Christopher Nolan has defended his creative approach to The Odyssey, telling Channel 4's Krishnan Guru-Murthy that he deliberately set out to strip away the "cultural prejudice" that leads audiences to view the ancient world in overly formal or elevated terms. The director argued that Homer's poem is in fact "earthy and grounded and accessible", and said he wanted the film to feel "very fresh for modern audiences" by dispensing with assumptions he considers illogical. The comments matter because they address a wave of online debate about the film's historical accuracy, particularly around its contemporary-sounding dialogue and costume design.

Much of the controversy has centred on a line in which Tom Holland's Telemachus, son of Matt Damon's Odysseus, tells Robert Pattinson's Antinous that "my dad is coming home", which some critics felt did not fit the setting; Holland countered that as a Greek character he would not have said "Father" anyway. Nolan said he had sought "language that has emotional not intellectual meaning", though he conceded he was "maybe being naïve" and that the choice "might bite me on the ass". He also defended the film's aesthetics, noting the production drew on archaeology of the Mycenaean period rather than Romantic-era paintings, and dismissed jokes that Agamemnon's black armour resembled Batman's by pointing to real Mycenaean blackened-bronze daggers. The film, set at the end of the Bronze Age, features a star cast including Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy, Jon Bernthal as Menelaus and Zendaya as Athena.