Matt Damon has made, by his own rough count, around 80 movies. On Tuesday night he stood in front of twelve of the people who built The Odyssey and repeated what he told producer Emma Thomas early in the shoot: “Thank God I’m not producing this movie.”
Damon, who plays Odysseus, was on moderator duty at Universal’s Spielberg Theater for a conversation with the film’s department heads, held alongside the making-of documentary Behind the Scenes of The Odyssey and ahead of the Nov. 17 home release. The Nerd Wire was in the room. He went down the row one chair at a time. What came out was a picture of a production that ran on short prep, very little sleep and a director who hears “impossible” as a scheduling note.
Six movies, all at once
Thomas laughed at the producing line when Damon first said it, he recalled, and then gave him the framing he carried through the rest of the shoot. The Odyssey was about six different movies in one, and the team had made every one of them before. They’d been on the water for Dunkirk and up mountains for Batman Begins and Interstellar. “We’ve just never done them all at once,” Damon remembered her saying.
Thomas said the scale frightened her less than the early films did, back when “we really did not have any clue what we were doing.” What changed is the team, plus a deliberately short runway. “The longer you prep, the more movies you end up kind of throwing in the bin and starting again,” she said. By her account, Christopher Nolan started talking about a modern screen Odyssey right after Oppenheimer came out, didn’t begin writing until around the start of 2024, and the production office didn’t open until that fall. Damon pointed out that everyone further down the row looked traumatized by the reminder.
She also described two different Nolans. In prep he demands the impossible and tells everyone the work isn’t where it needs to be. Once the cameras roll, “he becomes incredibly pragmatic” and plays inside whatever box the crew has built for him.
35 gongs and “the rockstar instrument of ancient Greece”
Composers usually arrive after the shoot. Ludwig Göransson was on The Odyssey by October 2024, before a frame existed, and Damon said the only thing Nolan would tell him about the score was a single word: gongs.
Göransson confirmed it. The brief was a sound audiences had never heard in a film like this, so he collected about 35 gongs, surrounded himself with them in his studio while the Los Angeles fires kept everyone else away, and spent roughly ten days learning to write on them. “The louder you hit them, the more different they sound,” he said. Cutting himself off from a computer full of samples was the point. With endless options, he said, your imagination stops.
Those gongs are all over the finished film, especially in the megaron scenes on Ithaca, where he wanted the sound to feel close to claustrophobic. From there he went hunting for players of instruments that barely exist anymore: a lyre, which Nolan had written into the script, and the aulos, a pair of pipes played at once that he called “the rockstar instrument of ancient Greece.” He also traveled to record shepherds in southern Albania who still perform an old style of polyphonic singing.
“If you don’t find him, you don’t have the journey”
Damon said it felt like he did a hundred fittings for Odysseus alone. Then he got to Morocco and saw 2,000 people in costume.
Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick said the job began with as much real research as the period allows, and then with a second question about what “a new mythology” should look like for Nolan’s adaptation. Ithacans, Spartans and Trojans each had to be broken down methodically. All of it hung on getting one silhouette right first: a clean, simple line for Odysseus that reads as strength and can be taken apart piece by piece as the journey wears him down. “He’s the key to that journey,” she said. “And if you don’t find him, you don’t have the journey.”
“Guess what? Water wins”
Production designer Ruth De Jong got the question of which location bedeviled her most and answered with the Trojan horse. It was fabricated on Stage 12 at Universal and shipped to Morocco. Then Nolan announced he wanted to shoot two days early, while the horse was still, in her words, “in boxes in customs.”
Once it was assembled, Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema were keen to see how it would hold up in the surf. “Guess what? Water wins,” De Jong said. For the film’s opening image of the horse buried in sand, her team dredged the beach and fixed the horse to a massive metal plate. It held for a while. Then the tide came in and knocked it over. Nolan’s response, as she told it, was that he’d be shooting it tomorrow.
Her other numbers were just as rude. The 2.5-acre Troy set went up between late December and the start of shooting in early February. She ran six art departments in six countries and slept three or four hours a night for nine months. She argued the pace is a feature. “You work from the gut,” she said. “You work from the heart.”
Damon admitted he still can’t tell which parts of her sets were real. One day Robert Pattinson knocked on a wall, it echoed, and Damon had been sure it was stone.
Cutting the movie from the road
Editor Jennifer Lame said she asked Nolan whether he needed her on location for this one. After reading the script she answered her own question, because of the visual effects. “Oppenheimer didn’t have that,” she said. She traveled with the company, sat in on film dailies every evening and kept comparing notes with the effects team as the Cyclops material came in, a process she said she doesn’t think had been done before.
A Cyclops on strings
“There were no Cyclops available,” Damon offered, by way of setting up visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson.
Jackson said the team knew from the first conversation that Scylla, the six-headed monster, would have to be computer-generated. The Cyclops was different. He and Nolan agreed the actors and the camera needed something physically occupying that space. The original plan gave them months to build a full-size creature and shoot it in Los Angeles at the end of the schedule. Then De Jong and Nolan came back from a scout (“Thanks, Ruth”), and the sequence moved to a cave on top of a mountain in Greece, in February.
Plenty of people told him it couldn’t be done. Jackson’s answer was to throw out everything complicated. The team built only the rigid parts of the creature, hung them on a simple stick-figure frame and operated the whole thing like a marionette. They barely had time to assemble it before shipping, let alone rehearse. Strung up in the cave, he said, it had “an amazing life of its own,” and it worked better than the elaborate version would have.
Special effects supervisor Scott Fisher, whom Damon introduced as a “torture artist” because the sight of Fisher’s rain boat meant a long afternoon for everyone on the ship, said no single effect kept him up at night. The pace did. Every sequence, he said, “is just like a movie in itself.”
No ADR, and nobody survives the hold
Damon said he did not re-record a single line of dialogue for The Odyssey, the same as on Oppenheimer, and that he has no idea how production sound mixer Willie Burton pulls it off.
Burton said he learned the rules on Tenet: “There’s no ADR with Chris.” Nolan also wants the boom microphone on a cable, which means hauling 300 to 400 feet of it around every set. In Morocco the sand dunes forced Burton to abandon his cart and mixing board for a portable recorder with knobs. Then came the ship. The captain’s safety briefing, he recalled, was that everything on board could kill you. As the camera kept backing up, Burton ran out of places to stand, and Nolan pointed him to the hold. The ship’s crew told him nobody survives the hold.
He went anyway. He and boom operator Doug Shamburger pulled up planks to run cable under the deck and planted microphones along the hull for the oars and the waves. When the storm sequence arrived, Burton figured he was the one dry person on the boat, right up until the water poured in and he got soaked trying to save the gear. He also became the ship’s unofficial snack clerk, since everything was stored down there with him. People kept asking him to pass up bags of potato chips.
Supervising sound editor Craig Henighan described the other half of the job. He stood on a ladder over his backyard swimming pool swirling the water with a jet hose to find the sound of the whirlpool. He recorded the real ship in Scotland, along with every forest, beach and gust of wind his crew could get to. And he set one rule: sounds captured for one stop on the journey never appear in another. The Cyclops’s island only ever sounds like the Cyclops’s island.
The wig Robert Pattinson didn’t get
Hair designer Gloria Casny was the Nolan first-timer on the panel. Her research ran back to 1200 B.C., where reference is thin, and forward through centuries of hair getting longer and shorter. “Alexander the Great was like the Fabio of the time,” she said of the man who brought long hair back. For Ithaca she landed on short hair and beards, classic and understated, to sit alongside Mirojnick’s costumes.
Then, on her first day of fittings, while she was standing in a hallway with Nolan and Thomas, her phone rang. It was Pattinson, whom she’d worked with before, asking for a long wig. Casny knew how the director feels about wigs and took it as a test. She relayed the request. The answer was no. “Was Rob joking?” Damon asked. He was not.
Makeup designer Luisa Abel said her starting point was the idea that the mythology had to be grounded. She built a color board for every leg of the journey, researched the dirt, dust, soot and mud of each location, and had all of it custom-made. In Morocco her team ran to 60 hair and makeup artists, and just under 7,000 background performers went through fittings over the shoot, with every tattoo, piercing and modern eyebrow dealt with along the way.
Casting gods
Casting director John Papsidera said most of his work happens in imagination, long before there are sets or costumes to look at. The idea he and Nolan settled on early was to fill a story about gods, monsters and legends with the closest thing this era has, which is movie stars. “They weren’t mere mortals on screen,” he said. “They were larger than life.”
“I don’t accept that”
Thomas took the microphone back near the end to thank the moderator. None of it would have worked, she said, without Damon’s performance, or without a lead who was on set, on time, with the best attitude every morning.
Damon said he has never been prouder to be part of a group, and then told one more story. In Scotland, the sea tore apart one of the boats the production needed for the Laestrygonians sequence. A crew member named Neil walked Nolan through the damage and explained that having it ready to shoot the next day was, as a matter of physics, impossible.
“I don’t accept that,” Nolan said.
Damon looked at his shoes. “Somehow,” he said, “that thing was floating the next day.”
The Odyssey is available on digital, 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD on Nov. 17 from Universal Pictures.
Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.
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