Christopher Nolan Admits Using Actors’ Real Seasickness In The Odyssey

The cast and crew of The Odyssey have made no secret of the fact that shooting Christopher Nolan’s new epic was an especially grueling experience.

And in a new interview with The Telegraph, the Oscar-winning filmmaker has shared just how much his actors were put through their paces on set.

While making The Odyssey, Nolan opted to shoot on location using practical effects as much as possible, rather than relying on sound stages and CGI.

As a result, the shoot took the director and his troupe of actors to Scotland’s Moray Coast, where they shot a scene on board a recreation of a 115-foot Norse warship in the middle of a storm.

The conditions led to many of the shoot’s extras experiencing seasickness, which gave the Oppenheimer filmmaker an idea.

“Excuse me,” the outlet quoted him as saying. “But would you mind if we get the vomiting on camera?”

“Credit to them, they said, ‘Absolutely, bring it on’,” he recalled. “They were really game for it.

“And that day ended up being fabulous as well as miserable; it yielded some of my favourite shots in the film.”

Matt Damon leads The Odyssey as its central hero, Odysseus, with the film follows his journey home to Ithaca at the end of the Trojan War.

Last month, the Ocean’s Eleven star opened up about just how gruelling the shooting could get, telling GQ: “The joke on the crew was we didn’t have a single easy location. Every time we’d go somewhere, we’d be like, ‘Well, Iceland will be easier’. And then it’s raining sideways and it’s fucking freezing. Iceland was like, ‘Yeah, easy? Hey, hold my beer.’”

Even though the last days of filming took place on a lot in Los Angeles, Matt admitted that even this came with its problems.

“Sure enough, we showed up [to the set in LA] and Chris has two jet engines blowing so much water at us,” he explained. “So it was kind of a fitting end.

“Even the controlled environment was cold, wet, and a little bit miserable.”

Meanwhile, his co-star Robert Pattinson agreed that he had “never seen people look so exhausted” before beginning his work on The Odyssey, which finally sales into cinemas on Friday 17 July.