The Odyssey article in the July edition of Empire
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyseey is a production so epic, it’s become a myth in itself. Empire braves colossal berserkers, sinister suitors and voyage officials to voyage with him around the world.
Flinging thuderbolts
Outside, it’s an effortlessly sunny June afternoon in Los Angeles, the sky pure blue, people scurrying around the Sony Pictures lot clasping budget reports. But inside Stage 29 — one of the tallest soundstages in LA, whispers Tom Holland — hell is being unleashed on a mythic scale. Having wended its way around the globe over the first half of 2025, the director’s latest production has made its way home. To Hollywood. And to the cavernous room where Nolan previously filmed a Batcave and a spaceship. Right now, he’s dwarfing both of those with a day that, even by the standards of The Odyssey, is pretty damn big.
There are movie stars. So many movie stars. Having passed an array of famous- name-bedecked chairs so vast that it gives the one from that Avengers: Doomsday video a run for its money, Empire find ourselves in a two-storey palace from antiquity, which appears to have an A-lister in every shadowy corner. There’s Matt Damon, Odysseus himself, brandishing a sword and a mighty beard. There are Anne Hathaway and Holland, as the hero’s wife Penelope and son Telemachus. Robert Pattinson is here, in a dark cloak. John Leguizamo strolls past, near unrecognisable as an aged servant with milky-white cataracts and greyed-up hair. Under a table lies Mia Goth, reading a book.
There is grandeur. The megaron, or great hall, of this palace of Ithaca is lit by flickering LED bulbs in braziers, an innovation from cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, creating an eerie sense of firelight. They illuminate the near 100 extras playing suitors, beggars and maids, as well as a water feature and an ornate loom. Aside from this newfangled high-tech flourish, we could be on set of an Old Hollywood epic like Intolerance: for a sea view from the veranda, a hand- painted backdrop creates an exquisite illusion, drapes fluttering thanks to a concealed fan.
There is vengeance. Yes, spoiler alert for a tale that’s 3,000 years or so old: Odysseus has made it home. And he’s not in the best mood. Here, after experiencing the most nightmarish commute back from work imaginable — a 10-year trek beset by monsters, curses and worse — he has returned to face the final obstacle to domestic bliss. A bunch of awful men, led by Pattinson’s Antinous, who want what Odysseus has for themselves.
Lastly, completing the doomy picture, there are those thunderbolts. Nolan stands, in his customary pristine suit, remote-control trigger in his hand. When the Muse tells him the moment is precisely right, he pushes the button — and white-hot lightning flashes, strobing the stage.
Alfred Hitchcock once said, “In feature films, the director is God.” Well, today, Nolan is doing a more than passable impression of Zeus, king of them all.
Keeping code-names close to home
The Dark Knight was ‘Rory’s First Kiss’ (Rory’s his son). Interstellar was ‘Flora’s Letter’ (Flora’s his daughter). With The Odyssey, the alias on call sheets and signage was ‘Charlie’s Tale’.
The moniker flummoxed Robert Pattinson, for one. “I’d literally just come straight off The Drama when I did this, and my character was called Charlie,” he tells Empire, with a laugh. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is a little bit bold.’”
Pattinson admits he never thought to ask who this Charlie was. But if he had, he’d have learned it was in fact a reference to Nolan’s dog, a sweet-natured chocolate Labrador. And rather than getting the gig because the director and his producer/wife Emma Thomas had run out of kids after which to name their projects, Charlie’s name was deployed for very good reason. “I don’t think you can adapt The Odyssey if you’re not a dog owner,” says Nolan, sincerely. “Charlie’s our first dog. And I think I had to become a dog owner before I could truly understand the emotional heart of the film.”
Odysseus does have a pet pooch, Argos. Yet it might seem strange that of everything in Homer’s sprawling saga — gods, monsters, war, a cast of thousands — it’s this one simple animal that helped unlock The Odyssey. Until you consider what Argos represents: loyalty, devotion, the joys of home. Everything, in short, that drives the legendary, embattled Greek hero as he journeys the 560 nautical miles from Troy to Ithaca.
Despite its simple logline, The Odyssey is a daunting thing to adapt. There are myriad versions to pore over (“I’ve lost count of the number of translations I’ve read,” Nolan admits), infinite world-building details over which one can obsess. The writer-director cites, as one rabbit hole he disappeared into, the subject of axe-heads. Specifically, the ones that are lined up in a row in Ithaca so that Penelope’s sleazy suitors (and eventually Odysseus himself) can attempt to fire an arrow clean through them — a ‘trial by bow’. Nolan talks to Empire at length about how he came to settle on the placement of the axe-heads on the palace floor: first inspired by a translation offered by Robert Fitzgerald in 1961, before being swayed by his first assistant director, Nilo Otero, “a classics nut and a very well-educated man, who over months wore me down”.
Suffice to say, one can get lost navigating this story, dashed onto the proverbial rocks. Nolan kept his course straight and true by focusing on breathing life into these characters: they may be ancient, but they still love, cry, yearn to cuddle their pet. “It is a collection of the most fundamental and evocative extrapolations of everyday life, what it is to be human,” offers Nolan. “I guess that’s why it’s stuck around.”
When he first read the screenplay, Matt Damon (who happens to own a Golden Retriever also named Charlie; “My Charlie’s a lot older, so I was there first”) was hit hard. “I was astounded by the adaptation,” he says. “I mean, it’s really something. There’s stuff I can’t give away, but it really landed with me emotionally in a way that [Homer’s] The Odyssey itself doesn’t as much.”
Anne Hathaway, too, marvelled at how alive Nolan’s spin on the saga was: “It was all there, coiled inside of these words that had so much power to them. Some of his phrasing almost felt like incantations. The Greek word for evil is kakó — and you can only spit that word out. I felt that way about so much of Chris’ language. It had that kind of power that, you know, moves across time.”
Script finalised and axe-head conundrum resolved (in case you’re wondering, they’re going with six rows of two axes crossed; “a really elegant solution,” smiles Nolan), in early 2025 Team Odyssey prepared to embark on their colossal quest. For this story about a man making his way home, they were going to have to leave theirs. And they wouldn’t be back for some time.
Doing things practically
He’s built an actual robot, flipped an actual 18-wheeler truck, crashed an actual airplane. Of course he was going to make a movie about a man facing a gruelling trek around the world by doing exactly that himself. “If we can get the camera there,” he says, “we can get the audience there.”
Already, before the movie has even come out, the shoot for The Odyssey has become the stuff of legend. How cast and crew hit the road with IMAX cameras, bent on capturing spectacular vistas from around the world. They would make cinema the way it used to be made, following in the footsteps of old masters like David Lean, William Wyler and Anthony Mann. Although, if any of those guys ever had to leg it through a cloud of swarming bees, it’s never been documented.
“At the cave mouth, there was a buzzing,” recounts Matt Damon. “And you can hear it in the movie, because there were thousands of bees right at the mouth of the cave. You had to walk through this curtain of bees to get in.” He’s remembering just one of the many out-in-the-wild, out-of-this-world natural locations they shot in: Nestor’s Cave, on the rocky slopes above Voidokilia Beach in Messenia, Greece. “This announcement went around to the crew: ‘Don’t worry, the bees don’t sting. They’re non-stinging bees,’” continues Damon, grinning at the memory. “And everybody believed that. And then Hoyte turned to me three days in and goes, ‘I’ve already been stung twice.’’’
They started in Morocco in February, for scenes involving the battle for Troy, featuring 1,200 extras: “In at the deep end, to say the least,” sums up Emma Thomas. Then they hit the shores of Greece, for landscapes that were less Thomas Cook, more J.M.W. Turner. “There’s a reason people don’t go on holiday there until much later in the year,” Thomas says. “Chris said right from the beginning that he didn’t want a film set in the sunny version of the Mediterranean. He wanted the seas to feel like a threat. He wanted the weather to feel like a threat. He wanted this to feel like a world in which these people feel small in the context of nature.”
Onwards to the highlands and glacial regions of Iceland, a landscape so desolate that it inspired co-star Himesh Patel to ask Damon, “Matt, is this the toughest conditions you’ve ever shot in?” (Damon replied, “I’m not sure, Himesh, but if it isn’t, you were with me”). And before Empire joins them in LA — Ithaca was the only stage-bound set created for the entire production — they have been to Favignana, a Sicilian island surrounded by azure waters, for Ithaca exteriors. If that sounds like a mellower pitstop, well, they had to trek up a mountain every morning.
“A full-on mountain,” confirms Robert Pattinson, who tromped up it in cloak and sandals. “I don’t even think it was something that anybody actually climbs up regularly. And it’s not like we’re getting ten people up there. It’s, like, getting 700 people to the top of this mountain, every single day.”
Nolan joined them each morning for the vertical schlep, pondering his shots for the day. “It was always very awkward overtaking Chris on the way up,” admits the speedy Tom Holland, “just because he was in his thoughts and then this young kid comes past, like, ‘Alright, boss, how you doin’?’”
Rather than battle the elements, the director had a simple philosophy: keep shooting, no matter what. They marched on through the sideways rain, the thumping hail, the boiling heat. Not only avoiding falling behind schedule but getting ahead of themselves by nine days — the rarest of miracles in big-budget moviemaking. There was only one thing that stopped The Odyssey dead. “There was one day where it was just too much,” Holland recalls. “Where my character is returning home — from boy to man, he is ready to ascend the throne. And I remember standing under an umbrella with Chris, and the most preposterous rainbow was coming out of the castle I was supposed to be going home to. And we did have to wait for the rainbow to clear, because it was the most ridiculous thing. It looked like something out of My Little Pony.”
With all the challenges chucked at them, even that annoyingly perky rainbow, cast and crew of The Odyssey could always cheer themselves up by taking another peek at the script. And reminding themselves that the hero and his allies have it way, way, way worse.
Unleashing giant maniacs
If he was channeling Zeus on the Ithaca set, today the filmmaker is doing a mean Ares, god of war. It’s July 2025 and after a ten-day jaunt to Iceland, braving freezing temperatures to shoot scenes of Hades, The Odyssey has alighted on the north coast of Scotland, the part of the remote Culbin Forest where the trees meet the sea. Over a crest, three large ships rest on the white sand. Here in the woods, made supernatural and sinister by industrial machines spewing out fog, mayhem is being meticulously unleashed.
“All the toys!” beams Emma Thomas, surveying the scene. Where on the LA soundstage things moved relatively slowly, all those extras to marshal and a giant camera crane to manoeuvre, here in the wild there’s a furious pace. Seven IMAX cameras are in play, briskly capturing a succession of action beats. And what action. Odysseus never seems to have a pleasant day — “Certainly not in the film,” laughs Matt Damon — but even by his standards, this is a toughie. Having washed up on the shores of a mysterious island, the hero and his 60-odd crew find themselves getting absolutely walloped by the Laestrygonians: relentless warriors clad in gleaming armour, curved blades in their meaty paws, so humungous they make Bane look like a titch.
Nolan is protective of his techniques — he’d prefer audiences not to know how some shots were pulled off before seeing the movie. But we can reveal the deployment of a gizmo the crew refer to as ‘the turntable’, essentially a massive platter with concentric rings whirling in different directions, a camera spinning around it on a track, as people hack at each other with swords on top. The result: total disorientation. Shortly after, we get to witness a forced-perspective optical illusion, shot via Steadicam, that makes the forest itself seem like a malevolent force. “My job description is, ‘Visual-effects supervisor, trying to avoid visual effects,’” jokes Andrew Jackson, a long-time Nolan collaborator, as he lines up the nifty in-camera trick.
Then it’s time for some wirework, sailors flung high up into the air, impaled with spears, or punched into trees so hard that the trunks break. It’s controlled chaos, exhilarating to see even before it’s been cut together. And sometimes surreal: “Sorry, excuse me,” says a disconcertingly polite Laestrygonian as he hulks past Empire on his way back to the fray.
“It was a fun sequence to shoot,” says Nolan later. “It’s really a thing of trying to get across the brutality. They’re warriors, and their weapons and armour is of a level of sophistication that Odysseus has never seen.
The point of the Laestrygonians in the story, as in the original poem, is to show in some ways the questionable nature of Odysseus’ leadership. To give his men reason to doubt him. And so what they come up against leaves them all shaken.”
Nolan’s previous protagonists have had a lot thrown at them: ninjas, mad clowns, black holes, four-week-long security-clearance hearings. But The Odyssey sees him for the first time tackle monsters and magic. There’s a truly gnarly whirlpool: Charybdis. A six- headed beast: Scylla. The Sirens, those legendary seductresses whose song lures sailors to their doom. And, in Circe, one of fiction’s most iconic witches. The sorceress, who weaves a dark spell on the beleaguered voyagers, is played here by Samantha Morton.
“When she finished her scene, she got a round of applause from the cast and crew,” reveals Emma Thomas. “That’s something we hadn’t seen since Heath Ledger on The Dark Knight.” Adds Nolan: “Samantha Morton is somebody I had wanted to work with for a very long time. And she was absolutely who I had in mind as soon as I finished the script for Circe and the way we were approaching that character. I was thrilled when she said yes.”
Even more fearsome than Circe is the Cyclops Polyphemus, the savage one-eyed ogre who attempts to terminate Odysseus’ trip home by having him for lunch. For that sequence, the team headed into an actual cave, that bee-curtained one in Greece. “We walked in and Chris very excitedly beckoned me into the middle of the cave,” remembers Damon. “He goes, ‘Smell!’ So I took a deep breath and smelled and said, ‘What?’ He goes, ‘This is the best this place is going to smell for two weeks, because we have 40 sheep coming in any minute.’ That proved true. That was the best the cave ever smelled.”
Nolan, who calls the sheep “excellent performers”, chuckles at the memory. “It got pungent,” he confirms. “Yeah, it got very, very dank and smelly after a time. But I’ve built a lot of caves before — shooting in a real cave, the feeling is utterly different. Once the rock is moved across the door and you’re in the dark, it’s very, very oppressive. It gave it a sense of reality.”
Polyphemus himself was achieved via a variety of techniques, from animatronics to puppetry, all overseen by Bill Irwin, the renowned clown who previously performed chatty robot TARS for Interstellar. Most striking was a 60-foot contraption that stood in for the Cyclops, towering over the actors. “Bill was doing voices and noises [of Polyphemus] and was with us that entire time,” Damon says. As Nolan explains, “Everything about the Cyclops sequence is aimed at trying to imagine: what would this be like in real life? Not approaching it from a storybook or cartoony point of view, but really trying to be in there with Odysseus and his men. It’s a horrifying situation.”
These are literal monsters. But back home in Ithaca, tormenting Penelope and Telemachus, is a human one: the oozy, conniving Antinous, played by Robert Pattinson. “I think in my first conversation, I was saying he kind of reminded me of James Woods in Casino,” Pattinson reveals. “Just someone who has no respect for honour. Not only does he not care about Zeus’ law and the old ways, he has no code at all. There’s nothing he really believes in.” Antinous is the ultimate toxic party-crasher: a guy who eats the food, drinks the drink and refuses to leave. “It’s funny, that’s what The Odyssey is,” Pattinson laughs. “If there are bad vibes at a party, someone’s gonna come eventually and murder you.”
To outwit him and his fellow suitors, Penelope must draw upon all of her resources, proving crafty in every sense of the word via judicious use of a loom. “There’s a way to think about her that she is just kind of passively, quietly waiting,” says Hathaway. “But I didn’t see her like that. I saw her as this incredible, active, ride-or-die partner. I wanted her to have a sense of danger to her. That she’s not doing this out of a sense of duty — she genuinely loves [Odysseus] with her whole fiery soul.”
As for Telemachus, his challenge is to remain calm in the face of the most irritating goading imaginable. “I mean, he’s just the worst stepfather you could possibly have,” grins Pattinson of Antinous. “I always end up doing these slithery things with Tom (he and Holland also co-starred in The Lost City Of Z and The Devil All The Time) and I don’t know why. This was just a fun part to play: ‘I just want to be your daddy. I want to be your daddy. That’s all I want!’”
Gazing upon his creation
It’s early March 2026, almost a year since the grand rumble of Culbin Forest, and we’re joining the director back in LA, this time in an air-conditioned chamber at Warner Bros.: The Odyssey is a Universal production, but this is his post-production Mount Olympus. His editor Jennifer Lame on his left, a small phalanx of audio experts flanking them on both sides, Nolan sits, taking in the visuals on the screen before them — the Trojan horse being heaved towards city walls, rolling across massive logs — but more focused today on the sounds. It’s so loud, Empire feels the rumble of creaking timber and roar of chanting soldiers as a physical sensation.
“How does that feel, Chris?” somebody asks, once a looping shot of a spear penetrating the wooden horse is paused. “Really nice stuff,” he considers. “Put a little more low into it. It just needs to be nudged down a hair.”
They have two weeks left of their six weeks of sound-mixing, a part of the process Nolan finds enjoyable, if exhausting. “We’re trying to get the right splintery sort of wood sound,” he explains, taking a break to sit with us out on a shaded terrace. “There’s something very enervating about being in that room, concentrating on tiny details and all that loud sound washing over you. We’re trying to really create an experience for people that they can live and breathe in. To put people on the deck of Odysseus’ ship. Put them in the cave of the Cyclops. Put them in the fall of Troy.”
He’s been in the all-consuming world of Odysseus for a couple of years. Now, finally, it’s almost time to welcome everyone else in. When Empire speaks to him for the final time before release, it’s on the day in June — roughly a month out from release — when tickets go on sale. And pandemonium has ensued, with US booking websites like Fandango and AMC crashing in the face of frenzied demand. The director is in a sunny mood, perhaps because of headlines like “Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Sparks Ticket Frenzy”, or maybe just because his epic of all epics is finally complete. He’s in the calm before the storm. “You get a bit of a lull,” he reflects. “It oscillates day by day. You have a very busy day and then you have a nothing day where you don’t know what to do with yourself. It’s hard to find the right mental space for that, you know?”
Everyone, suddenly, seems to be talking about a story that’s millennia old. And Nolan’s mission statement, that he wants his Odyssey to feel visceral and modern, has been backed up by the reveal this same day that the film will be rated R. “I went to the studio at the very beginning and had a very honest conversation with them that we wanted to make the most intense version of The Odyssey,” he says. “With the weapons of the time, they are more brutal — you’re talking about swords, and bows and arrows and things like that. So I concluded pretty early that it would be very difficult and potentially compromising to make a PG-13 version of this story. I don’t feel as if there’s anything gratuitous in the film at all. It’s really just about making it fresh and accessible. Speaking to today’s audience.”
It’s fair to say today’s audience is hyped to see it: tickets have been listed on eBay for as much as $1,000. But nobody was more excited to see the finished film than the actors who journeyed the globe to make it. And recently Matt Damon, Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson headed to Nolan’s personal screening room to watch the whole thing. (Anne Hathaway, in New York at the time, had to wait a little longer.) Damon, usually a popcorn fiend, eschewed snacks, too nervous about viewing his performance.
Two hours and 52 minutes later, the trio sat stunned. Pattinson’s summation is concise: “There’s so much movie!” Holland is still processing it. “Making this film felt as much like an adventure as the one on screen,” he says. And the one on screen exceeded his expectations. “When the movie finished, it was late at night; had it been 5 o’clock in the afternoon, I would have said to Chris, ‘Do you mind if we just throw it on again?’” he enthuses. “Your brain is going, ‘I don’t understand how he’s done that without using CGI.’” (Nolan confirms that Holland peppered him with questions, laughing, “The sequence with the Laestrygonians, he was just like, ‘How the hell did you do that?’ And I didn’t give him an answer.”)
As for Odysseus himself, the man whose feats will be sung about in legend (well, film magazines) for eternity? “It occupied such a huge piece of real estate in my head that I worried it wouldn’t live up to my hopes,” says Damon. “But it was as big as it was in my memory.”
All of it — the bees, the bruises, the swallowed seawater, the ovine aromas — worth it in the end. Fiction’s wildest journey, captured on film. Prepare for thunder.
The Odyssey is in cinemas from July 17
Wife of Odysseus (Penelope) and Telemachus have their own battles to fight
Samantha Morton was Nolan’s perfect choice for the sorceress Circe
Polites (Andrew Howard) with his leader
The loyal Eumaeus (John Leguizamo) with Odysseus’ son, Telemachus (Tom Holland)
The director on set in Culbin Forest with Damon and Himesh Patel, as second-in-command Eurylochus
Director Christopher Nolan (centre, arm raised) amid his extras on set
The intrepid warriors reach land
A serious moment for Odysseus and Athena (Zendaya)
The complex Clytemnestra (Lupita Nyong’o)
An altogether more menacing Mediterranean
