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“You get a phone call from a nondescript number,” Matt Damon tells PEOPLE, explaining Nolan’s communication process
NEED TO KNOW
- In his PEOPLE cover story, Matt Damon reflects on life now and his latest movie, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey
- The British writer-director “famously doesn’t have a phone,” notes Damon
- It was receiving a text from Nolan’s wife and producing partner Emma Thomas that alerted Damon that the filmmaker wanted to talk about a then-unknown, he explains
Christopher Nolan works at the cutting-edge of cinema — but without a phone.
In his PEOPLE cover story, Matt Damon confirms that yes, the writer-director of The Odyssey (in theaters now) indeed operates without a cell phone. Nolan, 55, told The Hollywood Reporter in 2023 that he does not communicate via text or email.
So how did Damon, 55, first receive word that Nolan wanted him to embark on an onscreen journey as Odysseus? The British filmmaker’s wife, Oscar-winning producer Emma Thomas, “had texted me, ‘Are you around for a call today?’ Because Chris famously doesn’t have a phone,” recalls Damon.
It’s Thomas, 54, who “always gives you a heads-up if he’s going to call,” explains the actor. “And then you get a phone call from a nondescript number, because he’s just picking up a line at Universal Studios.”
Even Nolan, he adds, “doesn’t know what number it’s going to be.”
The Odyssey, also starring Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o, Elliot Page and Samantha Morton, reunites Damon and Nolan after their work together on 2014’s Interstellar and 2023’s Oppenheimer.
“He called and we chatted for 10 or 15 minutes,” Damon says of the fateful moment he learned about Nolan’s planned adaptation of the famous Homer epic. “It was only six months after Oppenheimer had gone through the Oscars and all of that.”
As the Good Will Hunting Oscar winner had estimated, that left at least a year before Nolan would be back behind the camera. “So I just thought we were catching up, which we did. And then he blurted out, ‘Yeah, I’m thinking of going back to work.’ And I went, ‘Wait, already?’”
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Nolan tells PEOPLE that Damon and Hathaway (another regular collaborator), were not specifically in his head as he was crafting his Odysseus and Penelope. “I try to just discover the characters through the process of writing,” says the director-screenwriter.
“What I’ve found over the years is if you have an actor in mind — and obviously it’s very tempting, particularly when we work with great people before, it’s tempting to cast it as you are thinking about the script — but for me that always limits what the characters can be. Because then you’re writing to what you’ve seen an actor do before.”
When Nolan is finished with the script, he says, “you get to sit there and go, ‘Okay, I wonder what Matt’s doing this week or should I give Anne a call?’ And that’s the fun of it.”
The Odyssey is in theaters as of July 17.
For more on The Odyssey, pick up this week’s issue of PEOPLE, available everywhere Friday.
Read the original article on People
