'It comes from my own life'
Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan says that only now, with the maturity of middle age, is he able to do justice to Homer’s epic story of love and loss
Universal Pictures
- Michael Hodges
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We all know the Odyssey. “It is in our bones,” says film director Christopher Nolan. “The Lotus Eaters or the Cyclops stick in the back of our minds; they are things that we carry with us.” Nolan was five when he first encountered Homer’s 3,000-year-old tale of Odysseus’s journey home to Ithaca after the fall of Troy. “I was at primary school when the older kids put on a performance,” the Oscar-winning director of Batman Begins, Interstellar and Oppenheimer recalls. “An 11-year-old boy played Odysseus, strapped to the mast as they passed the Sirens.”
Half a century later it’s Matt Damon who is strapped to the mast, cast as Odysseus in Nolan’s big screen version of the Odyssey, where, as well as the Sirens, he must also face the man-eating Cyclops and terrifying six-headed Scylla. As you might expect, CGI helps in the rendition of these monsters, but it’s not the main event. Nolan, who won two Oscars for Oppenheimer, has gone back to Hollywood basics with a wildly audacious two hours and 52 minutes of real sets and real ships crossing real oceans; all caught by cameras using real filmstock. The effect, on occasion, is awesome and so are the numbers. Filmed in Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland and the US, The Odyssey cost $250 million. The first ever IMAX feature film, it used 2.1 million feet of film and required IMAX to develop a new camera made with the carbon fiber similar to that used in Formula 1 racing cars.
Christopher Nolan on set of The Odyssey. Universal Pictures
Nolan, now 55 and just off the plane from New York, is in a London hotel suite. Artfully tailored clothes and the pale skin of a man who has spent months in the editing suite, Nolan looks like the fantastically successful director he is. As of July 2026, his films, including The Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar and Dunkirk, have grossed over $6.2 billion. “I think as a film-maker, I’m very much part of the audience,” he says, when I ask him why that might be. “I love [making] movies, but I also love seeing movies. So, I try to surprise myself and the audience.”
His adaptation of the Odyssey is no different, with plenty of speculation about the surprises in store. What does it feel like to be Nolan when the whole world has an opinion about your movie, that no one has seen yet? “It’s frightening,” he says. “A film is not finished until the audience has told me what that film is, and there’s no hiding from that.”
I wasn't ready to make Troy. The Odyssey is the greater prize
Christopher Nolan
Nolan began very young. “I started making films with my dad’s Super 8 camera when I was only seven years old.” His father was an English advertising executive, his mother an American flight attendant. A product of British public school, Nolan has the self-assurance his background bestows and, one imagines, is required to tell Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway, who plays Penelope, what to do. Nolan says he, “leaned heavily on Matt Damon” to turn the tortured man of Homer’s tale into a movie hero. “Odysseus is really tricky. He is wily, which is not very heroic. In a way he’s a better supporting character. If you look at Star Wars, Odysseus is Han Solo, he’s not Luke Skywalker. Matt can be an accessible everyman or an iconic figure like Jason Bourne, but he can also combine those two things, and that was absolutely crucial.”
Hathaway is also a revelation, her Penelope, chased by a particularly villainous Robert Pattinson as Antinous, is a study in grace under pressure. “I knew she would be able to do something amazing,” Nolan says. “I know what she’s capable of.”
Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland in The Odyssey. Universal Pictures
The film fizzes with outstanding supporting performances; Himesh Patel as Odysseus’s second-in-command Eurylochus, Samantha Morton as the witch Circe and Tom Holland (“one of the great new young voices in cinema,” says Nolan) as Telemachus, the son of Odysseus.
Thanks to director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema, the land and seascapes astonish. The monsters are nightmarishly disturbing. Cyclops features the performance of Bill Irwin and, for its design, Nolan pinned a reproduction of Francisco Goya’s disturbing painting Saturn Devouring His Son to the studio wall. “There’s an indifference in the eyes and that creates horror,” he says. “I’ve learnt from my friend Guillermo del Toro that a monster is never just a monster.”
This isn’t Nolan’s first go at Homer. In 2003 he was down to direct Troy, Warner Brothers’ take on the Iliad, then removed. As recompense, the studio gave him Batman Begins and Nolan promptly reinvented the genre. “Batman was very important; it leads to me doing the Odyssey.” Does he wish he’d done Troy? “I would not have been ready at that time, but I was ready to make this film now. This the greater prize, the Odyssey is the big one. I have technical expertise but also a lot of life experience, the maturity to get to a place where this middle-aged story of love and loss, ethical compromise comes from my own life.”
Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer. Alamy
Nolan’s wife of 29 years, Emma Thomas, is also his producer (the couple, who live in LA, have four adult children). The vital scene for Nolan isn’t in the slaughter in the Cyclops’s dreadful cave but a conversation after the warrior’s bloody return to Ithaca. “When Odysseus and Penelope talk there’s a mutual understanding, a lack of judging. That comes with time and I wouldn’t have got it 20 years ago.”
Paradoxically, this is a film about going home but also about a curse that makes truly going home impossible. In writing the Odyssey Nolan focused on the Greek concept of Xenia. “I refer to it as Zeus’s law: you treat others how you would be treated. In the Bronze Age, if you left the house for more than a day or two, you were putting yourself at the mercy of strangers, they have to feed you and clothe you. This law of Zeus makes civilisation possible. In a way, it’s a definition of civilisation.”
By tricking the Trojans with his gift of a horse, Odysseus broke the code. “The longer I worked on the film,” says Nolan, “the more I realised we’re still dependent on that concept. Nothing’s changed, it is the underpinning of society. And when it’s not respected, that’s when things get sticky.”
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In going to ancient Greek myth, Nolan has made a film about scarier monsters than the Cyclops, about the changes brought by AI and climate change – are we approaching the end of our civilisation? “I think we feel that we are,” he says. “We may be at that point where the power of our technological innovations can be truly apocalyptic. But we can also be optimistic if we think in terms of cycles of history. These things happen again and again, we do have a future.” And we also have a past; if the Odyssey does reshape contemporary film-making it will be because one man has retained the excitement he once felt picking up his father’s camera. “From there to now there’s a continuous line of fascination with recording images and ordering them in narrative form,” he says. “It’s a passion I developed very early on, and it’s never left me.”
Authors
Michael Hodges
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