“It’s never quite brutal enough for Chris”: The Odyssey cast reveal how they created Christopher Nolan’s epic adventure

A mammoth adventure epic that shot for 91 days across six months in six countries and cost a reported $250 million to make, The Odyssey is a cinematic beast worthy of its own mythology. Adapting and doing justice to one of the foundational texts of Western literature is a big gig. But if one director can take on a full-blooded adaptation of Homer’s epic 8th-century BC poem, it’s Christopher Nolan. His previous film, Oppenheimer (2023), was a riveting look at the man who developed the atomic bomb; it won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, while raking in $976 million at the box office. Making sophisticated filmmaking at scale that’s also hugely popular to a global audience is his thing, often delivered with smart storytelling twists, some nifty technical innovation or both.

This feature, Nolan’s 13th, is the first to be shot entirely using IMAX cameras. The director’s love for the format goes back to his years as a teen cinephile when he first encountered it as a 16-year-old at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, watching documentaries by filmmakers such as Greg MacGillivray and Toni Myers. He says: “As soon as I started seeing these films, it was, like, why isn’t Hollywood using this? Why aren’t we giving a mainstream audience a dramatic feature in this way?” Nolan is evangelical. “It’s the closest imaging format to the way the eye sees that’s ever been devised,” he explains. “You can really give people the feeling of being there, of the screen disappearing and the imagery just enveloping you.”

Verisimilitude can only go so far when making a film derived from a mythological poem written nearly 3,000 years ago, but there are moments when Nolan’s team have conjured such an authentic-looking film that viewers may wonder where they managed to get a real cyclops from. “We’re using every trick in the book,” Nolan says. “Everything from CG to animatronics to puppetry. The Odyssey has so many different elements: we wanted the fantastical elements to be as grounded as the real things we were photographing.”

Nolan put his actors through a lot, which makes for a visceral and thrilling piece. “Being out on a real boat in real storms and real waves with the actors, they’re actually experiencing those things,” he says. For all the massive set-pieces, bloody sword fights and high drama though, when asked about a moment he looks upon with pride, Nolan singles out a quiet moment in nature.

“There’s a shot I’m particularly proud of with Odysseus looking out over the boat in a very rough sea with dolphins playing in the waves beside him. A lot of people assume those dolphins are CGI, but they’re not. It’s all for real.”

In The Odyssey, Greek king of Ithaca Odysseus (Matt Damon) makes a long, dangerous journey home after the Trojan War – where he’s been fighting for Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) – while encountering savage mythical creatures. Gruelling battles on land and violent storms at sea relentlessly pummel our hero and his long-suffering crew, including stalwart second-in-command Eurylochus (Himesh Patel). Washed up on a beach with the mysterious Calypso (Charlize Theron), Odysseus tries to piece together memories of wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland), the struggles of the mind proving as exhausting of those of the body. With Robert Pattinson offering an oleaginous turn as eager suitor Antinous, Samantha Morton a bewitching Circe, and Zendaya a luminous Athena, there are abundant riches elsewhere among a characteristically strong Nolan ensemble cast.

We sat down with Damon, Hathaway, Patel and Safdie, as well as Lupita Nyong’o (playing a dual role of Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra) and John Leguizamo (Odysseus’s servant Eumaeus) to find out about making the film, how their director runs a set, and what the toughest part of filming was.

Lou Thomas: How did you immerse yourself into the world of the film?

Matt Damon: The first day I shot was Essaouira in Morocco, walking over the dunes on that beach and seeing thousands of people, because obviously Chris doesn’t put people in by computer. If it says “thousands of people”, there are going to be thousands of people. The scale of it was immediately jaw-dropping and the [Trojan] horse was there, half-sunk in the sand, and the tide was coming in. It was just so massive a production it was really easy to immerse yourself in a world, because it was just built all around you.

Anne Hathaway: One of my favourite things about being on a Chris set is that the film is the star, so you are expected to be ready to show up to support the film and not the other way around. For all of my scenes I was in a cast of several hundred people every day, and we would come in and go through the works and everybody would be in full costume, no Uggs, standing on your mark at 7am. Then you find out what your day’s work was. There’s a phrase that I love, which is “to give someone the dignity of their experience”. I just felt like Chris created an experience that we all wanted to be a part of and the greatest dignity we could give was to actually allow ourselves to be immersed in it.

Lupita Nyong’o: The script is a really good start. He writes in a very visual way. I read the script before I had read The Iliad or The Odyssey, so it was my first introduction to this myth in its entirety, and it was very cinematic. You get the stakes, you get the emotions. You start there and then it’s really about steeping yourself in the version of this film that Chris is trying to make. 

Benny Safdie: The way that he makes his movies is you have no other option other than to [immerse yourself in it] because you’re going to the ends of the world to get to these places. There was one time where I flew, took a car, took a boat, took another car, then at one point I was in a helicopter just to get to this place for a couple of shots. Then behind me were boats in the ocean behind the ships that I arrived on. There’s an element of physicality that overwhelms you when you’re there, because of all this effort that went into it. You click into another gear.

Himesh Patel: Oh, man. You get immersed. Given the way that he builds his sets, everything’s in front of you. There’s nothing that you need to imagine. It’s all there. Costume was a big thing for me, especially with all the armour and all that, so you’re immediately in the physicality of the person you’re playing. Then there was a lot of physical prep before we started in Morocco; we had a a sword-fighting camp. And I had another day in LA before getting used to working with a sword and how that works. Also, I read the original poem. I hadn’t read it.

John Leguizamo: My guy Eumaeus is sight-impaired so they gave me contacts that were opaque, so I couldn’t actually see. I had to be guided to eat, go to the bathroom, whatever. I have a friend who’s legally blind, and I studied her, and that’s what I incorporated into this character to help me be as real as possible.

Which sequence was the most challenging to film and why?

Leguizamo: Every day [laughs].

Damon: That is an unanswerable question. It was the most incredibly, wonderfully challenging movie that I have done. I got back and immediately told Ben Affleck, “Every location on this movie would have been the hardest location on any other movie.” They were all challenging for different reasons, but challenging for everybody. It felt more like an expedition than a movie. We were all in it together, we were all out in the elements. If you were cold and wet, everybody else was cold and wet. A few feet away from you, Chris Nolan was cold and wet.

There was this great feeling of camaraderie that developed because we got the sense that we were doing something special and going through it together – this attempt to do it all on IMAX that had never been done. It started to dawn on us as the production kept going that, “Oh my god, I think we’re going to be able to do this. I think we’re actually gonna pull this off.” So that was really exciting.

Hathaway: It wasn’t as challenging as it was exhilarating. There was a scene where I get to be on a boat with Odysseus, and the weather was really rough that day, so the waves were huge and I loved it. I was also very aware that I was gonna be the only woman on a boat in the entire film, so I needed to not fall or complain. I needed to just charge up the ship every time they asked me to do something.

Damon: Of the months that we shot on that boat that was without question the roughest day, the one that Annie came on.

Patel: It’s hard for me to pick, because it was all blood and thunder. Iceland was tough. The conditions were so brutal, because that’s what they had to be. Although they did also add some sideways rain, so it’s never quite brutal enough for Chris. There were some days we’re on the boat just off Favignana in Italy where it would be raining a little bit and grey, and then this other boat would just pull up alongside and it was Scott SFX [special effects supervisor Scott R. Fisher]. He had a massive hose, and it was “We’re going to just spray this hose all over you if that’s okay?”

How does a Nolan set differ to that of other directors?

Nyong’o: There’s no cell phones, so that’s a big one for me. I was stunned at how much more focus there was on set because there were no distractions. Everybody is there and everybody is aware what’s going on and everybody is poised to jump in when they’re needed. I love that, because it’s a different energy.

Safdie: There’s a certain nimbleness and freeness; even though it is this big movie, it’s distilled down to the simplest process. It’s, “We’re all just a bunch of people here trying to figure this out.” To be able to preserve that is really exciting.

Leguizamo: Chris is with you, because most directors go away to the video village and you start being separated from them. He’s right there behind the camera. Old-school style. No diva attitude.

Patel: No, none of that. We’re all democratised. Everyone’s treated the same. There’s no video village. There’s no one watching and offering notes to Chris.

What makes him the right director to make a film like this? 

Damon: I could go on for a long time about this. He’s at the absolute pinnacle of his abilities right now. It was so exciting to be one of the people who got to do this with him. I think everybody top to bottom felt that way. It’s just clear when you watch him the level of command he has over this art form.

Hathaway: There’s a lot of really brilliant technicians out there and there’s people who have an artist’s soul. It’s very rare to find somebody who has both of those things that work in concert with each other and actually support each other, then has the intelligence and inspiration to have a vision on top of it. It’s a really rare thing.

Damon: It’s true. That left brain, right brain combination with some great ideas.

Hathaway: He also has a sense of integrity, so he’s a really muscular filmmaker himself; he doesn’t ask you to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. I’ve seen it. There have been stunts that I walk in and he was dropping down a building, getting off scaffolding and just be, like, “It’s not that bad.” That’s the thing, that’s the reason why we all wanna get out there and bleed for him – because he’s leading the charge himself.

Safdie: He’s unafraid. He knew we could do this.

The Odyssey is in cinemas from 17 July. An IMAX 70mm print is screening from 17 July at BFI IMAX.