The case for analog

We must protect Christopher Nolan at all costs !!!!

Dearest Readers,

I come to you BUZZING after seeing ‘The Odyssey’ in cinemas last night and wanting to talk to everyone I know about it. It was a PERFECT film in the way that all Christopher Nolan’s films are.

Obviously there has been a fair bit of press surrounding the release of the film and a few of the interviews stuck with me. Not only does Christopher Nolan not have a mobile phone but he also doesn’t have an email address. I really fear the way his assistants / agents have to work because of this but is this why he can tell such a good story ? Being chronically offline?

Chris (I call him Chris as though he is a dear friend) shoots on film and later cuts the literal film strips after converting them digitally which can then be screened in IMAX theaters. Instead of looking at traditional monitors on set he has his own personal CASIO screen that he checks frames on (Apparently he has outbid everyone on EBAY for this particular models as this is the best tool he knows how to work with).

In one of the scenes there is a gigantic cyclops that I knew before going to see the film wasn't created with CGI but was a puppet. My jaw was on the floor at how awe inspiring the creature was.

Christopher Nolan spoke about there being a demand for craftsmanship and how his own kids were rejecting what he refers to ‘AI slop’. We are fed so much garbage online that we are forgetting what it means to create something meaningful and worthwhile.

About six weeks ago The Guardian published an article that posed the question ‘Are Australian books being published too quickly?’. My answer is an emphatic yes. As a bookseller I get given A LOT of proofs each month that I am finding more and more could’ve used another six months to a year in the edit. There is this hamster wheel of pushing things out in the name of ‘trends’ and what I am seeing is less and less quality storytelling.

Coming from a film world, scripts take years to write I think it is imperative for creatives (not just authors) to silence the noise of trends and ‘AI slop’ and take time to look at our work with eagle eyes. To slow down and turn off Tik Tok for a second and think for ourselves. We are losing our own critical thinking compasses and relying on the voices of content creators and I have been guilty of falling into this trap.

We need auteurs. We need original voices to come through. And the more that creatives are encouraged to meet commercial deadlines and stick to trends, the more we miss out on hearing the vitality of these voices come to life.

I am trying to take this approach in my own daily routines and have been working on my own novel since 2021 - a book that probably won’t be out until 2028. It has been an incredibly illuminating and rewarding experience seeing the manuscript’s evolution. I have allowed myself to step away from the novel for long periods of time and to return to it with a more critical eye. I have cut characters and storyline darlings that I thought made total sense (but in fact they didn’t) and the process continues….

Having ADHD I use AI to help me with my executive dysfunction but that is limited to organizational tasks. For the bookshop I use Chat GPT to write copy for event pages (things that used to take me a LONG time to do) and to help me carve my time out more efficiently across various projects. But in terms of creativity and creative writing - whether it be this Substack or my novel/ film treatments I do not let AI TOUCH my work. The reason for this is I can always tell whether someone has used AI in their writing.

Running it through Chat GPT and Claude sucks the life out of words. There is a cadence to it that is so robotic and heartless that once you figure out the pattern you can’t help but see it everywhere.

As Christopher Nolan says about the way he makes films it is a very ‘human’ process and that leaves us open to human error.

I believe human error is what makes us vulnerable, it helps us connect with one another through our vulnerabilities, our incapabilities. It is our empathy that brings magic to a story. We are able to step inside another world for a moment and pretend it is ours. It is the suspension of disbelief that is so rare to find and something that Christopher Nolan gifts us in his work. I encourage you to go see ‘The Odyssey’ in cinemas to see what I mean.

Back to books next week when I FINALLY get through ‘Land’ which seems to be going on forever.

What are your thoughts on the above? Are there any works (books, films, paintings) that you get totally lost in? I would love to know.

Happy Reading!

Jessie

xx.