The news caught people aback, as it was meant to do, as it inevitably would do. An AI filmmaker was making his own 135-minute movie inspired by The Odyssey — public-domain work, to be sure, but also clearly the domain of Christopher Nolan in this Summer of Our Damon-ian Lord 2026. 

The filmmaker said he’d hold off from releasing the work — titled Odysseus: The Fall — for at least another several weeks. But that didn’t stop the backlash. Just what exactly was the game of this provocateur, an Iran-born, England-raised Millennial engineer named Ash Koosha? Why was he making a movie on the same subject as Nolan’s $250 million epic for a few thousand dollars and no actors?

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And how did his new feature square with Dreams of Violet, his far more sympathy-producing AI film about the recent Iranian democracy protests, which debuted at Tribeca last month?

That it hit at a moment when Nolan disagreed with his own star Matt Damon about whether there was a future for large-scale analogue filmmaking (Damon said “I knew that this was the last chance I was going to have to do something like this” and Nolan volleyed back that he was being “defeatist”) only fanned the flames. At heart Koosha appeared to be engaged in hastening the end-of-cinema moment Damon was predicting — and with the very source material supposedly staving it off.

So The Hollywood Reporter called Koosha, his brother and collaborator Pooya and his producer (the CNBC founder Tom Rogers, who with the pair has founded the AI-centric film-production banner Fountain 0) to explain what they were up to. They have a vision of cinema both cogent and, to some, no doubt provocative and angering. 

I imagine the past several days have been a little intense for you. What has it felt like from your end since you made this announcement?

Ash Koosha: There’s been a lot of excitement, and a lot of questions, and a lot of confusion.  One thing we want to clear up is that we’re not going against Christopher Nolan. He’s doing what he’s doing in the old world of cinema. And he does it brilliantly. But there’s room for something in the new world. I’m an Odyssey fan since I was a little kid — I learned about Nolan’s movie from a Homer-focused Reddit. I’ve been immersed in all the questions about all the details, like Agamemnon’s outfits and everything else. My goal is not to make a movie that is the same as his. It’s to use the tools to make my own version of the story.

I think a lot of people saw what you did with Dreams of Violet and were OK with it, since you couldn’t safely get into Tehran to shoot and since there’s a humanitarian urgency to that subject. That’s not really the case here.

AK: I see them as related. Dreams of Violet raised questions and this raises deeper questions — questions that are important for the industry. “Can we have stories at the speed of news?” “Can other people paint with tools besides people like Christopher Nolan?” “What can be created if they can?” 

So you don’t see this as a trading off of the existing hit, like all those knockoff direct-to-video movies we’ve seen for a while now in this blockbuster age. I mean, you can understand why people would see it that way.

AK: Not at all. 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 Substack about him. And some people would read it but how many? Now I can put my take into a film. I can paint my opinion with images and sound and light. And a lot more people can see it.

So it’s more of a kind of discourse vehicle than a derivative genre.

AK: I call it tangential filmmaking. It’s other stories that can exist with the main one in cinemas. 

Tom Rogers: Obviously it’s hard to be in the same arena as Christopher Nolan; everyone agrees his Odyssey is the superior film. And we want people to see that film. But hopefully they see ours too. Christopher Nolan is the ultimate in physical filmmaking and what we’re trying to do is be the ultimate in AI filmmaking.

AK: Exactly, you can’t judge them on the same terms. They’re at 125 years and we’re in our infancy. So of course there are going to be bumps in the road. But it’s what you can achieve by trying. To me the risk is low and the reward is high: a whole 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 it’s not all slop. 

So what is your specific take on Odysseus that you feel your film will help clarify?

AK: I don’t think he’s well-understood. I don’t want to say too much but I think 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 about ego motivating him.

When will we actually be able to see this Odyssey?

Pooya Koosha: We want to wait a while, at least until late summer. We don’t want people to feel overloaded and confused. That’s important to us.

TR: We could have released it now but we’re not trying to trick people. We want them to be able to clearly compare.

I want to come back to the idea of tangential filmmaking. It’s a novel view and almost calls to mind the early days of the Web, when everyone started blogging and people said “but why would you want to read anything that isn’t from these big media outlets.” And of course we did, and they co-exist. You’re saying Hollywood and filmmaking are now due for the same treatment — that thanks to AI we’ll get the same explosion of bottom-up cinematic content that Internet distribution enabled for media.

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AK: Yes, exactly. There is room for all kinds of cinema and AI finally makes that possible. We’ve had so many years when making cinema was dependent on having enough money,  and unless you’re Christopher Nolan you couldn’t make a movie of a certain scale, and even he couldn’t sometimes. The concentration of revenue became a barrier to entry. All of that is going to go away. That’s what we’re trying to bring about.

PK: We hope a lot of other people come in and do this. This is about something very broad and democratic.

TR: Yes, that’s the whole goal of Fountain 0 — to look for the best use of the tools. 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about actors. If tangential filmmaking takes off, the great majority of what we’ll see won’t have them. Is that a vision you foresee, or are OK with?

TR: I think this will make actors more valuable, whether it’s in an old-world movie or live theater. People will want to see them too, maybe even more than they do now.

It’s an interesting vision of co-existence — actors flourishing  in some forms of cinema and then not occupying this other form; traditional shoots pervading one form but then all these scrappy homemade projects overflowing right alongside them.

AK: That’s all we’re trying to do. To show you can make great films in the manner that Christopher Nolan does. But you can make gorgeous films using AI models too.

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