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Making movies is hard.
That was my first thought after watching “Behind the Scenes of ‘The Odyssey,’” a 75-minute documentary chronicling the making of Christopher Nolan’s $1.8 billion blockbuster, which premiered Tuesday
night at the Spielberg Theater on the Universal Studios lot.
“I have absolutely mastered the art of talking a lot and revealing absolutely nothing,” Nolan joked as he introduced the film. “And so I’m told I need to get out of the way.”
Most viewers won’t see the full version screened Tuesday. The 75-minute cut was a one-time presentation, while a shorter version will be included with the film’s digital home release, arriving Nov. 17. Universal has not announced which portions will make the cut.
After the screening, star Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus, moderated an hourlong conversation with 12 department heads: producer Emma Thomas, production designer Ruth De Jong, editor Jennifer Lame, composer and songwriter Ludwig Göransson, visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson, special effects supervisor Scott Fisher, costume designer Ellen Mirojnick, casting director John Papsidera, supervising sound editor Craig Henighan, production sound mixer Willie Burton, head of makeup Luisa Abel and head of hair Gloria Casny.
The room was packed with guild voters and social media influencers, including comedian and actor Evan M. Williams. Afterward, the crowd spilled into the lobby, where exhibits on the film’s artisan achievements awaited and multiple conversations and selfies began.
The premiere kicks off two weeks of Universal awards-season screenings for “The Odyssey,” the highest-grossing film of Nolan’s career. The studio is campaigning the film across all categories, aiming to match or break the record 16 Oscar nominations Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” earned earlier this year.
The campaign continues Wednesday, when Robert Downey Jr. moderates an Imax 70mm screening at the TCL Chinese Theatre, followed Thursday by Guillermo del Toro at AMC Universal CityWalk. On Nov. 17, Steven Spielberg sits down with Nolan at the DGA Theater, the same day “The Odyssey” arrives on digital.
Nolan is also paying it forward Saturday, moderating a Q&A with “Digger” director Alejandro G. Iñárritu.
Here are eight of the most revealing moments from the documentary and the Q&A.
Matt Damon didn’t loop a single line on “The Odyssey”
Damon revealed that he did not have to re-record a single line of dialogue for “The Odyssey,” a rarity for a production of this scale. “I did not loop a line for this movie,” he said onstage, turning to legendary production sound mixer Burton to ask how he pulled it off.
Burton explained Nolan’s strict rules. “There’s no ADR with Chris,” he said. “Does not want to do ADR, and he also wants the boom mic to be on a cable.”
The commitment to capturing sound on set extended to the ship itself. Burton recalled being sent below deck during the production, where he ran cables under the floorboards and mounted microphones on the hull. During storm sequences, water poured down on him. He also became the ship’s unofficial snack clerk.
“I’m trying to do sound now, and one of the guys is, ‘Can you hand me potato chips?’” Burton recalled getting boisterous laughter from the crowd.
The documentary also shows how much attention went into the film’s sound design. Henighan sent a crew to record the ship for real, including every oar stroke. Re-recording mixers Gary Rizzo and Kevin O’Connell note that nearly everything in the mix is organic, from gongs forged by human hands to the army’s actual screams.
The Cyclops started as a desk lamp test.
Nolan wanted nothing to do with the “very cartoony, very unthreatening” Cyclops sequences of decades past. His visual inspiration was Francisco Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son,” particularly its blank, indifferent face.
De Jong suggested turning the creature’s single eye sideways and centering it. Jackson then conducted a simple test: He filmed actor Bill Irwin, who plays Polyphemus, improvising in a dark Universal office with a desk lamp on the floor. Jackson digitally moved one of Irwin’s eyes to the center of his face and painted out the other.
“It was quite phenomenal, actually, how effective it was,” Jackson said.
The documentary also reveals that the giant creature was initially represented by a crude stick-figure puppet. The original plan was to shoot the sequence on an L.A. soundstage late in production. But after Nolan and De Jong scouted Greece and found a real cave, the team had to finish the puppet and get it standing on a Greek mountain within two months.
The production ultimately built only the creature’s rigid parts around the simpler structure. “Because of the way that we were forced to make it in a much simpler way, it actually worked much better,” he said.
Tom Holland asked for a shorter skirt to look taller, and Robert Pattinson wanted a long wig. Both were rejected by Nolan.
Thomas, Nolan’s producing partner and wife, described two versions of the director: one who demands the impossible during preparation and another who becomes “incredibly pragmatic” once shooting starts.
The documentary offers a running list of things Nolan won’t allow.
Marking her first Nolan film, Casny received a request from Robert Pattinson, who plays Antinous, for a long wig. The actor called her on the first day of fittings while she was standing next to Nolan and Thomas. “I didn’t even know how he got my number,” Casny recalled. “The answer was no.”
Holland tells a story in the documentary about his first costume fitting, where he quietly asked Mirojnick to shorten his skirt a bit so he’d look taller. Six weeks later, the alteration was done and the costume went before Nolan. “Two seconds into taking in the costume, he was like, ‘How come the skirt is shorter?’” Holland says.
Nolan’s attention to detail is paramount which Damon even chimed in to highlight. He recalled a day on “Oppenheimer” when a missing hat delayed the company on a moving train for half an hour. Thomas jumped in with the obvious lesson learned: “He does not like hats.”
And when Henighan presented a particularly graphic, squelchy sound design for the Samantha Morton’s Circe sequence, Nolan wasn’t interested. He preferred dry bones cracking and knuckles popping.
Nolan told his Marine Coordinator, ‘I Don’t Accept That’ about physics.
Damon recalled a moment in Scotland when the sea tore apart one of the production’s boats during the Laestrygonian sequence. Marine coordinator Neil Andrea explained that the transom and hull had been ripped out and that getting the vessel ready for the next day was “literally impossible.”
“And Chris turned to Neil and said, ‘I don’t accept that,’” Damon recalled. “And somehow that thing was floating the next day, and we shot on it.”
Thomas, gamely defending her husband, added: “I promise you, he’s more pragmatic than that.”
The sea was the production’s most stubborn adversary. Nolan admitted that he had privately hoped to minimize boat time while writing the script. “But it’s ‘The Odyssey,’” he said. “Of course, we’re going to be on this boat for months.”
Andrea’s team converted Viking ship replicas from Scandinavia into Greek warships, hiding small engines inside them. The storm destruction sequences were eventually filmed on the Universal backlot, with jet engines blasting the ship on a gimbal.
The Trojan Horse got stuck in customs.
The production’s logistical challenges extended to the Trojan horse itself. In Morocco, Nolan moved the start date up two days while the enormous prop was still sitting in crates at customs.
“I’m like, ‘What? The horse is in boxes in customs.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, anyways, carry on,’” De Jong recalled.
When the crew finally planted the horse in the sand for the opening shot, the incoming tide knocked it over. Nolan’s response? “Great. Well, I’m gonna shoot this tomorrow.”
The fall of Troy was built practically, with a 2.5-acre city constructed between late December and early February. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema wanted to light the entire film with fire, so he designed hundreds of LED fixtures, nicknamed “pyrahedrons,” calibrated to the color of firelight.
Nolan sees his entire filmography inside Homer
The documentary’s opening stretch plays like a Nolan master class, with Damon recalling the conversation that started the project. Nolan caught up with him for 10 or 15 minutes and said two words: “The Odyssey.”
Nolan describes Homer’s poem as containing all of Western literature, including the DNA of his own films. Adapting it meant recognizing “that’s where I got that thing from ‘Interstellar,’ or that’s where ‘The Dark Knight’ comes from.”
Rather than imitate the Romantic-era paintings and Hollywood epics of the 1950s and ’60s that defined the genre, Nolan applied the grounded approach of “The Dark Knight,” “Inception” and “Interstellar” to Greek mythology.
Ludwig Göransson built the score around 35 bronze gongs
Damon said that whenever he asked what Göransson was working on, Nolan answered with one word: gongs.
The composer explained that he shut himself in his studio during the Los Angeles fires, surrounded by about 35 bronze gongs and spent 10 days learning to write for them. He had heard gongs before, he noted, “in the theme song for ‘Mortal Kombat.’”
From there, Göransson sought out musicians who played the ancient aulos and lyre. He also traveled to southern Albania to record iso-polyphonic folk singing.
The documentary’s music chapter ends at Abbey Road with vocalist James Blake. The end-credits song, “When I’m Home,” came about because Göransson wanted the film to finish the song started by the bard, played by Travis Scott. The track uses Scott’s original vocal recording from the movie.
Nearly 7,000 extras were put through hair and makeup and Matt Damon performs pullups.
The documentary makes clear that grounding Greek mythology in reality required enormous detail. More than 80 hair and makeup artists worked in Morocco, and just under 7,000 background performers passed through fittings.
The teams erased every modern tell, from tattoos and earring holes to the shape of women’s eyebrows.
Mirojnick also created distinct visual identities for the principal characters.
Penelope, played by Anne Hathaway, wears bright colors because, as the actress explains, she isn’t a widow and keeps dressing as if her husband will return. Telemachus (Tom Holland) transitions from boy to man through increasingly bright, light armor, while Antinous wears a leopard pelt.
As for casting, Papsidera says Nolan once described Homer as writing “the Marvel films of his time,” so the actors had to be the superstars of ours. Odysseus’ warriors, though, needed real bodies. “You don’t want it to look like, you know, 2025 bodybuilding,” Papsidera says. “They weren’t taking peptides.”
Papsidera, whose work ends before cameras roll, had his doubts. “This pragmatic Chris, I’d like to meet sometime,” he cracked, adding that he doesn’t even get a copy of the script to keep. He also joked with Damon of the pecking order: “No movie without us, buddy.”
And most notably, points to the short prep time that left him roughly 62 days to cast about 60 actors.
Damon, meanwhile, was well aware of the physical demands of playing Odysseus. Filmed doing pullups on a ladder, the actor offers a candid assessment of the production. “I’m 54 years old, and I knew this was going to be really physical.”
Near the end of the doc, Damon delivers the line that may become the campaign’s rallying cry. “My whole life was kind of leading up to this movie, and I don’t know how long we’re going to get to make movies this way.”
Onstage, Thomas turned the spotlight on the moderator, making sure voters know the movie couldn’t exist without its star, who has yet to win an acting Oscar. “I cannot believe we did it,” she said, crediting Damon for being “on set, on time with the best attitude every morning.”
Damon passed the praise back down the row. “I’ve never seen more asked of a crew, never,” Damon concluded. “And I don’t think I ever could again.” Then he pauses chuckling. “That didn’t come out right.”
