Telemachus and Penelope's storyline represents the grounded reality of the Odyssey, while Odysseus's adventures represent the myth as it was distorted through centuries of oral retelling, like a giant game of telephone.

6:41love to touch on that you brought up and and this is only my interpretation. I haven't actually spoken to Chris about this. To me, the way I see the film is that Telemachus and Penelope represent the reality of the story. >> Yeah. >> And Odysseus' side of the story, Matt's side of the story, represents the myth. >> Yeah. >> And this humongous game of telephone that has been played with this text, you

7:04know, it wasn't written down for hundreds of years. There was a dark period in ancient Greece when no one would write anything down, so they would sing the song. So to me, what I love about the creative choices that Chris has made on that side of the story is that he's kind of pushed the boundaries of what might be deemed historically accurate or reality because that is the myth.

7:26>> And I think that that it again is true to what Homer is doing in the Odyssey. Because Odysseus, you know, he his first adventure he sacks a city and that's the kind of thing that that people did. >> Mhm. >> And then he moves on to the the Cyclops story, which the Greeks said, well, that is set in Sicily. So all even though it involves a giant with one eye, which is

7:45obviously mad. Right, so the Greeks said, well it happened in this particular place. And then he starts going to really strange places that are clearly outside the order of the mortal, and he ends up in the land of the dead. Matt Damon is off meeting these weird things, and they get weirder and weirder and weirder as it goes on. I think that's why the film works brilliantly as an

8:09adaptation of Homer. And it opens the there's kind of slogan, isn't there, at the beginning, a time of apparent magic. And so that's something again that is running throughout the film. You're never quite sure how real what you're seeing is. And I guess an obvious question for anyone who is adapting Homer is what do you do about the gods? Because in the in the in Homer's poems, the gods are not just

8:37real, but but very, very vivid. >> I know when I read the script for the first time, I was completely floored by the kind of big surprise. Again, it goes back to that conversation we just had about Matt side represents the myth, and you're never quite sure on what is reality and what is someone recounting a story, and then another person recounting a story and slightly changing a detail, and and all of a