I've been prepping for my role as Medusa.
I love Athena. I love all the goddesses and the archetypes and what they represent because I think they're always going to be relevant not just to women but to humanity. They're living energy. There's a lot we can still learn from them.
When I was nine, I started reading Homer. I would get up at four o'clock in the morning, before I had to go to school, in third or fourth grade, and, for several hours, I would read 'The Iliad' or 'The Odyssey.'
A major difficulty is that the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx is partly a product of the answers that we already have given to the riddle in its various forms.
It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
I studied classics, and I find it mystifying that we had Medea and Electra and Antigone and all these amazing characters, and they don't really exist in cinema now. The only person who's really doing it, and he gets loads of criticism for it, is Lars Von Trier.
We know their names: Hippolyta, Antiope, Thessalia. But they were long thought to be just travelers' tales or products of the Greek storytelling imagination. A lot of scholars still argue that. But archaeology has now proven without a doubt that there really were women fitting the description that the Greeks gave us of Amazons and warrior women.
Behind each woman rises the austere, sacred and mysterious face of Aphrodite.
It doesn't seem to me that anyone has discovered much that's new since the Iliad or the Odyssey.
The first glimpse that we have of the notions which the Greeks possessed of the shape and the inhabitants of the earth is afforded by the poems passing under the name of Homer.
The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?
I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition.
I've always been interested in the Greek tragedies. A few years back, I re-read a translation of the 'The Oresteia,' and that stayed with me, and slowly this idea of using some of those old legends and plays to tell a new story about modern urban life began to form.
The latest page I've been working is about the organization of the pantheon of the gods. Who's indebted to whom, how they are related, who screwed whose uncle or grandmother, all of that.
The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.
