We still have seven months to go before Christopher Nolan brings out his latest epic, The Odyssey. But some early preview material that gives a tiny glimpse is always welcome, isn't it? In an exclusive interview with Empire magazine, the filmmaker has opened up the scale at which he is mounting his adaptation of Homer's classic work of the same name.
“As a filmmaker, you’re looking for gaps in cinematic culture, things that haven’t been done before," he said about the Matt Damon-fronted epic, which is entirely being shot on IMAX cameras. "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.”
A strong champion of the celluloid format, the Oppenheimer director says they used “over two million feet of film” for the shoot spanning 91 days, with most of it in the waters (the teaser showed Damon's Odysseus stranded on his damaged ship). “It’s pretty primal!" says Nolan, adding that these portions have occupied him for the last four months. "We got the cast who play the crew of Odysseus’ ship out there on the real waves, in the real places. And yeah, it’s vast and terrifying and wonderful and benevolent, as the conditions shift. 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.”
The Odyssey revolves around the legend of the Greek king, Odysseus, who encounters a variety of strange and mythical characters on the way home after the Trojan War.
Produced by Universal Pictures in association with Nolan and his wife, Emma Thomas, under their home banner Syncopy Pictures, The Odyssey will arrive in theatres on July 17, 2026.