For his 13th feature film, Christopher Nolan is diving into myth and history with “The Odyssey,” a grand-scale adaptation of Homer’s timeless epic starring Matt Damon as Odysseus. Speaking with Empire, Nolan explained that the film grew from his search for something missing in modern moviemaking. “As a filmmaker, you’re looking for gaps in cinematic culture, things that haven’t been done before,” he said. “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.”
Nolan described the project as an elemental exploration of storytelling itself. “Emma [Thomas, producer and Nolan’s wife] said it best when we first announced the project: it’s foundational,” he said. “There’s a bit of everything in it. I mean, it truly contains all stories.” To realize that scope, he leaned into the raw power of practical filmmaking. “We shot over two million feet of film,” Nolan revealed. “It’s pretty primal! I’ve been out on it 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.”
For Matt Damon, who reunites with Nolan after “Interstellar” and “Oppenheimer,” the production was both massive and meaningful. “I can say, without hyperbole, that it was the best experience of my career,” Damon told Empire. He described the film as “exactly what you want of a summer movie,” adding, “It should be the most massively entertaining film. It should feel mythic.”
Even amid the scale of the shoot, Nolan kept his trademark flexibility. “We were shooting that [Trojan horse] stuff next week, so I go, ‘How are you going to do it?’ And [Nolan] goes, ‘I don’t know. We’ll just get in there and figure it out,’” Damon recalled with a laugh. That mix of ambition and spontaneity, he said, is what makes Nolan’s sets singular. “If you’re going to have an existential crisis as you pass the Sirens and you’re lashed to a mast, it’s there. If it says you’re running for your life from a Cyclops, you’re going to run for your life. Chris doesn’t hide the ball.”
“The Odyssey” opens in theaters worldwide in July 2026, setting sail as one of next year’s most anticipated blockbusters — a mythic, large-format epic only Christopher Nolan could deliver. Check out the new images below, courtesy of Empire.
