How Did Christopher Nolan Create The Cyclops In The Odyssey?

Christopher Nolan has claimed that bringing the cyclops to life in his new movie The Odyssey is “right at the top” of the most difficult technical tasks he’s come across in his directing career.

As ever, Nolan tried to eschew green screen technology and CGI as much as possible in his adaptation of the Ancient Greek epic, instead relying on practical effects and filming on location.

This included when it came to the cyclops sequence in The Odyssey, which the Oscar winner has said he achieved through the use of both puppetry and animatronics.

“Everything about the Cyclops sequence is aimed at trying to imagine: what would this be like in real life?” Nolan told Empire last month.

“Not approaching it from a storybook or cartoony point of view, but really trying to be in there with Odysseus and his men. It’s a horrifying situation.”

To pull it off, he reunited with the actor Bill Irwin, who previously puppeteered and lent his voice to the robot TARS in Nolan’s movie Interstellar.

“Bill was doing voices and noises and was with us that entire time,” the filmmaker added.

Meanwhile, in a junket interview with reporter Jake Hamilton, Nolan opened up more about the “terrifying challenge” of creating the 60-foot cyclops character.

“I wanted to tell the story with a credible tone,” he said. “My rule of thumb for everybody involved in the film was ‘give them a reason to believe’.

“You know, as the movie goes on, we want to see extraordinary things, we want to go to extraordinary places. So, we need a reason to believe.”

He continued: “We’re going to real places, we’re shooting real things as much as possible. And the cyclops is the first pure fantasy element that comes into the film, so how do we give that some kind of reality?”

Nolan said that he “used every trick in the book”, including “all these different techniques, from puppetry to animatronics”, but said the “smartest thing I did” was to get Bill Irwin to help “find this guy from the inside”.

“We need a performer at the heart of it,” Nolan reasoned. “It’s one of the most challenging things that I’ve been involved with.”

After the interviewer admitted to feeling sorry for the cyclops by the end of the scene, the Oppenheimer director noted: “I learned from my friend Guillermo Del Toro that a monster is never just a monster – and that’s something he’s brought to his own work in a major way.

“It’s really about finding the individual behind that, and, in that way, presenting a more real and a more threatening [character]. The cyclops is a real individual, it’s a real character that Bill’s been able to create with everybody else involved in the film.”

Leading man Matt Damon also spoke about the scene with Amy Poehler on her podcast Good Hang.

“[Nolan] does as little special effects as humanly possible,” he claimed. “You can do quite a bit without CGI. He understands what year he lives in and has the absolute best special effects teams, they really help try to figure out how we can do just about everything in-camera.”

Elsewhere in his Empire interview, Nolan admitted that the on-location shoot for the cyclops sequence presented some real-life hurdles that he hadn’t prepared for.

“It got pungent,” he admitted, referring to the 40-strong herd of sheep also featured in the scene. “Yeah, it got very, very dank and smelly after a time.

“But I’ve built a lot of caves before – shooting in a real cave, the feeling is utterly different. Once the rock is moved across the door and you’re in the dark, it’s very, very oppressive. It gave it a sense of reality.”

Matt also shared: “At the cave mouth, there was a buzzing. And you can hear it in the movie, because there were thousands of bees right at the mouth of the cave. You had to walk through this curtain of bees to get in.”

The Odyssey is in cinemas now. Read HuffPost UK’s extensive round-up of behind-the-scenes facts about the making of the film here.