Horse Power: How Christopher Nolan & DP Hoyte Van Hoytema Solved the Trojan Horse Scene in “The Odyssey”

Last night in New York City, Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey premiered at Lincoln Center, playing on both the theater’s vaunted IMAX screen and a richly detailed 70mm print. Outside the theater, Nolan and his starry cast and crew, including Zendaya, Matt Damon, Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o, Anne Hathaway, and John Leguizamo, walked the red carpet under the shadow of a majestic beast—a replica of the Trojan Horse that Nolan and his production designer, Ruth De Jong, and her team had built for the film. The beast stood nearly 40 feet tall, large enough to fit actors Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema inside.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter from the red carpet, Leguizamo, who plays Odysseus’ swineherd Eumaeus, one of his most loyal servants and friends, said that he was stunned to find Nolan and Hoytema literally inside the horse when he arrived on set ready to meet him. “I was looking for Chris Nolan to meet him, and they told me he was inside the horse with 20 actors and the DP [Hoyte van Hoytema] and the IMAX camera. I couldn’t believe that. I was like, wow, this man is a leader. This man is not going to ask anything of you that he doesn’t attempt himself.”

Despite his epic ambitions, Nolan is a meticulous filmmaker lauded for finishing his films on time and under budget, yet he is also a much freer, riskier auteur than one might expect. That was clearly evident when filming the crucial Trojan Horse sequence, arguably the film’s narrative backbone. Rather than pre-plan and pre-vis the sequence to death, Nolan was content to get himself and his cinematographer inside the horse, along with Damon (playing Odysseus, of course), Jon Bernthal (playing Menelaus), and other performers, and figure it out once inside.

Speaking to GamesRadar+, Damon said that Nolan told his cast and crew they were “just going to cram in there and figure it out,” as the star recalled “that feeling of claustrophobia, that was all just developing organically… Hoyte was looking through the lens, and Chris was right next to him. They just built that in real time. It was so cool to see. If we had planned it out, I don’t think it would have had that same energy.”

Alongside Damon’s Odysseus, Leguizamo’s Eumaeus, and Bernthal’s Menelaus, the star-studded cast includes Lupita Nyong’o in dual roles as Helen of Troy, the wife of Jon Bernthal’s Menelaus and the woman whose face launched a thousand ships, and her sister, Clytemnestra, wife of Benny Safdie’s Agamemnon. Robert Pattinson stars as Antinous, the most vile of the suitors, trying to steal Odysseus’s home, his wife, Penelope (played by Anne Hathaway), and, for good measure, to murder his son, Telemachus (played by Tom Holland). Zendaya plays the goddess Athena, and Charlize Theron plays the nymph Calypso. 

It’s wild to hear these stories and then see a replica of the Trojan Horse on Broadway in Manhattan, with the film’s stars passing it on their way into the screening. Such is life at a Christopher Nolan premiere, where the impossible becomes possible—thanks in large part to his producing partner and wife, Emma Thomas, who has moved heaven and earth time and time again to allow Nolan to create his ever-ambitious epics.

Shot entirely with IMAX cameras, The Odyssey sails into theaters on July 17.

Featured image: THE ODYSSEY, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.