Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey”: An Attempt to Break New Cinematic Ground

Christopher Nolan is no stranger to grand ambitions. He has been an advocate and early adopter of using IMAX cameras in his films, dating back to The Dark Knight (2008), his superhero masterclass, which utilized the large-format cameras for the gangbusters opening bank robbery scene. He’s been deploying the cameras ever since, even helping IMAX push their own technology further, creating newer, lighter-weight equipment.

For his latest epic, Nolan’s adapting Homer’s The Odyssey, and he has told Empire Magazine that he has pushed himself and his cast and crew, which includes his go-to cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, to try to capture things that have never been done on film before. The Odyssey filmed for 91 days earlier this year, including on “goat island,” the Sicilian island of Favignana. Also known as “goat island,” Favignana is where scholars believe that Homer’s hero Odysseus came ashore with his doomed crew to feast on barbecued goats and sure up their provisions for the voyage home. “As a filmmaker, you’re looking for gaps in cinematic culture, things that haven’t been done before,” Nolan told Empire. “And what I saw is that all of this great mythological cinematic work that I had grown up with – Ray Harryhausen movies and other things – I’d never seen that done with the sort of weight and credibility that an A-budget and a big Hollywood, IMAX production could do.”

That included building a full-scale Trojan Horse, filming entirely in IMAX, and capturing footage on location, including in the Aegadian Islands. He also told Empire he shot over 2 million feet of film during the production, far more than Odysseus’s oft-thwarted journey home to Ithaca.

Nolan’s film stars Matt Damon as the cunning Odysseus, reuniting with Nolan after a memorable, albeit brief, role in Interstellar and a much meatier turn in Oppenheimer. Tom Holland plays his son, Telemachus. The rest of the cast is as starry as you’d expect on a Nolan film, with Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, and Jon Bernthal in undisclosed roles.

Nolan also did something even Steven Spielberg has advised against—he shot, at least partially, on the open ocean. “It’s vast and terrifying and wonderful and benevolent, as the conditions shift,” Nolan told Empire. “We really wanted to capture how hard those journeys would have been for people. And the leap of faith that was being made in an unmapped, uncharted world. By embracing the physicality of the real world in the making of the film, you do inform the telling of the story in interesting ways. Because you’re confronted on a daily basis by the world pushing back at you.”

While the conditions might have been challenging, the ever-ambitious Nolan’s goal of making a mythic film on a scale that hasn’t been done before sounded like precisely what his Odysseus was after.

“I can say, without hyperbole, that it was the best experience of my career,” Damon told Empire, recalling arriving on set to find the Trojan Horse, fully to scale, waiting for him. “I saw the horse on the beach and I was just like, ‘F**k.’ It was just so cool.”

Featured image: Matt Damon in Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” Courtesy Universal Pictures.