Christopher Nolan Used an Epic Amount of Film on The Odyssey

After Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan has an epic blank check. For his upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, Nolan led a humongous, 91-day shoot. “We shot over 2 million feet of film,” he told Empire in a November 14 cover story. Much of the film was shot out on the choppy ocean, rather than in a studio tank. “I’ve been out on it for the last four months,” Nolan told Empire. “We got the cast who play the crew of Odysseus’ ship out there on the real waves, in the real places. And yeah, 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.”

Nolan wants to bring Hollywood epics (like Lawrence of Arabia or Cleopatra) into modernity with new technology. “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,” he said. To that end, he’s also got the stars — Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, and Tom Holland, to name a few — and the budget. The Odyssey costs $250 million, per The Hollywood Reporter, a shocking amount for a non-superhero, non-sequel, non–James Cameron–directed project. But also, isn’t Odysseus kind of a superhero in his own way?