How The Odyssey Was Made: Behind-The-Scenes Facts You Never Knew

After years of build-up, Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to the record-breaking Oppenheimer is finally here.

With an all-star cast, big budget and epic filming locations, The Odyssey is undoubtedly one of this year’s most anticipated movies.

Based on Homer’s epic Greek poem, the film follows Odysseus, King of Ithaca, on his 10-year journey home after the Trojan War. Along the way, he must battle mythical monsters, gods and extreme conditions to make it home to his loyal son and faithful wife.

So, how did Christopher Nolan go about bringing this classic text to life?

Well, by all accounts it was no easy task, but it sounds like it was all worth it, as The Odyssey is already being hailed as a cinematic triumph.

To celebrate the release, here are 23 behind-the-scenes facts about how The Odyssey was made…

Oppenheimer was Nolan’s most successful film to date, both critically and commercially. The film grossed more than £70 million in its opening weekend and swept the 96th Academy Awards with seven wins, including Best Picture and Best Director.

As a result, he was able to shoot even higher with his next project.

“Coming out of Oppenheimer, which was a film that had far more success than we’d ever imagined, it leaves you with an opportunity,” he told The Independent.

“You have the chance to do something that you wouldn’t have otherwise. And so the scale of The Odyssey, and what that was gonna require, was suddenly possible.”

The story of The Odyssey first entered Christopher Nolan’s creative consciousness two decades ago, when he was attached to direct the 2004 Brad Pitt film, Troy.

Nolan had previously been set to helm the sword-and-sandals epic that adapted Homer’s “prequel” to The Odyssey, The Iliad, after its original director, Wolfgang Petersen, left production to make Batman vs Superman.

However, when that project fell apart, Petersen wanted to jump back on to making Troy, meaning Nolan was dropped as its director.

Ironically, Nolan then went on to make Batman Begins instead, but all along, it seems he’s never stopped thinking about the story of Troy.

“When I was briefly attached to direct Troy, I did a lot of thinking about the Trojan Horse and how I would portray that and make it credible,” he told The Independent. “I’ve had an image of that horse sinking into the sand in my head for 20 years.”

Nolan is renowned for pushing boundaries when it comes to cinema, changing the world of modern filmmaking in the process.

The Odyssey is his first feature film to be shot entirely using IMAX cameras (he has worked with this technology before but has always struggled to use this technology in scenes with dialogue because of how loud the cameras are).

Not only is it his first film in this format, The Odyssey will also be the first commercial movie shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film cameras

“The Dark Knight was the first film where we were able to go to IMAX and say, ‘Lend us your cameras – let’s try this on things like the introduction of the Joker, the truck flip’,” Nolan told The Independent.

“But we couldn’t do the dialogue scenes because the cameras are very, very loud.”

He continued: “So, knowing we were doing The Odyssey, I went to IMAX and said, ‘Look, if ever we’re gonna do a whole film on IMAX, this is the movie to do it with’.”

The director then worked with film presentation pioneer David Keighley to develop lighter, quieter equipment which can handle dialogue-heavy scenes without drowning out the actors’ lines.

Back in 2023, the Inception director explained why IMAX is so important to him.

“The sharpness and the clarity and the depth of the image is unparalleled,” he enthused. “The headline, for me, is by shooting on IMAX 70 mm film, you’re really letting the screen disappear.

“You’re getting a feeling of 3D without the glasses. You’ve got a huge screen and you’re filling the peripheral vision of the audience. You’re immersing them in the world of the film.”

Nolan has experience using IMAX cameras, but he faced a new challenge during The Odyssey due to the sheer size of the tech, leaving him tasked with placing one of the largest movie cameras available in a way that wouldn’t distract or obstruct the actors during the film’s most emotional moments.

“Of course, [that’s] terrible for an actor that you cannot play against the person you’re supposed to see,” said cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema to Time.

To counteract this, the team put up mirrors, allowing the actors to make eye contact with one another.

While avid fans of the classics would have you believe Nolan has taken a fast and loose approach to historical accuracy with The Odyssey, the director has maintained that a great amount of detail and research went into making it.

Afte the first trailer dropped in December 2025, some fans of mythology and history complained about Agamemnon’s armour being too dark and shiny for the era in which the story is set.

However, Nolan immediately shut down this criticism.

“There are Mycenaean daggers that are blackened bronze. The theory is they probably could have blackened bronze in those days. You take bronze, you add more gold and silver to it and then use sulfur,” he told Time in May.

“With Agamemnon, Ellen [Mirojnick], our costume designer, is trying to communicate how elevated he is relative to everyone else. You do that through materials that would be very expensive.”

He also provided thorough explanations for many other production choices, including the boats and weapons, which draw on inspiration from the Bronze Age.

“The oldest depictions of Homeric characters tend to be depicted in the manner of people living in Homer’s time,” he explained.

“So there’s a pretty strong case there for portraying things that way because that’s the way the first audience received the story.”

It’s no secret that Christopher Nolan is a real cinephile, who draws inspiration from classic movies in his own filmmaking.

He told The Independent that before he began work on The Odyssey, he looked at certain films for “textures that might inspire us”, which he then screened for his cast to help encourage their own performances.

The first film on his list was Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 feudal epic Ran, which he called “such an incredible film”, praising its use of “landscape and wind, in particular”.

He explained: “We watched the film and thought, ‘Yeah, the banners flapping in the wind and everything – that’s an important part of what we’re doing’.”

Nolan also named Martin Scorsese’s controversial The Last Temptation Of Christ as required viewing for The Odyssey as it offers “a fresh and accessible window into history”.

The final film he listed was Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1966 historical epic Andrei Rublev.

“We look at a lot of films, really not for the specifics, really for a generalised inspiration of what the texture of a film can be,” the Memento director explained.

Fans of classic historical and fantasy epics are used to hearing a range of upper-class British accents in these types of films. Because of this, many were left a little taken aback when The Odyssey trailer dropped and everyone, including the film’s British cast members, spoke in modern American dialect.

In a July interview with The Los Angeles Times, Nolan explained this deviation from the norm was very much intentional.

He insisted that “language that has emotional, not intellectual meaning to people”, adding that he chose to use modern dialogue over elevated or theatrical language.

“I was maybe being naïve, it might bite me on the ass, but I wanted an earthy narrative,” he explained. “To me it was a no-brainer.”

Nolan later claimed that the debate over the use of language proved people look at the past “in weird ways”.

“There’s a lot of cultural prejudice,” the Oscar winner suggested to Channel 4. “There’s a lot of sort of elevating it, because it’s old, you know, whatever it is.”

He added that in the source material for The Odyssey, “what you find is something that’s really earthy and grounded and accessible”, which he tried to replicate by using modern-day phrasing in the dialogue.

In the same Los Angeles Times interview, Nolan said it had been a “no-brainer” to cast Matt Damon as Odysseus.

The pair had previously worked together on 2014’s Interstellar, as well as 2023’s Oppenheimer.

“For this very complex character, you need an actor who disappears into parts, who is very open to the audience,” he explained. “You want the audience to go with him through his mistakes – and he makes a lot of mistakes.

“Matt was everyman for The Martian, a kind of superhero for the Jason Bourne films, and Odysseus is part everyman, part superhero.”

The Odyssey marks the fifth collaboration between Tom Holland and his real-life wife, Zendaya.

While Tom was cast in the movie before Zendaya, the couple had already run through the script together at home, and he later told Access Hollywood that Christopher Nolan had asked him directly if Zendaya would like to appear in his film too.

“At my meeting with Chris he asked me a question. He said, ‘Would you be offended if I asked Zendaya to play Athena?’,” the Spider-Man actor revealed.

Following this, he went home and told his then-fiancée in person that Nolan wanted her for his film, informing her she needed to read the script again – this time to focus on Athena.

“The little corners of her mouth [raised]. It was amazing,” he gushed.

She also told Access Hollywood: “I was incredibly grateful that I even got to be part of it, too. I didn’t see that coming.”

Nolan always had Lupita Nyong’o on top of his casting wish list for Helen Of Troy, who is considered the most beautiful woman in Greek mythology.

Apparently, there were two key qualities that made the British filmmaker feel Lupita was the perfect choice to play both Helen and her twin sister, Clytemnestra.

“The strength and the poise were so important to the character of Helen,” Nolan told Elle back in May.

“Lupita makes it look effortless. I’m sure there’s a tremendous amount of discipline and training that goes into projecting that kind of poise and feeling the emotion bubbling beneath the character, the layers of the character right there underneath,” he added before, calling her an “incredible person”.

When her agents informed her that Nolan wanted to see her for a role, the 12 Years A Slave actor admitted to the magazine that she “went in quite blind”, but as soon as she read the script she said yes “even before he told me what role it was”.

Plenty of us were shocked when Travis Scott, rapper and former boyfriend of Kylie Jenner, was first revealed to have been cast in The Odyssey.

In the film, Travis plays a bard who recites verses about the highs and lows of the Trojan War.

While some traditionalists were alarmed at the thought that Nolan might have had a character performing raps in an Ancient Greek setting, those who have seen the movie were have said that Travis’ role is more of an orator.

Nolan previously defended Travis’ casting, explaining that he saw a link between bards in ancient times and modern-day rappers.

“I cast him because I wanted to nod towards the idea that this story has been handed down as oral poetry, which is analogous to rap,” the director told Time.

Speaking to Deadline at the film’s premiere, Travis agreed: “I feel like we felt kind of the same way about what music is and how, as an artist, you can deliver a story.”

It’s not the first collaboration between the rapper and the director, either. They originally paired up back in 2020, when Travis recorded the original track The Plan for Nolan’s movie Tenet.

When Robert Pattinson was offered the role of Antinous, one of Penelope’s suitors in The Odyssey, he’s revealed that he had to give it some thought.

“My first thought always with a part is like, ‘I don’t know if I can do anything’, he told Today about his initial reaction, admitting that his “imposter syndrome kicks in very, very hard”.

Once he said yes, Robert threw himself into the role, working closely with the costume department to help create a look that exuded privilege and wealth.

“As soon as I read the script, I’m like, ‘I want to have cheetah underpants’,” he told GQ. “I think Antinous is that kind of guy.

“He has this kind of sensuousness about him; ‘I just like pleasure.’ And so I was kind of thinking you want to have the most luxurious underpants he can.”

In fact, Robert ended up getting so much into his character that Tom Holland was genuinely wound up when they shot together.

“He is such a treat to work with because he’s so good and he really keeps you on your toes as an actor,” Tom told Digital Spy.

Tom added: “You can never coast when you’re working with Rob. Everything is going to challenge you. He’s going to make big choices.

“Acting is listening, you have to be able to react to him. I do remember in that scene when he’s talking to me, having this feeling inside of like, ‘I want to hit him so fucking bad’. But he’s great and I love him, he’s excellent in this film.

“I feel like he’s probably the only person that could have found that version of Antinous. He really has a unique way about him.”

According GQ, The Odyssey filmed for 91 days in five countries around the world, before ending things at Universal Studios’ lot in the United States.

“The joke on the crew was we didn’t have a single easy location,” Matt Damon explained.

“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’.”

Nolan and the cast began by filming in the Peloponnese region of Greece in March and April of 2025, according to the Hellenic Film Commission. Destinations cited include Voidokilia Beach, the 13th-century Methoni Castle, the monolithic Acrocorinth overlooking the city of Corinth, Almyrolaka Beach and Nestor’s Cave.

To recreate the ethereal feel of the underworld, Nolan chose to film in Iceland. Reported Icelandic filming locations include the black sands and caves of Hjörleifshöfði mountain, the Snæfellsnes peninsula, the river Markarfljót and the harbour of Landeyjahöfn.

To create the ancient sandy atmosphere of the Greek epic, the crew of The Odyssey travelled to Morocco, filming in Marrakech, Tahanaoute, El Haouz, Essaouira and Ouarzazate.

Controversy subsequently hit the film last summer when Matt and Zendaya filmed a sequence in Dakhla, a city in the Western Sahara that has been under Moroccan occupation for the last 50 years.

Organisers of the Western Sahara international film festival (known as FiSahara) accused the film’s crew – whether knowingly or unknowingly – of “contributing to Morocco’s repression of the Sahrawi people and to the Moroccan regime’s efforts to normalise its occupation of Western Sahara” by filming in the region.

Although Nolan has never directly responded to these comments, The Guardian reported that The Odyssey’s shoot in Dakhla was completed in around four days, and was already over by the time the festival organisers began raising their concerns.

In addition to Greece, Iceland and Morocco, the movie also went to Scotland, filming on the dramatic Moray Firth Coast. During production, people spotted a full-scale, wooden Viking ship docked in Inverness.

Of course, the director could have faked it on a sound stage using post-production effects but told Time that he preferred shooting on location as it gives his films more of a “grounded tone”.

It would have been impossible to tell the story of The Odyssey without landing on the sun-swept Mediterranean landscape.

In March 2025, the crew arrived for shooting on the Italian island of Favignana (also known as Goat Island), just off the Sicilian coastline.

Nolan told GQ that they filmed at a ruined castle, Castello di Santa Caterina, for two weeks.

To access this location, the cast and crew hiked 900 feet every day, with helicopters transporting equipment up and down.

However, when we say the cast and crew had to hike 900 feet every day, there was one exception.

“I got to take a helicopter to work every single day, which was amazing,” Anne Hathaway recalled while talking to the BBC.

She continued: “I think the executive decision was made that, because Penelope was the queen and that she couldn’t arrive looking as rugged as the suitors or some of the other members of the Ithacan royal court, that I should be helicoptered up. So I got to take a helicopter to work every single day, which was amazing.”

Anne was insistent that she didn’t get any special Hollywood treatment, though, claiming she was “shoved” in helicopters already being used to move equipment up the mountain.

The Odyssey may look like the most expensive, epic film of the year, but impressively, it actually came under its expected price tag.

When Nolan paid a visit to The Daily Show to discuss his new adaptation, host Jon Stewart asked him to confirm whether the film was completed “ahead of schedule” and “under budget”.

“Yes,” Nolan replied, pointing out that this “never happens” in Hollywood.

“The reality is, we [scheduled for] 100 days. And by day 91, we couldn’t have taken another step. So we finished,” he recalled.

“I mean, people were just exhausted,” the director added. “They’d been through it. So, it took the right time to make the film. We had enough time to make it.”

The cast of The Odyssey have backed up Nolan’s claims about the tough shoot.

Robert Pattinson, who only joined midway through filming, could already see how “exhausted” people were on set.

“I started a third of the way through the movie, and they’d already been to [two] countries by that point and people just looked like… I mean, at the end of every day people were broken,” he told GQ.

Matt Damon admitted to Today he was warned before signing up that it would not be an easy film to make.

“He [Christopher Nolan] was like, ‘This movie’s gonna be hard,’,” Matt recalled. “And I looked at him like, ‘I’ve made, I don’t know 80 movies’. And he goes, ‘No… This movie’s gonna be really hard.’ He, to his credit, was not lying.”

Most directors prefer to sit in their chairs in a nice, safe and warm spot while they’re working – but Christopher Nolan likes to take a more hands-on approach.

In a Time profile, Matt Damon said this brought the cast and the director closer together, especially on the harder filming days.

“When you’re uncomfortable – and you are most of the time, physically, just by nature of what’s required to get these shots – if you turn and look over your shoulder, he’s no more than five feet away and doing the same thing without complaint,” he explained.

“There’s something really nice about being a soldier in the foxhole and looking over and the general is right next to you.”

In fact, Nolan typically has a no-chairs approach for all of his cast and crew on his film sets.

Anne Hathaway told Variety in 2020: “I worked with him twice. He doesn’t allow chairs, and his reasoning is, if you have chairs, people will sit, and if they’re sitting, they’re not working”.

Talking of long days, one extra gruelling filming session aboard a ship left the cast and crew seasick.

Nolan told The Telegraph that during a day on set in Scotland, the weather conditions were so bad when filming on the boat, the cast and crew started throwing up.

Instead of shutting down the cameras, the director asked the movie’s cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema and the cast if he could keep them rolling.

“And credit to them. They said, ‘Absolutely, bring it on,’” the director 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 told People he received no special A-list treatment while filming the oceanic scenes, either.

“If you’re out on a boat in the middle of the ocean and you get caught in a storm, you get wet with everybody else. Nobody’s getting a hot beverage that you’re not getting,” The Bourne Identity star explained.

“You know what I mean? Everybody’s on equal footing, including Chris, who was just as cold and wet as everybody else throughout the whole thing.”

Although The Odyssey has a huge cast, made up of some of the most celebrated actors currently working in Hollywood, there was one actor whose work moved everyone on set.

“This was a massive film and she is someone who comes in and changes the dynamic,” he said of the Bafta winner. “In some weird way, the film lived or died over that character. She was the fulcrum.

“I’ve always admired Samantha’s work, she brings so much depth of thinking about her role, there are no limitations on her performance.”

Nolan added: “After one of her takes, the crew gave her a great round of applause. I was talking with Emma [Thomas, Nolan’s co-producer and wife] afterwards and she remembered that the last time that had happened was with Heath Ledger on The Dark Knight.”

Tom has described his first few days on The Odyssey set as being among “the most daunting experiences” of his career.

He told Fandango that “working with the IMAX cameras” created new challenges for him, as he tried to deliver his emotional scenes in front of a big, noisy camera.

“It is unlike anything I have ever seen before, and I didn’t know that [,the cameras] only ran for three minutes [at a time],” Tom said about the revolutionary technology.

Because the director kept calling “cut”, and having the crew put their cameras down, Tom thought it was because Nolan was unhappy with his performance.

In the end, it was a stunt coordinator who assured Tom that, in fact the cameras only run for three minutes at a time, so Nolan was cutting because of the technology rather than anything he was doing.

In fact, Nolan has praised Tom as “amazing”, “one of the great new young voices in cinema” and someone he would “love to work with again”, during an interview on The Late Show.

Zendaya plays the all-knowing Greek goddess Athena, but she apparently struggled to appear quite as wise as her character on set.

She filmed her scenes in Iceland’s freezing cold weather, which made it difficult to deliver the performance she knew she was capable of.

“It was particularly cold. It was in Iceland,” she told Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “My mouth was just frozen. There is nothing coming out. My mouth would not move. Literally. It came out like, ‘Blah blah blah’. So embarrassing.”

This, along with nerves, led the Emmy winner to mess up her first few takes.

“Here’s the thing. I had my lines and I wanted to have them so down,” she admitted. “I think I kind of psyched myself out a little bit.”

Charlize Theron is known for her physically demanding roles, from Mad Max: Fury Road and the Netflix comic book adaptation The Old Guard to the recent survival thriller Apex.

However, despite years of playing on-screen badasses, filming The Odyssey came as a challenge even to her.

Nolan has claimed he cast her as sea nymph Calypso because the role “required somebody of Charlize’s intellect and empathetic ability”.

What she didn’t realise the role would be so physically demanding, too, mainly because the stand-in for Calypso’s island was a windy Moroccan beach famed for its windsurfing and kiteboarding.

“She had to do these scenes that were already challenging with a 30- to 40-mile-an-hour wind ripping sand into her eyes,” Matt Damon told Elle. “She’s just a boss, though.

“The grips were trying to hold screens over, anything that we could do so that we could shoot. But even with all that stuff, she was in massive discomfort, and you wouldn’t know it from seeing the movie. I’ve known her for so long, and she is one of those people who won’t complain, ever.”

Charlize has admitted she wasn’t ready for how tough the conditions would be due.

“That was brutal,” she admitted to the magazine. “But it was also incredible, because you felt like you were in the space where Calypso would have come from.”

Speaking to Travis and Jason Kelce on their New Heights podcast, Matt admitted that before shooting The Odyssey he’d not “been that light since high school”.

“It was a lot of training and a really strict diet,” he noted.

Matt expanded on how he achieved this impressive ripped look during an interview with Amy Poehler on her Good Hang podcast – and admitting that doing so in his 50s was no small task.

“It’s way different to be getting jacked in your 50s,” he said. “It’s really hard. It’s just a complete, complete lifestyle change”.

He claimed that the transformation required him to “just put your foot on the gas and that’s it”, revealing that he also gave up gluten as part of his transformation, a change he has stuck to since filming ended.

“I didn’t realise the level to which it was affecting me,” he said. “It’s completely changed my life these last couple years of not eating it.”

Despite the struggles and hard work, Matt said it was totally worth it.

“It was hard,” he emphasised. “It was hard for everybody though. That’s what made it wonderful.”

For The Odyssey, Nolan teamed up once more with three-time Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Göransson, with whom he previously worked on Oppenheimer and Tenet.

However, the filmmaker was adamant that he didn’t want The Odyssey’s score to be your standard swords and sandals soundtrack.

“It’s not like the orchestra existed back then,” Ludwig joked to Time. “It was a challenge and also an opening to try to make something unique.”

To achieve the sound that runs throughout the film, the man behind the Sinners soundtrack began by renting 35 bronze gongs, mixing their sound with more modern synths.

Even the string instruments used on the score play a surprising role.

“Chris had this idea of the sound of the lyre being the pluck of Odysseus’ bow,” Ludwig explained.

Travis Scott also contributed to the soundtrack, collaborating with Ludwig and songwriter James Blake on the end credit song.

In an interview with GQ, the director heaped praise on the Grammy-winning rapper.

“His voice became the final piece of a yearlong puzzle,” Nolan explained. “His insights into the musical and narrative mechanism [composer] Ludwig Göransson and I were building were immediate, insightful and profound.”

The Odyssey is out now in cinemas.