SATV, Kathmandu, July. 12 - Christopher Nolan has never been afraid to dream a little bigger. It’s almost a calling. With every film, he’s pushed himself and the medium further — playing with form, storytelling, visuals and audience expectations to create lasting cinematic spectacles. A student of Hollywood history, the Oscar-winner is always looking to fill gaps in cinematic culture and show audiences something they haven’t seen before: “The Odyssey,” he realised, was a massive one.
All Nolan films are epics in their own ways. But for “The Odyssey,” he knew he had to do something fitting of the Homeric poem and its foundational place in Western culture, something worthy of the biggest screens and the resources it would require. The goal was to make something accessible and realistic, which meant going to far-flung locations, using real ships on real seas, and taking audiences into the cave with the Cyclops, inside the Trojan Horse and to the bleak expanse of Hades. Opening in cinemas worldwide on 17 July, it’s also the first feature to be shot entirely on IMAX film.
“We all know the title, we all know what it means, we know what it promises and hopefully for the audience coming to see the film, they’ll feel we made good on that promise because that’s the fun of ‘The Odyssey,’” Nolan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “It’s the ultimate adventure story.”
The journey would require a deep dive into Greek mythology, Bronze Age scholarship and many translations, a months-long scouting expedition and a 91-day shoot spanning six months and six countries during which the cast and crew endured all manner of challenging weather, landscapes and the treachery of the open seas. “The Odyssey” was an epic undertaking — the hardest film anyone involved had ever made. Matt Damon, who stars as Odysseus, said that Nolan warned him as much before they started filming.
“He told me it was going to be hard, which I kind of, I blew off at first. I’m like, ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s going to be hard.’ And he said, ‘No, no, this is going to be really hard,’” Damon said. “He did not disappoint.”
That was by design.
“I mean, it’s ‘The Odyssey,’” Nolan said. “This should be a difficult film to make, and it was.”
Unlike Odysseus’s extended journey home, the production was also efficient: They finished nine days early.
When Hollywood movies take on the ancient world, they often fall back on familiar tropes — using accents, elevated language, 19th-century orchestral scores and neoclassical touchstones to convey antiquity. Nolan wanted to do something different and found inspiration in the text of the poem, in which he observed an earthy sensibility that stood in contrast to the grandeur of the story.
“You want to question people’s assumptions about how things should be portrayed in movies and what those are based on,” Nolan said. “There’s a challenge to that and a risk to that.”
That meant making some bold choices, including colloquial language, American accents, and blending elements from various stories, including “The Iliad,” “The Aeneid” and “Agamemnon,” to give the audience more clarity. His Trojan Horse, which he’s been thinking about since he was briefly attached to direct “Troy” over 20 years ago, does not have wheels.
For the score, he challenged composer Ludwig Göransson to use bronze gongs, aulos and the lyre to create a new kind of soundscape, and to come up with a four-note theme where the last would be the pluck of a bow.
And paramount to this story of homecoming and coming-of-age, his characters needed to be relatable.
“The movie has so much scale,” said Tom Holland, who plays Odysseus’s son Telemachus. “There are times where it feels like you’re on this kind of action-adventure roller coaster, but he doesn’t sacrifice any of the heart and the intimacy between our characters.”
Among the large ensemble cast are many famous names: Anne Hathaway is Odysseus’s wife Penelope, Zendaya is the goddess Athena, Charlize Theron is the nymph Calypso and Lupita Nyong’o is Helen, and her twin sister.
Robert Pattinson, Nolan said, is “unleashing his inner Alan Rickman” as the villainous suitor Antinous.(AP)
