Christopher Nolan insists The Odyssey backlash 'comes with the territory'

Christopher Nolan was not taken aback by the discourse surrounding The Odyssey because he believes it "comes with the territory".

The Oscar-winning director has been accused of being "woke" for casting Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy and transgender actor Elliot Page as the Greek soldier Sinon in his adaptation of Homer's epic Greek poem.

When asked if he was taken aback by the discourse surrounding his film, Nolan told The Telegraph, "(It) comes with the territory... But look, these conversations that happen before people see the film - they're always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet."

From the very beginning, the Oppenheimer filmmaker knew that adapting such a well-known and highly studied historical text would make him liable to strong opinions.

"All I can do is make the best film I possibly can in the most sincere way," he added. "It's very different from how anyone else would do it, but that's what adaptation is."

The British director noted this isn't his first time navigating online chatter about his take on a beloved property, having made three films starring Christian Bale as famed comic book hero Batman.

"I spent 10 years of my life dealing with Batman," he stated. "When I came on to Batman Begins, writers and artists had been working on this beloved character for almost 65 years, and a lot of freighted thoughts were out there about what he represents. And what I learnt over my time on that trilogy is you can't worry about any of that at all. What you have to do is honour the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can."

He continued, "In the end, fans of the property - even when we were doing something that was not what they would have done - enjoyed the sincerity of the attempt to put as good a version of it on screen as we could."

Nolan's Batman films - Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises - were released between 2005 and 2012.

The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon, Tom Holland and Anne Hathaway, opens in cinemas on 17 July.