central podcast.

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