The gods are nowhere to be seen
One of the most radical choices Nolan made was to not cast the majority of the gods of Olympus (with the exception of Zendaya as Athena). “I became more interested in the idea that to people in that period, evidence of gods was everywhere,” he explained to Time. For example, in Bronze Age Greece, thunder and rain had no scientific explanation, they were seen merely as the will of the immortals. In the film, we see these phenomena without ever seeing the gods themselves: the storm is Poseidon’s wrath, the wind filling the sails. The exception is Athena, who continues to appear to Odysseus.
How It Was Filmed
Ninety-one days of filming, wrapped up nine days ahead of schedule (Nolan has reportedly never gone over schedule or budget on any of his films). Six countries were involved: Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland, and the United States. The Sicilian scenes were shot around the Castle of Santa Caterina; the siren sequence was set on Lipari. In Iceland, during the white nights, Hades was filmed. On a Moroccan beach, where Ulysses meets Calypso, the wind whipped sand into the actors’ faces.
The stated goal is physicality. No green screen—or almost none. The Greeks’ ship was a real ship that sailed across the Mediterranean. The Cyclops is not a digital monster but a combination of animatronics, puppets, and computer graphics, brought to life by the performance of Bill Irwin, the same actor who gave voice and form to the robot in Interstellar. To design him, Nolan and production designer Ruth De Jong drew inspiration from Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Sons.
Then there’s the IMAX issue. The Odyssey is the first feature film shot entirely with IMAX cameras on 70mm film. The format delivers extremely high image quality but also presents significant challenges: the camera is noisy (Damon compared it to acting with a blender running right next to his face), it weighs so much that a helicopter was needed to hoist it up rocky slopes, and it’s so bulky that the actors couldn’t see each other’s faces during filming. They solved this with a system of mirrors.
Matt Damon as Ulysses in *The Odyssey*.
Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
The Music
The soundtrack is by Ludwig Göransson, a three-time Oscar winner who previously collaborated with Nolan on Tenet and Oppenheimer. At Nolan’s request, he didn’t use an orchestra to score the film. Instead, Göransson rented thirty-five bronze gongs of various sizes, recorded them, and combined them with synthesizers. The film’s soundscape also features a lyre nearly as tall as a man: Nolan wanted the sound of the lyre to match that of Odysseus’s bow.
