“If the horse were sinking into the sand and about to be swept away by the tide, the Trojans would never believe there could be anybody in there,” says Nolan, pouring Earl Grey from a teapot wrapped in a geometric cozy at the bright but unassuming offices of his production company, Syncopy. “They would be rescuing this thing from the waves and dragging it into the city as a prize. It wouldn’t be on wheels, like a roller skate.”
A scene from Nolan's The Odyssey. —Melinda Sue Gordon—Universal Pictures
Arriving on July 17, The Odyssey follows the Greek hero behind the Trojan Horse on his 10-year journey home from war. Odysseus encounters a cyclops, sea monsters, and a sorceress who transforms men into animals, all rendered with minimal CGI and maximum ambition. It’s the first feature-length film shot entirely on IMAX, and the scale is awe-inspiring. But it’s ultimately a character study: It would have been enough to strap Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus, to a real ship’s mast and sail him past sirens. In Nolan’s version, Damon also has to perform an existential crisis as those sirens psycho-analyze him through song. Like the Trojan Horse, The Odyssey can be enjoyed as pure spectacle—or it can be cracked open to reveal something deeply human. “The script was very specific in what he was doing,” Damon says. “He’s very faithful to Homer because that’s not somebody you rewrite. But thematically, what he looked at was really interesting.”
The first posters for The Odyssey don’t feature photos of the film’s many stars, just Nolan’s name in bold letters. “There are a few directors working right now who demand the audience’s attention in terms of going to see their films in the cinema,” says NBCUniversal chair Donna Langley, who greenlighted the movie. “Chris has spent his career making films pushing the boundaries of cinema.”
—Photograph by Devin Yalkin for TIMEFor Damon, it was the most rewarding experience of his career. “Movies like this are not getting made anymore. To do this without a green screen, the way that David Lean would have done it, I don’t know anybody, with the exception of Chris, that’s even trying to do that,” he says. “There aren’t a lot of people in their mid-50s as protagonists in these epics. I looked at this like the last movie I’d ever do.” It won’t be. But you can forgive the dramatics. It’s difficult to imagine him—or any movie star—making an old-school film of this magnitude ever again.
Comparing Emily Wilson, E.V. Rieu, and Robert Fagles translations of The Odyssey, I feel less like I’m interviewing a director than sitting in office hours with a particularly approachable professor. He has studied the period, and the film is aware of its historical moment: the Trojan War marks the end of the Bronze Age, and Greece is about to plunge into a dark age of fallen kingdoms and lost literacy.
Nolan’s attentiveness to his characters extends beyond the page. He famously forgoes a director’s chair, preferring to stay close to his actors. “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,” says Damon. “There’s something really nice about being a soldier in the foxhole and looking over and the general is right next to you.”
Nolan with Matt Damon as Odysseus and Zendaya as Athena on set of The Odyssey. —Melinda Sue Gordon—Universal PicturesNolan could have faked it on a soundstage. “I’ve developed a reputation for not liking visual effects. But, you know, my films have won three Oscars for visual effects,” he says, with a laugh. “I know a lot about it, and I’m really fascinated by it. But I like to make films with a very grounded tone.” That instinct took root early. Nolan was born in 1970 to an English advertising executive father and an American mother who was a flight attendant and English teacher. He split his early years between British boarding school and Evanston, Ill., and fell in love with IMAX watching documentaries in the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry’s five-story wrap-around movie theater. His younger brother Jonathan became a collaborator on scripts like Memento, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight.
The Dark Knight redefined what a superhero film could be, eschewing camp for a gritty crime drama whose cool color palette, brooding hero, and anarchic villain cast a shadow over the genre for decades. Nolan attributes much of his success to his frequent collaborators. The most visible are actors like Damon and Anne Hathaway, who plays Odysseus’ crafty wife Penelope in this film. But behind the scenes much of his core team has been there since the early days. Thomas, who shares four children with Nolan, has produced each of his films. “Emma, who is a wonderful friend who’s constantly throwing baby showers for people where she bakes all of the goods herself, and is the most phenomenally committed parent—every idea that Chris has, she’s the person who makes sure that it can be made a reality,” says Hathaway. Thomas admits she “frets a little bit” when she reads harrowing scenes at sea but assures me, “When he asks for the world and we can’t deliver the world, he always has a backup plan.”
A helicopter was required to hoist that 400-lb. camera and blimp up craggy mountainsides. “This was a very ambitious production,” says Langley. “They were up against the weather and the elements.” And catastrophe nearly struck when Scottish customs agents opened IMAX film cans, potentially exposing the unused film. (Luckily, it was safe.) “In large part, it all did go right,” says Langley. “Chris is a very responsible filmmaker ... He minimizes risk and prepares appropriately and hires a team that can execute at the highest level.”
Nolan and his crew shot across six different countries to map Odysseus’ journey. —Melinda Sue Gordon—Universal PicturesDespite his reputation as a visionary, Nolan still takes notes from the studio. “I think the day we don’t take notes anymore is the day we make a crappy movie,” says Thomas. “There is the creative benefit of having people question you and to really make you justify what it is you’re doing. We also want the studio to be invested in our movie. They have to sell it.” Nolan has never run over schedule or budget, including on this film, which he shot in just 91 days, nine days ahead of schedule. “He’s kind of a machine when it comes to shooting,” says Thomas. “It’s very funny: when he’s writing, we’ll go for a hike, and he’ll say, ‘Stop going so fast.’ The minute we start shooting, his heartbeat speeds up. He’s suddenly a different person completely. He just moves fast.”
In the corner of three-time Academy Award–winning composer Ludwig Göransson’s studio sits a lyre nearly the size of a grown man, one room over from a ping-pong table that, at the push of a button, disappears into the floor. For Göransson and Nolan, the ancient and the modern are not so far apart.
Nolan speaks with pride about the level of research that went into the production from all departments, especially considering our Bronze Age knowledge is based on “very fragmentary archeological records.” When the trailer dropped, classics buffs complained about Agamemnon’s armor—dark, shiny, and reminiscent of Nolan’s Batsuit. But what struck some as fantastical Nolan defends as feasible. “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,” says Nolan. “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’s obsessive about veracity. In 2014, he told this magazine what it took to get Interstellar’s physics right. He brought a similar ethos to The Odyssey. “For Interstellar, you’re looking at, ‘What is the best speculation of the future?’ When you’re looking at the ancient past, it’s actually the same thing. ‘What is the best speculation and how can I use that to create a world?’” He knows the approach won’t satisfy every classicist. “Hopefully they’ll enjoy the film, even if they don’t agree with everything,” he says. “We had a lot of scientists complain about Interstellar. But you just don’t want people to think that you took it on frivolously.”
In the film Damon portrays a celebrated astronaut who, stranded and desperate, nearly sacrifices humanity to save himself. “He doesn’t play a liar or a cheat,” says Nolan. “He plays someone who really believes in what they’re doing. Matt can just take the audience into that point of view and go on the journey with that character and make mistakes with that character and not judge that character.”
Matt Damon is Odysseus and Himesh Patel is Eurylochus in The Odyssey. —Melinda Sue Gordon—Universal PicturesWhat compels Odysseus—and compels audiences to root for him—is his love for his wife. Penelope waits 20 years for a husband everybody else thinks is dead. She manages to repeatedly outwit the 108 suitors plotting to court her, murder her son, and usurp Odysseus’ throne. Hathaway was pleasantly surprised when she read Nolan’s script and saw that the queen doesn’t just sit around and weep.
Hathaway and Damon committed to the notion that The Odyssey is a love story. “Matt’s married to the love of his life, and I’m married to the love of my life, and I think we both look at our relationships with a certain degree of wonder and gratitude because for most people, they don’t find that kind of happiness in a marriage, let alone two actors,” says Hathaway. “So we came to the Odysseus-Penelope relationship with the understanding that yeah, sometimes you meet your soulmate.”
Mia Goth is Melantho and Anne Hathaway is Penelope in The Odyssey. —Melinda Sue Gordon—Universal PicturesNolan doesn’t love promoting his movies; he compares discussing the plot in advance to sneaking a peek at a Christmas present. In his ideal world, “directors would be anonymous” so the work could speak for itself. And yet once he starts talking about The Odyssey, he can’t seem to stop, happily chatting long over our allotted time.
But the film also feels like a culmination. Nolan is aware that he makes a lot of movies about brilliant men trying to get home to their families. When I ask whether he worries about fan response to repeating certain tropes, he pauses and sighs. Despite the fact that he doesn’t carry a smartphone, the internet has found him. “You have to be comfortable with repeating yourself, if it’s right for the project,” he says. “If you’re paying too much attention to what people are pointing out in your work, you’d be paralyzed.”
Clockwise from left: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and David Oyelowo in Interstellar, Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer, a scene from Dunkirk, and Christian Bale in The Dark Knight. —Everett Collection (4)In the lead-up to the film’s release, Nolan has been making the same regular stroll: past the Margaritaville and Bubba Gump Shrimp on Universal CityWalk into the IMAX theater where he screens his film on the scale he always dreamed of. “I think when I signed up to do Troy way back when, I was in a little over my head,” Nolan says. “The Odyssey is a sweeping story ... I think I needed to build on what I learned doing large-scale films to be able to make this film.” Like our hero, Nolan took 20 years to find his way back.
Nolan in Los Angeles on April 17, 2026. —Devin Yalkin for TIMESet Design by Ali Gallagher, Art Department by Zoran Radanovich
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