Heard as one who is always innovating in cinema, Christopher Nolan appears to have escalated his art to an entirely different level with his next huge scale project, The Odyssey, by going out on the sea with his crew for up to four months to shoot the movie. In fact, in a conversation with the press, the winner of two Oscars in the same categories, spoke about his ordeal being at sea and made it known that he has practically filmed 400 miles of film for his forthcoming movie.
Christopher Nolan on Filming The Odyssey, Sea Adventure Film, Grand Scale Production, Director’s Insights
Speaking to Empire Magazine, Christopher Nolan explained in detail how he photographed the ocean scenes to such a grand scale, and the whole thing seemed to him “quite primal”.
“For the last four months, I’ve been on the water,” the innovative director commented about his filming of The Odyssey on the water. “So, we took the actors who are the crew of Odysseus’ ship to the real waves, in the real places. And yes, it is vast and scary and amazing and kind, as the situations change. We really wanted to show how difficult those journeys would have been for people. And the leap of faith that was going into a world without a map, uncharted,” he added. Nolan also revealed that he has already “shot over two million feet of film,” which is approximately 400 miles of reel.
When asked what brought him to such an extreme point of action in order to get the shots he wanted, Nolan answered, “As a filmmaker, you’re looking for gaps in cinematic culture, things that haven’t been done before. And what I saw was that all of this fantastic mythological cinematic work that I had gone up with Ray Harryhausen movies and other things I hadn’t seen that were done with the sort of weight and credibility of an A-buget and a big Hollywood, IMAX production could.”
The Odyssey, which features among others Hollywood A-listers Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Jon Bernthal, and Charlize Theron, is presently scheduled to hit theaters on July 17, 2026.