![]() ![]() “But for the modern audience to understand that Odysseus himself was a trigger for the Trojan horse, that his intelligence and his wit brought Troy down, we had to add a little piece of ‘The Iliad’ to explore who he was. “When Homer wrote ‘The Odyssey,’ everyone knew about Troy,” Konchalovsky explains. ![]() Konchalovsky included portions of “The Iliad” in his “Odyssey,” he says, to put the story into historical context. “It’s challenging because it’s difficult to imagine: How do you do Zeus? How do you do Athena? To write a script out of a very big poem that deals mostly with gods and three characters, and the rest of the characters are there in the shadows, and create a right tapestry for every character to have a place-it’s a challenging thing to write.” “It’s a very big poem and it embraces so many events, so many characters-let alone a couple of them are gods.” Especially, he adds, considering he only had about two months to complete the script. Transforming an epic poem-one that has also been called the first novel because of its exciting narrative and use of flashbacks-into a four-hour drama was a heady task for Konchalovsky. I felt totally confident that if there was anyone in the film industry who was capable of distilling this down to something rather simple and human, it was Andrei.” Konchalovsky, he says, has an “emotionalism and a humanism to his work that has always arrested me. “I didn’t want it to be pure spectacle-and it’s not, by the way. “I had no interest in going near this project without Andrei,” he states. “I think that’s the essence of ‘The Odyssey’-that this man underestimates the impact of a war and the price that going to war takes on his life.”Īssante only accepted “The Odyssey” because Konchalovsky was attached to direct. I think mature men come to understand, certainly when they get in their 40s, that life is an incredibly brief, fragile proposition and the choices you make can literally become totally life-consuming. ![]() In “The Odyssey,” Assante says, Homer was writing about every man’s call to adventure, “and the price we pay emotionally, physically and psychologically for those adventures in our lives. Konchalovsky and Christopher Solimine penned the adaptation, and Jim Henson’s Creature Shop created the mythical creatures Odysseus meets on his journey, such as the gigantic Cyclops. (“Gulliver’s Travels”), Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Fuchs and Nicholas Meyer are the executive producers of the lavish production, which was shot in London, Malta and Turkey. Isabella Rossellini plays Athena, goddess of wisdom Vanessa Williams is the sea nymph Calypso Eric Roberts is the evil Eurymachus Irene Papas portrays Odysseus’ mother, Anticleia, and Bernadette Peters is featured as the enchantress Circe. ![]()
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