Interview: Director Uberto Pasolini on why The Return is “an odyssey of the soul”

The Greeks are coming! Christopher Nolan’s given us a first look at his version of Homer’s Odyssey, which lands next year, but this week sees the arrival of a wholly different approach to the story. While it concentrates on Odysseus’s return after decades at war, this is no glorious homecoming. Grief, trauma, guilt and anger are at the heart of director Uberto Pasolini’s The Return, a film which he describes as having a “timeless” quality.

Twenty years after fighting in the Trojan Wars, Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) returns home to Ithaca a very different man. Haggard and almost unrecognizable, he’s not the man he once was, haunted by the deaths of all his soldiers and the destruction of Troy. He finds his wife, Penelope (Juliette Binoche) is now a prisoner in her own home, under huge pressure to choose a new husband, but clinging desperately to the belief that she is not, as everybody believes, a widow. Their son, Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) has never met his father and is angry with his mother for resisting her many suitors but, at the same time, is under threat from them. No longer the great warrior king that his people remember, Odysseus has to come to terms with his experiences to save his family and his kingdom.

READ OUR REVIEW OF “THE RETURN” HERE

Uberto Pasolini is back in our interview hot seat for a second time – we last spoke to him four years ago about the emotional drama Nowhere Special  – to talk about his stripped-back approach to bringing Odysseus to the screen. He describes it as “an odyssey of the soul” with no mythical beasts, no glorious gods because, in his vision, the characters are responsible for their own actions. He reflects on how the film is about the choices we all have to make every single day of our lives, and also explains how he read a lot of interviews with veterans of the Vietnam war about their post-war experiences. Some of their words found their way into the film. “We didn’t have to modernize anything. Homer is modern and speaks to us very directly.”

Check out the full interview:

The Return opens in UK cinemas on  11 April.