Christopher Nolan is going all out for The Odyssey.
The Oscar winner opened up about the making of his upcoming film adaptation of Homer‘s epic poem in a recent interview with Empire.
Nolan said he “shot over two million feet of film” over the course of The Odyssey‘s 91-day shoot, noting that most of that took place in the ocean.
“It’s pretty primal! I’ve been out on it for the last four months,” Nolan said. “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 director described that he embraced “the physicality of the real world” during the film’s shoot, and that he was “confronted on a daily basis by the world pushing back at you.”
Nolan said that as a filmmaker, he is always looking for “gaps in cinematic culture,” specifically stories that haven’t been told on the screen before.
“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,” Nolan said.
Matt Damon stars as Odysseus in the film, which features a star-studded cast including Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o and Robert Pattinson.
The Odyssey arrives in theaters and on IMAX screens on July 17, 2026.
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