Christopher Nolan has tackled superheroes, sci-fi, noir, and historical drama in his films, but for “The Odyssey,” his first film since winning the Best Picture Oscar for “Oppenheimer,” Nolan said he wanted to take on a story that has “a bit of everything in it.”
“I mean, it truly contains all stories,” Nolan told Empire magazine in his first interview well before the release of “The Odyssey” next summer. “As a filmmaker, you’re looking for gaps in cinematic culture, things that haven’t been done before. And what I saw is that all of this great mythological cinematic work that I had grown up with — Ray Harryhausen movies and other things — I’d never seen that done with the sort of weight and credibility that an A-budget and a big Hollywood, IMAX production could do.”
Along with a few first-look images of “The Odyssey,” Nolan described to the British film magazine the feeling of being out on the sea for the last four months, aiming to bring his practical effect style of filmmaking to Homer’s epic. Nolan said he shot 2 million feet of film to capture the epic, and he called the whole experience of being out on the sea “pretty primal.”
“It’s vast and terrifying and wonderful and benevolent, as the conditions shift. We really wanted to capture how hard those journeys would have been for people. And the leap of faith that was being made in an unmapped, uncharted world,” he said. “By embracing the physicality of the real world in the making of the film, you do inform the telling of the story in interesting ways…because you’re confronted on a daily basis by the world pushing back at you.”
Matt Damon is starring as Odysseus in Nolan’s film, his third with Nolan after both “Interstellar” and “Oppenheimer.” It also features a staggering cast that includes Tom Holland as Odysseus’ son Telemachus, Anne Hathaway as his wife Penelope, and Mia Goth as Melantho. The film also stars Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Benny Safdie, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, John Leguizamo, and Elliot Page in currently undisclosed roles (though Jennifer Lawrence joked to us that Pattinson is playing one of the sirens).
Universal is releasing “The Odyssey” in theaters on July 17, 2026.