Christopher Nolan Has Been Making ‘The Odyssey’ His Entire Career, and 28 Years Later, He’s Finally Filmed It

Christopher Nolan Has Been Making ‘The Odyssey’ His Entire Career, and 28 Years Later, He’s Finally Filmed It Christopher Nolan in a tuxedo and bow tie smiling.Image via Media Punch/INSTARimages By  Greer Riddell Published Feb 3, 2026, 8:07 PM EST Greer Riddell (pronounced Gre-er Rid-dell) is a very tired Londoner who is fuelled by tea and rarely looks up from her laptop. Before joining Collider in March 2024, Greer spent over a decade making social, content and video for UK media brands and freelance clients including the BBC, Bauer Media and Glastonbury Festivals. Greer is first and foremost the Social Media Coordinator at Collider, looking after Social Video and TikTok but is an occasional Features Writer. Sign in to your Collider account Add Us On Summary Generate a summary of this story follow Follow followed Followed Like Like Thread Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recap

Christopher Nolan is finally directing a big-screen adaptation of The Odyssey, a story that has inadvertently shaped his filmmaking career for decades. When he watched older students perform the epic at school at the age of five or six, he could not have known how deeply it would later influence his work. He recently told Empire magazine that he remembers the Sirens and Odysseus strapped to the mast as lingering semi-conscious images, yet they are indicative of a story he believes is “embedded” in all of us.

Nolan sees The Odyssey as almost biological, part of our “cultural DNA” and fundamental to storytelling because it contains every genre. When he began breaking down the text for his adaptation, he realized that it had unknowingly informed many of the films he had made over the years. His filmmaking partner and wife, Emma Thomas, who coincidentally holds a degree in Ancient History from University College London, has described the poem as “foundational.” For Nolan, the ancient world has long been at the back of his mind, and only now is he finally bringing it to the screen.

Christopher Nolan’s Characters Bear Some Striking Parallels To Odysseus

Christopher Nolan on the red carpet at the BAFTAsImage via PA Images/INSTARimages

Homer’s epic story of Odysseus trying to find his way home to Ithaca 10 years after the Trojan Wars, has quietly inspired Nolan’s body of work. Batman Begins follows Bruce Wayne's (Christian Bale) own journey from a traumatized young boy who lost his parents to training with the League of Shadows. He eventually returns to Gotham as the heroic Batman reclaiming his identity and eventually stopping Ra's al Ghul (Liam Neeson) and Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) from terrorizing the city. The theme of returning home continues in Inception, Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) traverses through multiple dream layers to finally get home to his children, while Interstellar’s Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is tasked with finding a new home planet for humanity. Nolan has also drawn on Greek mythology explicitly, framing J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) as a modern Prometheus in Oppenheimer taking fire from the Gods.

Nolan’s interest in adapting the ancient world nearly led him to direct Troy in the early 2000s, a project developed by Wolfgang Petersen for Warner Bros. When the studio chose not to proceed with Petersen’s Batman Vs. Superman project, the director reclaimed Troy, and Nolan moved on to direct Batman Begins instead. Petersen’s movie came out in 2004 with Sean Bean as Odysseus in a small role and Brad Pitt as Achilles, but it famously missed a mythological side, removing the all-important Gods. Nolan, however, has long been drawn to the supernatural aspects of ancient stories, and he has wanted to explore Greek mythology with the full weight and scale of blockbuster filmmaking.

Filming The Odyssey Was Its Own Perilous Journey

Production on The Odyssey began in February 2025 with a six-month shoot, as Matt Damon and the production team set out on a perilous filmmaking journey of their own. Nolan spent 91 days filming encounters with the Cyclops, the Sirens, and Circe (Charlize Theron), before Damon’s Odysseus could finally reunite with his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway). Filming began in Morocco with a major set-piece Nolan had dreamed of creating for decades, a full-scale timber Trojan Horse. True to the story’s spirit, it was a “we’ll see what happens when we get there” production, with Nolan climbing inside the horse on the beach alongside the cast and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema to get the right shot. Aside from limited sound stage work in Los Angeles, the film was shot entirely on location. The shoot moved across Greece, Iceland, Italy, and Scotland. In Italy, the cast and crew climbed 900 feet up a mountain each morning. In Iceland, where scenes set in Hades were filmed amid lantern light, the team battled unforgiving sideways rain. Production wrapped in August, finishing nine days ahead of schedule, though Nolan has said the cast and crew were exhausted in a way he had never seen before.

Related Christopher Nolan Reveals 'The Odyssey' Is Longer Than 'Oppenheimer's 11 Miles of Film

'Oppenheimer's IMAX 70mm print weighed upwards of 600 lbs.

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As well as being physically demanding, The Odyssey was technologically vast. Christopher Nolan, who has always been fascinated by the IMAX format, pushed it to dramatic new extremes. Nolan challenged IMAX to create the first new cameras in a decade, with upgrades to capture live sound. The cameras feature a new sound-suppression “blimp,” a giant casing that dampens mechanical noise, allowing filming just a foot from an actor’s face, which was previously impossible. Nolan and van Hoytema had experimented with an ergonomic blimp on Tenet, but it had to be enlarged to achieve the desired effect. Even small details, like actors’ eyelines in dialogue scenes, required new innovation. Nolan suggested a system of mirrors, so performers could maintain eye contact without seeing each other, overcoming the bulk of the blimped cameras. This technological odyssey has already captured audience excitement as IMAX screenings have sold out a year ahead of its release.

Christopher Nolan Was Inspired By Cinema's Greatest Epics

The Odyssey has even made its way into Christopher Nolan’s cinematic influences. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which the director described as a modern day echo of Homer, has consistently inspired Nolan. Its scale is particularly relevant to Nolan’s latest project alongside another formative epic, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The director paused filming in Los Angeles to screen the 70mm version of Lawrence of Arabia for the cast and crew. It was a rare print owned by Sony chief Tom Rothman and arranged with the help of Tom Holland, who plays Telemachus, Odysseus’s son. David Lean’s classic was partly filmed in Aït Benhaddou like Nolan’s Odyssey, and it presents the kind of mythic scale he hoped to emulate.

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For Nolan, The Odyssey is both a story of firsts and a return to a guiding influence. It is the first feature of his career shot entirely on IMAX 70mm cameras across over two million feet of film, the largest screen adaptation of Homer’s text in more than seven decades, and the most expensive film of his career. For audiences, it may be their first encounter with Homer, but for Nolan, it is the culmination of a lifetime of creative work. It is the story that sparked his imagination as a child, resurfaced through decades of filmmaking, and is finally being told on its own terms. After decades of cinematic journeys, Nolan is now guiding literature’s oldest voyage home.

The Odyssey will be released theatrically by Universal Pictures in the United States on July 17.

The Odyssey

Like Follow Followed Adventure Drama Fantasy Release Date July 17, 2026 Director Christopher Nolan Writers Christopher Nolan, Homer

Cast

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• Matt Damon Odysseus
• Tom Holland Telemachus
• Zendaya Athena
• Anne Hathaway Penelope

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• Movie Features
• Christopher Nolan
• The Odyssey

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