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Over five countries and 91 days, Christopher Nolan and the cast and crew of “The Odyssey” were driven to their breaking point as they labored to bring Homer’s epic to the screen. They shot on the ocean, in craggy mountain
passes, across dense forests and sandy beaches, battling wind, rain and scorching sun in an act of cinematic brinkmanship nearly as punishing as Odysseus’ long journey home.
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt as exhausted as I did at the end of this shoot,” a heavy-lidded Nolan says the day after the film’s premiere in New York City. “It was the hardest thing I’ve done. It was an endurance test for all of us.”
Some locations were so remote, so unforgiving, that no one dared to film there before. Many days would start with members of the production hiking up rocky terrain just to get to where they’d be shooting.
“It felt more like an expedition than a film,” says Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus. “The running joke as we shot was ‘Boy, Greece was hard; I’m sure Italy will be easier,’ and then we’d get to Italy, and it would be just as intense. So then you’d think Iceland’s going to be a breeze, and then we got to Iceland, and it was raining sideways and we’re shooting through the night.”
It helped that Nolan braved the elements along with everyone else. “He was always right next to the camera,” Damon says. “When we were cold and wet, he was cold and wet. If you were hiking up a mountain, he was hiking up a mountain.”
Filming was supposed to go on even longer. “We could have shot another nine days,” Nolan says. “But the reality is we were done. We couldn’t have been out on those boats any longer than we were — we couldn’t take it. So, yes, we finished early, but we also sort of stumbled across the finish line.”
It’s 24 hours before “The Odyssey” opens on July 17, and I’m sitting with Nolan in his publicist’s SoHo office. The $250 million, R-rated epic is expected to be one of the year’s biggest hits, and the reviews for the film have just landed — they are raves. Nolan is calm, albeit weary, outfitted in a blue blazer and nursing a “cuppa” despite the 95-degree heat. A lot is riding on him. The film features A-listers like Damon, Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland, but Nolan — who became a household name with the “Dark Knight” franchise, and later a draw in his own right with “Inception,” “Dunkirk” and “Oppenheimer” — is the star attraction. In those films, Nolan retained his auteurist fire while creating big, bold populist extravaganzas.
“They broke the mold with him,” says Samantha Morton, who plays the witch Circe. “He somehow manages to communicate with the everyman who just wants to be entertained and with cinema aficionados. I don’t know anybody else that has ever done it like him.”
“The Odyssey” may be set in an ancient world, but Nolan saw it as an opportunity to test the limits of modern technology by shooting the film entirely with Imax cameras. It’s the first picture to do so, and the result is a film that is truly monumental in scope: Not only do the sacking of Troy and the battle with the Cyclops fill Imax’s vast screens, but the palace intrigue that awaits Odysseus when he finally returns to Ithaca also plays out on a massive scale. But pulling it off was an ordeal. Imax cameras are lumbering tools that weigh 300 pounds each and roar like Cuisinart blenders. Cast members initially struggled to figure out how to act in front of something they likened to an SUV.
“It was a blind trust exercise in Chris,” admits Hathaway, who plays Odysseus’ wife, Penelope. “Chris has a loyal group around him, and many of them had used Imax cameras to shoot action sequences. But they’d never done intimate scenes like the ones I was in. Everybody was a beginner in some respects.”
Moreover, the cameras only contain less than three minutes’ worth of film, so they need to be constantly reloaded, often in the middle of a scene. After some trial and error, Nolan opted not to yell “Cut!” when a camera ran out. Instead, he would gently ask the cast to pause, quietly get more film and have them pick up where they left off.
“When I say, ‘Cut,’ this bell goes off and everybody grabs a cigarette or scratches their ass,” Nolan says. “It’s a word you don’t want to use if you want to maintain some tension. There’s a sacred space between ‘Action’ and ‘Cut’ on a film. You want everyone instinctively coming together, freeing up their conscious minds and doing great work at the same time instead of peaking at different points. The harmony you need is like a stage performance.”
“The Odyssey” is being positioned as a grand, old-fashioned sword-and sandals adventure — the kind of blockbuster that gave blockbusters their name. But most of those movies were escapist adventures, and while “The Odyssey” is thrilling and awash in spectacular set-pieces, it carries far weightier themes. In some respects, it’s a spiritual sequel to “Oppenheimer,” Nolan’s most recent film, which explores J. Robert Oppenheimer’s guilt over unleashing the atomic age. When Damon, who appears in both films, read the script for “The Odyssey,” he saw parallels between Oppenheimer’s role in constructing the bomb and Odysseus’ part in developing the Trojan Horse, an ingenious ploy that allows his army to raze the city of Troy. Both innovations lead to carnage on an enormous scale.
“You see echoes of Odysseus’ ingenuity in Oppenheimer’s, and the tragic consequences of their discoveries,” says Damon. “Both men are tortured by what they’ve done.”
Part of what Nolan hoped to tease out in his latest film was the Greek concept of xenia, or the law of Zeus, in which hospitality must be extended to strangers, essentially because you never know if someone is really a deity in disguise. In “The Odyssey,” this civic duty is frequently ignored with disastrous consequences. “It’s supposed to keep people on the straight and narrow,” Nolan says. “I was interested in the idea that the interdependence of people is the foundation and possibly the definition of civilization. And both ‘Oppenheimer’ and “The Odyssey’ show us how often that is ignored and thus how fragile civilization is and how it can be easily unraveled.”
Like Homer’s poem, the film adaptation of “The Odyssey” unfolds in a mystical world, one in which men battle monsters, walk among gods and witness miracles. But Nolan wanted to root the film in reality. That meant using practical effects as much as possible in place of CGI, so that the mythical elements of the story never seemed too fantastic.
“The word that Chris kept using was ‘grounded,’” Damon says. “He wanted things that were real and tactile. He wanted layers of dirt on the wardrobe. He wanted the sets to feel like real places where people lived and worked, so that it would seem relatable and not some distant world.”
The particulars of “The Odyssey” remain the same. After defeating Troy and setting sail for home, Odysseus, the ruler of a small kingdom, and his men are blown off course. At the far reaches of civilization, they struggle to stay alive, beset by giant cannibals, sirens whose songs cause sailors to go mad and a sorceress who transforms men into pigs. But it’s also a human story about the costs of war and the innocent people who are swept up in the wreckage. Morton, who portrays a sorcerer who gains the upper hand on Odysseus’ crew when they come to her island home looking for food, plays her part as a battle-hardened woman just trying to stay safe, instead of the temptress of legend.
“My family is a military family,” Morton says. “War is complicated. Men are complicated. Our relationships with men as wives, sisters, daughters, is complicated. I drew on that. And there are people in my family that have been sexually assaulted and raped, and I thought of that as well.”
Perhaps the most subversive thing about “The Odyssey” is the way that it repositions its female characters and brings them to the fore. Penelope, for instance, is depicted in the poem as ever patient and virtuous while waiting for her husband to return. In Nolan and Hathaway’s interpretation, Penelope is a more calculating power player, keeping at bay the wolfish suitors who show up hoping to take Odysseus’ place and working the angles to preserve her son’s chance of assuming the throne.
“I always accepted the narrative about Penelope that focused on her likability, her goodness, her morality,” Hathaway says. “Chris created a character that’s not a denial of those things, but who is dealing with a constraining and challenging set of circumstances. This paragon of patience is staring at an uncertain future and wearing thin. The costs of playing the game are becoming clear.”
Hathaway says one of her friends went to see “The Odyssey” despite reservations about Homer’s work and came away transformed. “She always felt like it was a war tale that blamed women for everything bad in the world,” Hathaway says. “And she came out sobbing. She told me it was the first time she felt welcomed by the story. This version of ‘The Odyssey’ reached out its hand to her.”
Most people emerge from “The Odyssey” talking about its battle scenes — from the fall of Troy to Odysseus’ battle with hulking, man-eating soldiers outfitted in shimmering armor. And they are thrilling. But there’s real darkness too. In Troy, for instance, we get swept up with the soldiers as they sneak out of the Trojan Horse and take the city by surprise. But our excitement fades as Nolan’s camera captures the men raping women, looting houses and reveling in the violence.
When I spoke to Nolan on the press tour for “Oppenheimer,” I was struck by how rattled he seemed by the state of the world. Russia had invaded Ukraine, and he worried openly about nuclear Armageddon. Since that film, things have only grown more dire, with wars also raging in Gaza and Iran. That must have seeped into how he chose to interpret “The Odyssey.”
“That’s my job,” Nolan says. “And if I’ve done it right, there will always be a correspondence between what’s going on in the world and what’s happening on-screen. I don’t like to be too self-conscious or didactic about that. I really want to entertain people. That’s still what’s most precious about films.”
