The news surprised people, as it was supposed to, and as it was inevitable He was He does. An AI filmmaker was making a 135-minute film inspired by… Odyssey – is a public domain work, sure, but it’s also clearly the domain of Christopher Nolan’s Damon Ian’s Summer of 2026.
The director said that he will postpone the release of the work titled Odysseus: The Fall — For several more weeks at least. But that didn’t stop the backlash. What exactly is the game of this provocateur, the Iranian-born, England-raised millennial engineer named Ash Kosha? Why would he make a movie on the same subject as Nolan’s $250 million epic for a few thousand dollars and no actors?
And how his new feature matches up with Violet dreamsthe most empathetic AI-produced film about Iran’s recent democracy protests, which debuted at Tribeca last month?
It happened at a moment when Nolan disagreed with his star Matt Damon over whether there was a future for large-scale analog filmmaking (“I knew this was the last chance I was going to have to do something like this,” Damon said, and Nolan responded by saying he was “defeatist”) that fanned the flames. In essence, Kosha seemed engaged in accelerating the end-of-cinema moment that Damon anticipated—and that the source material itself supposedly prevented.
So Hollywood Reporter Kosha, his brother and collaborator invited Pouya and his producer (CNBC founder Tom Rogers, who with the pair founded the AI-focused film production banner Fountain 0) to explain what they were up to. They have a vision of cinema that is compelling and, in the eyes of some, undoubtedly provocative and angry.
I imagine the last few days have been a bit intense for you. How do you feel on your end since you made that announcement?
Kosha: There has been a lot of excitement, a lot of questions, and a lot of confusion. One thing we want to make clear is that we will not be opposed to Christopher Nolan. He does what he does in the old world of cinema. And he does it brilliantly. But there is room for something in the new world. I Odyssey A fan since I was a little kid – I learned about Nolan’s film from a Homer-focused Reddit post. I was immersed in all the questions about every detail, like Agamemnon’s clothes and everything else. My goal is not to make a film that looks like his. It’s using tools to create my own version of the story.
I think a lot of people saw what I did Violet dreams And you were OK with that, since you couldn’t get safely to Tehran to film, and since there was an urgent humanitarian need for this topic. That’s not really the case here.
AK: I see them as related. Violet dreams Questions raised This raises deeper questions – questions that are important to the industry. “Can we get stories as quickly as the news?” “Can other people draw with tools other than people like Christopher Nolan?” “What could they create if they could?”
So, you don’t see this as a trade-off for existing hits, like all those direct-to-video knockoffs we’ve seen for a while in this blockbuster era. I mean, you can understand why people see it that way.
AK: never. I see more as part of a larger news conversation. Before these AI tools, if I had a theory about Odysseus, I could write a subset of him. Some people may read it, but how many? Now I can put my idea into a movie. I can paint my mind with pictures, sound and light. And more people can see it.
Therefore, it is a type of means of discourse rather than a derivative type.
AK: I call it episodic filmmaking. They are other stories that can be found along with the main story in cinemas.
Tom Rogers: Obviously, it’s difficult to be in the same arena as Christopher Nolan; Everyone agrees to it Odyssey It is a superior film. And we He wants People to see this movie. But we hope they see us too. Christopher Nolan is the best at physical filmmaking and what we’re trying to do is be the best at artificial intelligence filmmaking.
AK: Exactly, you can’t judge them on the same terms. They are 125 years old and we are in childhood. So of course there will be bumps in the road. But that’s what you can achieve by trying. For me, the risk is low and the reward is high: a completely new kind of cinema.
TR: We’re just trying to show what’s possible when you don’t have to worry about budgets. We want people to see that it’s not all bullshit.
So, what is your specific take on Odysseus that you think your film will help clarify?
AK: I don’t think it’s well understood. I don’t want to say too much but I think that as someone who came from Iran and moved to the West as a child, I can understand something about his story, about what it means to be far from home. How it wasn’t just a matter of stimulating his ego.
When will we be able to actually see this? Odyssey?
Boya Kosha: We want to wait a while, at least until late summer. We don’t want people to feel overwhelmed and confused. This is important to us.
TR: We could have released it now but we’re not trying to fool people. We want them to be able to compare clearly.
I want to go back to the idea of episodic filmmaking. It’s a fresh perspective and brings to mind the early days of the web, when everyone started blogging and people were like, “But why would you want to read anything that isn’t from this big media outlet?” And of course we did, and they get along. You’re saying that Hollywood and the film industry now deserve the same treatment — that thanks to AI, we’ll get the same explosion of bottom-up cinematic content that Internet distribution of media has made possible.
AK: Yes exactly. There is room for all kinds of cinema, and AI is finally making that possible. We’ve had many years when making movies depended on getting enough money, and unless you were Christopher Nolan you couldn’t make a movie on a certain scale, and even he couldn’t sometimes. Revenue concentration has become a barrier to entry. It will all disappear. This is what we are trying to achieve.
Your: Hopefully a lot of other people will come and do it. It’s about something very broad and democratic.
TR: Yes, that’s the whole point of Fountain 0 — to find the best use for tools.
I would be remiss if I didn’t ask about the cast. If the episodic film industry takes off, the vast majority of what we’ll see won’t have it. Is this a vision you expect or agree with?
TR: I think this will make actors more valuable, whether it’s in an old-world film or live theater. People will want to see them too, perhaps more than they do now.
It’s an interesting vision of symbiosis – actors who thrive in some form of cinema and then don’t occupy that other form; Traditional sprouts spread out in one form but then all these annoying homemade projects flood in alongside them.
AK: That’s all we’re trying to do. To show that you can make great movies the way Christopher Nolan does. But you can also make great movies using AI models.
