Before the cast and crew of The Odyssey started filming, director Christopher Nolan screened three films to watch in preparation.
Nolan has long put on screenings of films ahead of shooting movies, and his adaptation of the Homer poem was no different – he told The Independent that he looked at certain films for “textures that might inspire us”, stating: “Usually, those influences are pretty indirect.”
For the filmmaker, good sources of inspiration included Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966), Akira Kurosawa’s feudal epic Ran (1985) and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). He called Ran “such an incredible film,” hailing its use of “landscape and wind, in particular”.
“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 said The Last Temptation of Christ was required viewing forThe Odyssey as it is “a fresh and accessible window into history”.
“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 Dark Knight and Inception director also credited the success of 2023 film Oppenheimer with enabling him to make The Odyssey in exactly the way he wanted.
“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 outlet.
“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 film, starring Matt Damon, follows Odysseus’s long journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War as he battles monsters, gods and mythical foes while his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) fends off suitors and son Telemachus (Tom Holland) searches for him.
It is the first feature film to be shot entirely on IMAX film cameras, made possible after the director worked with film presentation pioneer David Keighley to develop lighter, quieter equipment capable of handling dialogue-heavy scenes.
“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,’” he told The Independent.
“But we couldn’t do the dialogue scenes because the cameras are very, very loud. 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’.”
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