Christopher Nolan on Set of ‘The Odyssey’ Is the Most Exciting Thing You’ll See This Week

There are certain images that make you feel the weight of a film before you have seen a single frame of it. The behind-the-scenes photograph shared by Empire Magazine this week is exactly that kind of image.

Christopher Nolan stands on a forest floor, one hand raised toward the camera, the other holding what appears to be a script, facing a figure dressed in full ancient Greek armor, a red-plumed Corinthian helmet gleaming through the trees. It is an extraordinary glimpse at one of the most anticipated films in years, and it is arriving at precisely the right moment, just weeks before ‘The Odyssey’ opens.

‘The Odyssey’ represents a milestone in Nolan’s career that extends well beyond its source material. The film is the first narrative feature to be filmed entirely in IMAX 70mm, a goal that Nolan described at CinemaCon as the result of many, many years of working toward that moment, noting that he had been trying to shoot an entire film in IMAX since beginning with action sequences on ‘The Dark Knight’.

The achievement required IMAX to develop entirely new, lighter-weight cameras specifically for the production, with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and his team deploying the technology for the first time in cinema history.

The film’s scope matches that ambition. Nolan and van Hoytema shot more than two million feet of film across Greece, Morocco, Italy, Iceland, and Scotland, chasing real landscapes and real weather conditions that the epic required. Nolan told Empire that by embracing the physicality of the real world in the making of the film, you inform the telling of the story in interesting ways, “because you’re confronted on a daily basis by the world pushing back at you.”

The ensemble assembled around Nolan for this project is as staggering as any he has worked with. Matt Damon plays Odysseus, the legendary Greek king of Ithaca, with Tom Holland as his son Telemachus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Robert Pattinson as the villainous suitor Antinuous, Zendaya as the goddess Athena, Charlize Theron as Calypso, and Lupita Nyong’o in the dual roles of Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra. The film also features Travis Scott as a bard, a casting choice Nolan included as a deliberate nod to the oral poetic tradition of the source material, which he analogized to rapping.

The production conditions tested every one of them. Damon described the shoot as relentless, moving from location to location with no moment of respite, and noted that he had hoped each successive location would be easier, before realizing it simply would not let up. Filming at sea, in Iceland during white nights for the Hades sequences, and in Sicily required the kind of physical commitment that translates directly onto film.

‘The Odyssey’ follows Odysseus on his long and perilous journey home following the Trojan War, chronicling his encounters with mythical beings including the Cyclops Polyphemus, the Sirens, and the nymph Calypso, while attempting to reunite with his wife Penelope. The Trojan Horse sequence alone has already become one of the most talked-about set pieces in Nolan’s career, with the director describing it at CinemaCon as an absolute nightmare to film, in all the right ways.

Universal has positioned the film for a July 17 theatrical release, and the pre-release energy around it has been building steadily. Nolan revealed that ‘The Odyssey’ will be shorter than ‘Oppenheimer’, which ran over three hours, a detail that will come as a relief to audiences who want the spectacle without the endurance test. The Empire behind-the-scenes photograph confirms what the marketing has been promising for months, which is that this is the real thing, a filmmaker at the height of his powers pursuing the most ambitious project of his career.

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