THE ODYSSEY

Before it was a film, it was the foundation stone. The Odyssey, attributed to the poet Homer and composed some three thousand years ago, is the sequel to the Trojan War: twenty-four books of verse following Odysseus, king of the island of Ithaca and architect of the Trojan Horse, on his ten-year struggle to sail home to his wife and son. The classicist Edith Hall calls it “the mother of all stories”;¹⁴ Nolan says the poem “truly contains all stories.”³ It is set at a pointed hinge of history: the end of the Bronze Age, with Greece about to slide into a dark age of collapsed kingdoms and lost literacy.²

Nolan came to the poem through its translations, working across Emily Wilson’s plainspoken 2017 rendering, E. V. Rieu’s 1946 prose, and Robert Fagles’s 1996 verse⁵, and was hooked by Wilson’s famous opening line. “Tell me about a complicated man. The genius of the character, the cleverness, the inventiveness of him, that was a huge part of what interested me,” he said, calling Odysseus “a very wily person.”⁵⁷ Even Argos, the old dog who alone recognizes the disguised king, is promoted from a single scene to a small role. Nolan, deadpan, has offered his own logline: “it’s the ultimate dog story.”⁷

On December 23, 2024, Universal announced “a mythic action epic shot across the world using brand new IMAX film technology.”¹ Behind that single sentence sat a fixation more than twenty years old. Nolan calls the absence of a big-studio Odyssey an “odd gap in movie history” and says the near-billion-dollar success of Oppenheimer finally “gave me options.”² He had circled Homer before: in talks to direct 2004’s Troy, he now admits he was “a little over my head.”² From that abandoned project he kept one image, carried across two decades: a Trojan Horse that is not a proud monument but a half-sunk wreck in the surf: soldiers packed inside, breathing through straws as the tide rises. A horse the sea is reclaiming, he reasoned, is one the Trojans would rush to salvage and drag inside their own walls.²

The obsession is older still. Nolan first met the story at about age five, watching older schoolchildren stage it: the horse, the man lashed to the mast, images that lodged and never left. When he finally sat down to adapt it, he began by writing out everything he half-remembered and wanted to see, before rereading a single translation: the Cyclops, the lotus flower, the touchstones a general audience carries without knowing where they came from.⁶⁴

Cracking the Poem

The structural insight came from reading like a screenwriter. The poem, Nolan realized, “is all payoffs, but it doesn’t have the setups.” Homer’s audiences already knew the story, so nothing is foreshadowed. Building the missing setups inside the poem’s architecture is, he says, what “cracked it open” for him.⁴ He read the translations over and over, then set them all aside and worked “from intuition… as if it’s frankly something I’m making up,” the only way, he felt, to truly own it.¹⁴ From Wilson he took the character’s core: a liar who promises to tell the whole truth.² His shorthand for the challenge is pure film history: a slick, clever Han Solo works as a supporting character. The trick was building a film where the Han Solo figure is the hero.²

An Earthy Narrative

The film’s most argued-over choice is its language: plain, modern, American-accented English. Telemachus says “Dad,” not “Father.”⁹ Nolan wanted “language that has emotional not intellectual meaning to people,” and knew the risk: “I was maybe being naïve, it might bite me on the ass, but I wanted an earthy narrative. To me it was a no-brainer.”⁹ The casting follows the same logic: iconic faces doing the work of familiar speech.⁹ To those who call it sacrilege he offers a history lesson: Homer was “the Marvel of its day,” his heroes “the original superheroes.” In his words, “a lot of comic book culture… comes pretty directly from Homer’s epics.”⁷ Out of the poem’s code of sacred hospitality, in which a god may be hiding in any beggar, he distilled the film’s ethic, renamed on screen as “Zeus’s law.”¹⁴

The Intense Version

Nolan told Universal from the outset he would make “the most intense version of The Odyssey,” and pushed for the R rating himself: a PG-13 telling would have been “potentially compromising.”¹³ His visual touchstones reach outside Hollywood entirely: Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev and Kurosawa’s Ran.⁵ The gods themselves never literally appear: to a Bronze Age mind their evidence was everywhere, in thunder and rain and the rising sun, and Nolan judged that putting the audience on the deck, fearing Poseidon alongside the crew, would beat any bearded figure on a mountain.² Even the runtime is physical: an IMAX film projector holds just under three hours of film, so the cut runs 172 minutes. In Nolan’s words, “an epic film, as the subject matter demands, but it is shorter” than Oppenheimer.¹⁰

The page itself drew the cast before the cameras did. “Every script, I mean, I’ve read three of them now, they are phenomenal pieces of writing, and they’re all built like a Swiss watch,” says Matt Damon, on his third Nolan film.²¹

And the anxiety underneath it all is the anxiety of any storyteller joining a 3,000-year conversation. In the final weeks before release he called the run-up “nerve-wracking”⁵, and drew the line he always draws: “For me, a film is not finished until the audience tells you what it is.”⁸

Casting director John Papsidera, who has built every Nolan ensemble since Memento, describes the director’s eye simply: “He is never wondering what might fit the mold; he already knows the shape. He just wants to see who it ultimately ends up being.”¹⁵ The machinery around that eye is legendary. Emma Thomas hand-delivered a printed script to Himesh Patel in London, no agents, no e-mails: “a very covert operation,” as Patel puts it.³⁵ Mia Goth auditioned on decoy pages and had to accept the job before learning her role.⁴⁰ John Leguizamo got his part over dinner at The Odeon in Tribeca.³⁷ And Damon said yes before he knew what the film was: “When Chris called, he said, ‘I’d like to offer you the lead role.’ I said yes straight away. Then he asked if I wanted to know what the film was. He simply said, ‘The Odyssey.’”¹⁶

Principal photography ran from late February to August 5, 2025: 91 shooting days across six countries and three continents, finishing nine days ahead of schedule.⁴ “It felt more like an expedition than a film,” says Damon, whose days began and ended with mountain hikes.⁶⁴ Every stop, he swears, would have been the single hardest location of any other film he’s made, and they ran back-to-back.⁴ The crew’s in-joke became the “Odyssey Five”: five hours of sleep counted as a win.²⁰

The sea was shot on the sea. The company spent some four months on open water³ aboard the Draken, a reconstruction of a thousand-year-old Viking longship dressed as a Mycenaean vessel. The cast learned to row, and the ship’s real crew appear as extras.⁵⁸ “It’s pretty primal!” Nolan says of the ocean, “vast and terrifying and wonderful and benevolent, as the conditions shift.”³ The Sirens sequence was written plainly into the script, so Damon knew months in advance that on the appointed day he would genuinely be lashed to a mast on the open ocean.⁴ Even the family came aboard: all four Nolan-Thomas children worked as crew: “I’d sort of look behind a boat at sea, see a guy in a wetsuit maneuvering the boat and realize it was one of my sons,” because, as Nolan says, “The Odyssey is a family story.”⁵⁹ Presiding over all of it, producer Emma Thomas. In her own words, Nolan while shooting is “kind of a machine.”² He directs without a chair, standing within five feet of his actors, in whatever the weather is doing to everyone else.²

The emotional center was shot quietly, on stages in Los Angeles: the marriage scenes between Odysseus and Penelope. When those wrapped, Nolan turned to Damon and said, “It’s ours to lose now.”²

Hoyte van Hoytema has shot five of Nolan’s thirteen films, and his creed for this one fits in six words: IMAX is “a camera that doesn’t lie.”⁴⁶ The image had to be made honestly, at scale, in places that pushed back: what GQ called the pursuit of “some moment of magic in a real place: a real sunset, a real castle.”⁴ For the midnight sack of Troy, van Hoytema rigged hundreds of portable LEDs tuned to the color temperature of firelight, so Nolan could point the camera anywhere and keep the night alive.²

Monsters, Performed

The creatures were treated as characters, not effects. The Cyclops was conceived under a reproduction of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, kept on display through development, and realized as a hybrid of puppetry, animatronics, robotics, and computer graphics⁵⁸, anchored on set by a roughly 60-foot practical contraption inside that Greek cave.⁵³ Bill Irwin performed and voiced Polyphemus live for the actors for a month; “he was the essence of it,” Nolan says.⁵⁸ For the Laestrygonian battle, Nolan wanted the audience “trying to get across the brutality” of giants against men, an encounter that “leaves them all shaken,” and staged it with forced perspective and stuntmen flung on wires, seven IMAX cameras rolling at once.⁵²

The World Built

Production designer Ruth De Jong, Oscar-nominated for Oppenheimer, built an ancient Greece actors could touch; Hathaway’s summary of the design philosophy: “form followed the function.”⁴⁹ Nolan is frank that Bronze Age knowledge rests on “very fragmentary archeological records,” and defends choices like Agamemnon’s blackened-bronze armor from the actual archaeology, while deliberately drawing on how Homer’s own first audiences would have pictured the heroes.² Damon saw the effect from inside: “this comprehensive effort on the part of all the departments to just really world-build.”⁴⁸ Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick, who made Penelope ten brightly colored gowns because the queen refuses to dress as a widow²⁴, frames the whole picture her way: “an adventure film, not a history lesson or a poem… If you go to see it, you will go on the ride of your life.”⁵⁶

The Invisible Hand

None of which means no visual effects: Nolan’s films have won three Oscars for them, a fact he enjoys holding up against his in-camera reputation.² His longtime supervisor Andrew Jackson leads the work with DNEG, the studio behind Tenet and Interstellar.⁵⁵ The rule, as ever: the digital hand serves the real image, and stays invisible.