Emma Thomas

um the lighting everything to the untrained eye to me were and I'd be more than happy for someone to say well you know Kev they didn't get this quite right or that quite right but to me in terms of the just the way it looked and the way it felt for three hours or two hours 45 whatever it is I was there man I was I was there I was I was immersed in it and I was all in on it and I believed it and I think that that's all you can ever ask out of a movie in terms of that side of things if you're going to you know create a building or create a set or create this or that it should feel real and again i mean that wooden horse never looked like a prop man i mean there's no at no point did you think yeah that's just fiberglass and it's you know you can tell it's not it looked like a big fucking heavy oak thing

you know they're trying to pull it across the beach yeah that fucking thing was heavy uh my number three i'm gonna give a little love to emma thomas who is Christopher Nolan's wife, girlfriend when they made Following, and they would since marry.

She's produced every single one of his films.

Can you imagine getting this script from your husband and saying, okay, now you have to find me all these locations.

And then the producer and the director will go out and finalize.

Then she's got to figure out what the budget is.

Just the cost of moving... mounds of people and equipment like some of these locations you can only get to by helicopter so she'd have to like line up helicopters to haul all this equipment up and then there wouldn't be any room for the crew so every morning her and chris with their big go cups of tea would be climbing a mountain to go shoot for the day and the cast as well and the cast said we never ever could bitch and moan about it because chris nolan never did and emma thomas never did and they were there every single day working longer hours working harder hours never complained So it is a colossal amount of work.

And whenever there's a problem, they all come running to her.

I estimate that seven hundred and twenty-one point five million net has come back to the studio versus what it cost to make the movie, I'm putting the theatrical profit for The Odyssey at three hundred and forty-six point five million dollars.

And if the stories are to be believed that Christopher Nolan gets 20% of that net gross, that means that he and Emma Thomas alone stand to make a hundred and forty-four point three million dollars off The Odyssey.

But even once you take that out of the theatrical profit, that's still about two hundred million dollars that goes back to the studio, even after you pay Christopher Nolan.

So the gamble, if you wanna call it a gamble that Universal took on Christopher Nolan has paid off.

Because I thought that that's what it said in closing credits, but it didn't say Emma Thompson.

It said Emma Thomas, I think, which is his wife.

There

you go.

... action scene where there's no music, and it just hits a little bit differently.

Um, I, I wanna talk a little bit about, um, well, obviously you talk about the amazing people who are on that set, and obviously on Chris Nolan's set, but the Emma Thomas is somebody I wanna really highlight because-

Yeah

...

But Chris and Emma, I've been following, no pun intended, their work for a long time.

But I think Emma is one of the greatest producers in the history of movies, and I, I wanna highlight your perspective of Emma [clears throat] and kinda what that filmmaking relationship is.

Because to me, she's, she is as important and as genius as Nolan is, and I was just wondering if you can speak about your relationship as an actor to a producer like Emma Thomas.

I know not all producers are the same.

Premise of this is that every night a shepherd reads aloud a mystery, a murder mystery, pretending his sheep can understand.

When he's found dead, the sheep realize... once that it was a murder at once that it's a murder and think they know everything about how to go about solving it that premise that's an interesting premise because that's kind of not what the movie's about but this movie stars as the shepherd Hugh Jackman is George Hardy we've got also from like an actual person standpoint you've got Hong Chao you've got Nicholas Braun beforehand Molly Gordon, Emma Thomas, and, you know, just a couple other people who are playing the local townspeople.

The sheep are the ones that are the stars of this.

So you got Julia Louise Dreyfus, Brian Cranston, Reese Darby, Chris Hivdoud, Bella Ramsey, Regina Hall, Patrick Stewart, Brett Goldstein.

Number one, Steven Spielberg.

So, yeah, as I say, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, produced by Christopher Nolan, but also Emma Thomas.

If you haven't heard of her, she's basically Christopher Nolan's wife and she's produced all of his films.

So a very accomplished producer.

I went to a school.

My wife doesn't believe that that happened.

She thinks I'm making it up.

I went to a school where girls fought.

Your wife

went to a fancy school.

She went to a school where nobody ever fought about anything.

That's the kind of work of art that it is.

I can't remember her surname, but she, she's Emma something.

Emma Thomas.

Uh, there you go, Emma Thomas.

They, um, they met together in London University Film School and, um, it's, yeah, it's really impressive.

I find those, uh, very low budget first auteur films sometimes the most fascinating.