Christopher Nolan described his upcoming adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey as the most extreme and demanding film he has ever made, telling CBS News’ 60 Minutes that shooting it pushed the production to its absolute limits. The film opens in theaters worldwide on July 17.
Speaking to correspondent Scott Pelley, Nolan laid out his core filmmaking philosophy: “I always try to have a point of view on the story that’s from inside the film. I’m not looking at the characters from 30,000 feet; I’m trying to be in the race, in the maze with them. Because I want to try and give the audience a sense of what a place would smell like, what it would feel like.” On this particular project, he said, that instinct collided with the scale of the source material. “I think we pushed pretty hard on this one and maybe found some limits,” he admitted.
The technical ambition matches the rhetorical one. Nolan shot 2 million feet of IMAX film, making The Odyssey the first feature-length production shot entirely on IMAX 70mm cameras. Star Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus, framed the achievement plainly on the same broadcast: “I think what separates him from other directors is the stories he wants to tell are incredibly ambitious. And the way he wants to tell them is incredibly ambitious. In this case he wanted to do it 100 percent in IMAX, which had never been done.”
With an estimated production budget of $250 million, The Odyssey stands as the most expensive film of Nolan’s career. Filming locations included Al-Dakhla in Western Sahara, the Castle of Santa Caterina on the Sicilian island of Favignana, and the Moray Firth inlet of the North Sea in northeastern Scotland.
The cast spans Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Anne Hathaway, and Charlize Theron, with Zendaya playing Athena and Holland as Telemachus. Nolan also wrote the screenplay himself, adapting a poem scholars date to between 725 and 675 B.C.E. He described his writing process as one of continuous visualization: “When I’m writing, I’m visualizing the film as an audience member. Then, when I direct the story, I’m trying to take the audience there — to put them on the deck of Odysseus’s ship.”
Universal announced the film in December 2024, and IMAX opening-weekend tickets went on sale a full year before release, selling out within hours. The July 17 release date keeps Nolan in the summer window that has defined his biggest films, from The Dark Knight through Inception, Dunkirk, and Oppenheimer.
