Director Scott Derrickson slammed Elon Musk amid the tech mogul’s continued crusade against Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” saying the SpaceX CEO “doesn’t know s–t about cinema.”
“Clearly @elonmusk doesn’t know shit about cinema & he stopped reading in his 20s,” the “Doctor Strange” director wrote in an X post, which directly tagged Musk, on Tuesday. “His opinions on art are worthless.”
While some of Derrickson’s followers pushed back on this assessment, with one user defending that “no one’s opinion on art is worthless,” the filmmaker double down on his criticism of Musk.
“Great art says otherwise,” he added.
Musk has repeatedly spoken out against Nolan’s big screen adaptation of Homer’s epic poem, taking particular issue with the director’s casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page as the Greek soldier Sinon.
For instance, back in January, Musk declared that “Chris Nolan [had] lost his integrity” in response to a post that called his upcoming film “an insult to the author” because of Nyong’o’s casting. Then, in May, Musk took aim at Nolan’s “The Odyssey” once more, this time co-signing the right-wing fueled ire over the confirmation of Nyong’o’s casting as “the face that launched a thousand ships.”
Specifically, after conservative commentator Matt Walsh suggested that Nolan only gave Nyong’o the part to avoid being called “racist,” Musk simply responded with the word “True.”
He also called a post making a transphobic joke about Page’s casting a “banger.” Page had been rumored to play Achilles in “The Odyssey,” but ultimately portrayed Sinon.
Derrickson’s criticism didn’t deter Musk with his crusade, however. Namely, hours after Derrickson’s post hit X, the tech mogul told his followers that “Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of ‘The Odyssey’ that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer” before the year’s end.
Additionally, in a separate X post, Musk noted he was “down” with one fan’s suggestion of giving “Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek.”
Nonetheless, Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey” has emerged as a box office success, bringing in $264 million global in its opening weekend. The film, which stars Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Samantha Morton and Zendaya, has also earned critical and audience acclaim.
