IMAX<\/a> camera that enabled him to shoot the entire film in the format (a cinematic first) \u2013 Nolan started transferring his visions to screen. The director is no stranger to pressure: he flipped an 18-wheeler truck in downtown Chicago for The Dark Knight (2008), built a 100-foot-long rotating metal cylinder to pull off Inception\u2019s zero-gravity corridor scene, and filmed actual explosions for Oppenheimer\u2019s atomic blast. But his limits were tested more than ever before on The Odyssey. As he recalls, the scenes set on the open ocean, for which the cast and crew shot on a boat for four months, were enormously challenging.<\/p>\n![\"Christopher](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Screenshot-2026-07-10-at-14-59-03.png\")
Christopher Nolan: \u2018I\u2019ve had an image of that horse sinking into the sand in my head for 20 years\u2019 (Universal Pictures)<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I was writing the script, every time I\u2019d write something on a boat, I thought, \u2018Ugh, do we have to be on boats?\u2019 Because I know what it takes to film on the open water. They\u2019re like, \u2018Well, it’s The Odyssey, so yes.\u2019 Having an ancient vessel, and a boat built according to those ancient specifications \u2013 where everything\u2019s wooden \u2013 and being out on the open water with the cast and crew, it was a tall order.\u201d<\/p>\n
For these scenes, Nolan was assisted by Neil Andrews, the same marine coordinator he\u2019d worked with on 2017 war drama Dunkirk (\u201che\u2019s the best in the business\u201d), and the cast, including Damon and Himesh Patel, pulled together and \u201cbedded in with the crew of the ship we were using\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u2018Being out on the open water with the cast and crew \u2013 it was a tall order\u2019<\/p>\n
Christopher Nolan<\/p>\n
\u201cThese guys \u2013 Odysseus\u2019 crew \u2013 learned how to row the thing,\u201d Nolan says. \u201cThey learned how to raise the yard, raise the sails. And so by the time we got there with our camera, you know, Hoyte [van Hoytema, cinematographer] and I are on our own deck. We were shooting it kind of like a documentary. It was really thrilling to do. But boy, it was tough. It was tough on everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shooting took Nolan all over Europe \u2013 Morocco, Italy and, of course, Greece \u2013 but also to the Moray Firth coast of Scotland for standout scenes involving British actor Samantha Morton. Casting Morton as the goddess Circe \u2013 a powerful enchantress and stumbling block on Odysseus\u2019s nightmare journey home \u2013 was a necessity for Nolan, although \u201cit almost didn\u2019t work out\u201d due to the actor\u2019s busy schedule: \u201cI’ve always wanted to work with her. I knew she’d bring something incredible to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
These scenes also enabled Nolan to channel his inner horror fan. The filmmaker has flirted with the genre before \u2013 the hallucinogenic Scarecrow mask in Batman Begins (2005), for instance, and even in Oppenheimer, for the scene in which Cillian Murphy\u2019s physicist imagines the casualties of the atomic bomb shortly after it was dropped on Hiroshima. But in The Odyssey, Nolan directs his first sequence that wouldn\u2019t be out of place in a fully-fledged scary movie.<\/p>\n
![\"Scene-stealing](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Screenshot-2026-07-10-at-15-03-48.png\")
Scene-stealing Samantha Morton as the goddess Circe in ‘The Odyssey’ (Universal Pictures)<\/p>\n
\u201cWe wanted to embrace the horror element,\u201d he explained. \u201cI\u2019m a big fan of horror. I think that it\u2019s the most visceral and, in a way, the most purely cinematic of genres, where you\u2019re really trying to directly affect the audience with the sound and picture. I challenged my special effects and visual effects guys to do that, and they came up with incredible solutions. What it meant was we were able to get there and shoot Samantha just acting, just lost in the character, and it was electrifying to watch her work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Morton\u2019s efforts received a rapturous standing ovation from the cast and crew assembled on that day \u2013 something his producer and wife, Emma Thomas, remembered hadn\u2019t happened on a Nolan film since Heath Ledger\u2019s Oscar-winning performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight. \u201cWe got a nice round of applause from the rest of the cast and the crew after one of her scenes,\u201d he recalled. \u201cAnd that\u2019s not something that happens every day. It was a pretty magical thing to see.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nolan puts on special screenings for his cast and crew ahead of every film he makes. For The Odyssey, homework ranged from Andrei Tarkovsky\u2019s Andrei Rublev (19666) to Akira Kurosawa\u2019s feudal classic Ran (1985) and Martin Scorsese\u2019s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). And while The Odyssey has shades of these films, it\u2019s a breathtaking viewing experience all its own \u2013 helped by that IMAX camera, which blows the relentless action scenes up as big as they can be while also bringing a tender impact to the quieter moments involving Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland, who play Odysseus\u2019 seemingly abandoned wife and son. Shooting a film entirely in IMAX has been an aspiration of Nolan\u2019s since he was a teenager.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been a very long journey, starting with The Dark Knight,\u201d he says. \u201cThat was the first film where we were able to go to IMAX and say, \u2018Lend us your cameras. Let\u2019s try this on things like the introduction of the Joker, the truck flip.\u2019 But we couldn\u2019t do the dialogue scenes because the cameras are very, very loud. So knowing we were doing The Odyssey, I went to IMAX and said, \u2018Look, if ever we\u2019re gonna do a whole film on IMAX, this is the movie to do it with\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2019That\u2019s not something that happens every day. It was a pretty magical thing to see.\u2019<\/p>\n
Christopher Nolan<\/p>\n
He got to make that \u201clong-held dream\u201d a reality with help from his mentor, David Keighley, a pioneer in film presentation who designed a workaround that muffled the sound of the camera. As a result, standard scenes of dialogue can now be shot in IMAX. Keighley died in September shortly after completing work on The Odyssey; the camera has been named in his memory, and the film dedicated to him.<\/p>\n
If Nolan were given the chance to redo one of his films with this camera, which would he pick? He smiles. \u201cYou know, I don\u2019t look back in that way. You trust the process you go through at the time. But certainly there are a lot of sequences and a lot of films we did where we would\u2019ve used the IMAX camera if we could\u2019ve, and we just couldn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"'The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Screenshot-2026-07-10-at-15-06-44.png\")
‘The Odyssey’ cast member Zendaya watches on as the historic IMAX camera catches the action (Universal Pictures)<\/p>\n
The process has proved reliable \u2013 if arrived at by chance; after all, if Nolan had made Troy all those years ago, he wouldn\u2019t be making The Odyssey now. In fact, who knows what Nolan would be doing? Losing the chance to make Troy granted him the opportunity to make Batman Begins. \u201cYes, I did the Dark Knight trilogy instead,\u201d he says. It might just be the century\u2019s biggest film crossroads.<\/p>\n
\u2018The Odyssey\u2019 is in cinemas from 17 July<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":538930,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-538929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=538929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538929\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/538930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=538929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=538929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=538929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Christopher](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Screenshot-2026-07-10-at-15-06-26.png\")
Christopher Nolan on set of his epic new film, \u2018The Odyssey\u2019 (Universal Pictures)<\/p>\n