Christopher Nolan has revealed he used more than 2 million feet of film for his upcoming adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, now in post-production after wrapping principal photography in August.
In an interview with Empire magazine, Nolan described the scale of the shoot and the months spent filming on open water. “I’ve been out on [the sea] for the last four months. We got the cast who play the crew of Odysseus’s ship out there on the real waves, in the real places … We really wanted to capture how hard those journeys would have been for people. And the leap of faith that was being made in an unmapped, uncharted world.”
He added: “We shot over 2 million ft of film.”
The film was shot entirely on Imax, a format that consumes far more stock than standard 35mm.
Nolan told Empire he was drawn to The Odyssey after long being interested in bringing a Homeric epic to the screen. He had previously been in contention to direct Troy more than 20 years ago.
“As a filmmaker, you’re looking for gaps in cinematic culture, things that haven’t been done before. And what I saw is that all of this great mythological cinematic work that I had grown up with – Ray Harryhausen movies and other things – I’d never seen that done with the sort of weight and credibility that an A-budget and a big Hollywood, Imax production could do,” the Oscar-winning auteur said.
“By embracing the physicality of the real world in the making of the film, you do inform the telling of the story in interesting ways. Because you’re confronted on a daily basis by the world pushing back at you,” Nolan added.
The film, which stars Matt Damon as Odysseus and Tom Holland as Telemachus, is scheduled for release in July 2026.