How A Grisly 200-Year-Old Masterpiece Inspired Nolan's Cyclops
The Odyssey is finally here, but did you know Christopher Nolan was inspired by a centuries-old piece of artwork for one key moment in the movie?
With all the chatter about what Cristopher Nolan has left out of his monumental adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, it’s only fair that we spare a few thoughts for all the interesting things he added. There’s Elliot Page’s Sinon, for one (a character originally from The Aeneid). There are also the rumours of “people from the sea”, suggestions of Bronze age collapse, dodgy American accents, and nods to some of the great works of art and cinema.
In the lead-up to the movie’s release, Nolan went on the record about how the ending of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev had inspired the movie's ambition as well as the images of the Trojans dragging the horse across the beach. He also spoke about using an early 19th century masterpiece as a visual reference for Odysseus’ encounter with the Cyclops. This painting is Francisco Goya’s unforgettable Saturn Devouring His Son.
The Grisly Painting That Inspired Christopher Nolan’s Cyclops
If you’ve ever seen Saturn Devouring His Son, you might have felt a bit like the Leo pointing meme when the Cyclops first appeared in The Odyssey. This astonishing painting’s DNA is all over Nolan’s monster — not least in the moment when the colossal cheesemonger lifts up one of Odysseus’ men and unceremoniously chomps his head off.
In typical Nolan fashion, the twenty-foot giant was captured using no CGI. Instead, the director says he used “every trick in the book” to suggest its size — which basically meant a combination of old school camera moves, the actor Bill Irwin (who operated and voiced TARS in Interstellar), and a giant puppet. When it came to the monster’s big reveal — when we see its vertical eye for the first time, just before it chows down on a serving of Greek cranium — the image that came to mind for Nolan was Goya’s painting, and for more subtle reasons than pure shock and awe.
In Roman mythology, Saturn (the Greeks call him Cronus) is a Titan and the father of various deities, including Jupiter (or Zeus). Goya's painting is a depiction of him eating his newborn son after hearing a prophecy that one of his children will overthrow him (in the story, Jupiter was hidden by his mother and thus lived to fulfil the prophecy).
The painting is shocking for its gore, but the most haunting thing about it is the fear and shame in Saturn’s eyes. In a recent interview, Nolan talked about wanting to emulate Guillermo del Toro’s approach to monsters when creating his Cyclops, explaining that the most frightening thing about the creature is that “from the monster's POV, they're not a monster. We're irrelevant to them, and that's what's really scary.”
Or, as Odysseus asks Polites: "Do you speak to ants?"
The Dark Story Behind Saturn Devouring His Son
If you’ve seen the picture already, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that Goya wasn’t in a great place psychologically when he painted it. The work is one of a collection that are now known as The Black Paintings: fourteen dark, mysterious and unnamed pictures that the artist painted on the walls of the country estate he moved to outside Madrid in 1819 after the death of his wife.
As Goya left no information and died just a few years later in Bordeaux (at the age of 82), art historians have speculated for literal centuries about their meaning, but most now seem to agree that the artist retreated to the estate to escape the ruthless and repressive court of King Fernando VII. While there, the deaf, depressed and heartbroken Goya began to paint over the villa's pastoral frescos with terrifying images of satanic rituals and hungry god dads.
It's also unclear if Goya wanted anyone to see them, as he painted them directly onto the plaster walls. This also meant that it took an enormous amount of effort to transfer them onto canvas, but it was eventually completed in the 1880s and the paintings were moved to the Museo del Pardo in Madrid. They still hang there today and have lost none of their haunting aura.
What Other Filmmakers Have Cited Goya as a Reference?
As keen-eyed Nolan fans will tell you, Goya also gets name dropped in Tenet — these are the forged sketches that the Russian oligarch Andrei Sator uses as leverage against his wife, and that the Protagonist attempts to steal from the Freeport in order to gain Sator's trust. The Goya reference in The Odyssey is also another in a long line of art history nods in Nolan’s movies: including, most famously, the MC Escher-inspired mazes in Inception and the influence of Francis Bacon on the Joker's makeup in The Dark Knight.
As far as Goya is concerned, the artist’s paintings from that "Dark" period have been inspiring filmmakers with a taste for the macabre for decades. Take a quick look at Goya's Witches’ Sabbath (Aquelarre or El gran cabrón) paintings, for example, and you won’t be surprised to hear that they were a main influence for Black Phillip in Robert Eggers' The Witch. Guillermo del Toro has also unsurprisingly cited Goya as a major influence, both in aesthetic terms and also for how the artist used horror and monsters to express his darkest anxieties about the world.
In 2006, Del Toro even confirmed that the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth was directly inspired by Goya’s Saturn — so if you're in need of some mood board inspo for a nightmarish creature with an ungodly appetite, there’s really only one shop in town.
