Robert Downey Jr. won an Oscar for Oppenheimer and figured that settled it. “I am in the most important Chris Nolan movie that will ever be made,” he remembered telling himself in 2023. “And then you had to go and do this.”
Downey was holding the microphone Wednesday night at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, moderating a post-screening conversation about The Odyssey with Christopher Nolan, Matt Damon and producer Emma Thomas. The Nerd Wire was in the room. It came one night after Damon moderated a Q&A with the film’s department heads. Downey introduced Thomas as the one person without whom nobody would be there, Damon as “the man, the mensch, and now the myth,” and Nolan as, by any metric, the most consequential director of his generation. Then he spent the rest of the night affectionately giving all three a hard time.
“You’re welcome”
Thomas said she and Nolan never plan the next film until they know how the last one has landed, and that he didn’t start writing The Odyssey until around April 2024, well after Oppenheimer had finished its run.
Downey had a follow-up for her. Was there any reason his name never came up in casting?
“I think I would say to you, you’re welcome,” Thomas said.
Downey took the point. He and Cillian Murphy, he said, have a name for the feeling: ROMO, the relief of missing out.
Nolan found his other films inside Homer
Nolan said going back to the poem to adapt it kept surprising him, because he kept running into pieces of story that have fed everything written since. It is a coming-of-age story, a homecoming, a love story and an action movie all at once. He knew about that influence going in. What he didn’t expect was to reach the ending and find a bit of Oppenheimer in it, or to look back through his notebooks and realize that the poem’s ending is, in some way, the ending of all his films.
“The call I’ve been waiting for my entire life”
Downey asked Damon when he understood what leading this film was going to demand of him. Damon said it was the moment Nolan phoned. “It was the call I’ve been waiting for my entire life,” he said. He had always wanted to be in a David Lean movie and never thought he’d get the chance.
As for how the film has performed, Damon said he has “absolutely no context for this.” The movies he usually makes, he said, aren’t in this league, and the whole thing has been wonderful and a little confusing.
He was clearer about why the shoot worked. “Chris asks an unreasonable amount from every single person who works with him,” Damon said, “and he asks it of himself.” What’s implicit in the request, he added, is that Nolan believes you can do it. He quoted costume designer Ellen Mirojnick, who told him there is something about the way Nolan and Thomas come to you that “gives you the courage to believe you can do it.”
Damon said the production felt “more like an expedition than a movie.” Nobody had shot an entire feature on IMAX before, which gave every department its own technical problem, and the locations were so remote that the crew had to pack everything in before work could start. The weather was a great equalizer. When he was freezing, soaked and getting hammered by wind, he said, he would turn around and Nolan was standing right there in it. “There’s nowhere to hide,” he said. Everybody was literally in the same boat.
Seeing audiences respond the way they have, he said, “I feel like this can’t be real life.”
Emma Thomas on trust
Asked whether the production had a mantra, Thomas offered “hold on to your hats.” The pace was breakneck from the first day. The word she keeps coming back to, though, is trust. She and Nolan trusted a crew they had mostly worked with before, and the crew trusted Nolan to know what he needed and to be clear about it.
She pointed to the Circe sequence as the example. Visual effects, hair and makeup, prosthetics and Ruth De Jong’s production design all sat around one conference table working it out together. “There’s no way we could have made this film without true collaboration across the board,” she said.
When Thomas started describing what the shoot was like on the days everyone was freezing and knackered, Nolan cut in: “I didn’t know it was a roast.” Her point was that he is at his most positive when the cameras are rolling. His version was that he’s more miserable the rest of the time.
An indie film with warships in the background
Damon said Nolan’s reputation as a director can overshadow how good a writer he is. “Everything I needed was in the screenplay,” he said.
On set, he said, a Nolan film feels like an independent one. Nolan gathers every element he might need but doesn’t decide how to use them until he has cleared the floor and watched the actors work through the scene. Then he huddles with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and they figure out how to shoot it. Damon described rehearsing on the boat with Himesh Patel, just the two of them playing the scene, and then watching the marine coordinator call in three boats. Suddenly there were warships behind Patel’s shoulder. The crew, he said, waits like predators, works out what the shot is going to be and usually nails it on the first take. “It’s all about momentum on his sets.”
Nolan described the same thing from his side. People ask whether making the film was a journey for him, and he said he has to ignore that question while he’s working. On set he keeps blinkers on and thinks only about what the shot is, how it tells the story and what comes after it. Whether it’s an insert or a helicopter shot, he said, the screen is the same size.
What comes next
Downey closed by asking what could possibly motivate Nolan after this. Nolan said that was an easy one to answer in that building.
He walked through his history with the Chinese. For Interstellar, the theater pulled out seats and boxed in a temporary IMAX film projector at the back of the house. It did the same for Oppenheimer. Since then the setup has become permanent. The Odyssey is the first film he has shot entirely in IMAX, which he said he has wanted to do since he was 16 and first saw the format in museums. He said the film’s run at the Chinese broke the house record and became the highest-grossing engagement at any single theater.
He came by on a Tuesday afternoon during that run, he said, found the house packed and sat watching the crowd. As long as he and Thomas have a story to tell, he said, there is nothing better than a place like that with an audience in it.
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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