Christopher Nolan doesn’t do small. Anyone who watched him flip a truck in The Dark Knight or build an entire spinning hallway for Inception already knows that. Still, shooting more than two million feet of film for The Odyssey feels ambitious even for him.
Empire Magazine’s new issue, out next Thursday, gives the first real look at his adaptation of Homer’s epic. The magazine features early images, artwork and long interviews with Nolan and Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus. If you’re wondering how intense things got, Damon puts it plainly. “I can say, without hyperbole, that it was the best experience of my career.” When an actor who’s been in everything from Saving Private Ryan to The Martian talks like that, it means something.
Nolan isn’t holding back either. He calls the film “foundational” and “primal.” He says, “There’s a bit of everything in it. I mean, it truly contains all stories.” He talks about growing up on Ray Harryhausen classics and realizing no one had tackled mythology with the scale and credibility of a major IMAX production. If you’ve ever watched Jason and the Argonauts on a tiny TV, you can imagine why a filmmaker like Nolan would want to take that idea and blow it up to the size of a small city.
Then comes the detail that made every editor at Empire probably reach for a calculator. “We shot over two million feet of film […] It’s pretty primal!” To put that into perspective, two million feet of IMAX stock apparently equals around 139 hours of footage. That’s the sort of number that makes you wonder how long Nolan’s editing team slept. If the finished cut lands north of three hours, nobody will be surprised.
What makes the scale feel earned is how Nolan approached the shoot. “We got the cast who play the crew of Odysseus’ ship out there on the real waves, in the real places,” he explains. Four months on open water is no studio simulation. “It’s vast and terrifying and wonderful and benevolent, as the conditions shift.” You can picture the crew clinging to the boat thinking, “This better look amazing on screen.” Nolan wanted the grind of those journeys to feel real, capturing the exhaustion and risk of people navigating an unmapped, uncharted world.
There’s also a fun bit of alternate-history trivia buried in the interview. Years ago, Nolan was offered Troy, the 2004 Brad Pitt film. He turned it down and made Batman Begins instead. The Odyssey has been sitting in Nolan’s mind ever since, waiting for the right moment. With IMAX cameras, a committed cast and a story that has survived for centuries, he finally has everything he needs. Empire’s tease is only the start.
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