SerpApi.Org
Christopher Nolan knew that adapting Homer's The Odyssey for the screen would be a challenge, but it was one he was up for. The Oscar-winning filmmaker has crafted an illustrious career out of his preference for practical effects, shooting on location and often subjecting his cast and crew to treacherous, real-life circumstances. His approach to The Odyssey was no different.
"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," Nolan told Empire magazine. "Because you're confronted on a daily basis by the world pushing back at you."
For Matt Damon, who portrays Odysseus, the King of Ithaca in the swords-and-sandals blockbuster, Nolan's approach to filmmaking is singular.
"It's the thing I love about working with him. It is like shooting an independent film but at this scale that is beyond anything I've ever had the chance to do. But he really lets it be found and discovered," Damon said during a roundtable discussion for Entertainment Weekly.
Yahoo rounded up some of the wildest, most surprising behind-the-scenes facts about how Nolan's The Odyssey was brought to the big screen, from the cast's daily 45-minute uphill hike to the stuntmen who were buried alive.
Warning: Spoilers ahead!
Damon was completely enclosed in the Trojan Horse
As in Homer's poem, in the film, Odysseus gains entry into Troy by devising the Trojan Horse. Pretending they had given up, the Greeks leave behind a gigantic wooden horse as a peace offering for the Trojans. In reality, however, the hollow horse is filled with warriors, including Odysseus, leading to the infamous Fall of Troy.
"I said, 'Hey, I'm really excited to see what you have planned for the inside of this horse.' I said, 'How [are] you going to do it?' And he goes, 'I don't know,'" Damon recalled of his conversation with Nolan.
When it came time to film the scene, Damon was actually inside the Trojan Horse.
"At the end of the day, it was like, cram into a horse with all these guys and with Chris and with Hoyte [van Hoytema], who was operating the camera," Damon said. "And they shut the door of the horse, they seal us in and we just start getting all the shots that we need. It's about him and Hoyte understanding visually what that is, what the moment is and what exactly he wants to capture to tell the story."
Damon added of Nolan, "Why Chris is so brilliant is because he knows all of the elements that he is going to need, right? And he is on top of every single detail … but there's a looseness to the actual capture moment — to the filming."
Nolan's mirror system
The Odyssey was filmed using a new custom-built IMAX 70mm film camera, known simply as the Keighley. While the camera was notably quieter than others Nolan had used for films like The Dark Knight and Interstellar, it was still too loud to record dialogue clearly. To fix this, Nolan had a "blimp system" developed, a massive soundproof housing unit to dampen the camera's notoriously loud noise.
But the blimp posed another problem: Because it was so large, it served as a physical barrier between actors, blocking their eyelines during intimate scenes. So, to solve this problem, Nolan and his team crafted a custom mirror system mounted on the blimp, allowing the actors to still see each other via a mirrored reflection.
"Chris devised this mirror system," Damon told journalist Kevin McCarthy. "So you would still feel the actor and know that they were in the room with you and feel them breathing, they were just as close as you, but you would play the whole scene to a mirror."
The final, intimate conversations between Odysseus and his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), were shot using this system.
"All those scenes with me and Annie at the end, everything, we're looking into a mirror, and the incredible thing was, you didn't feel that at all," Damon said.
How jet skis helped bring Scylla and Charybdis to life
While on his treacherous journey home, Odysseus and his crew face Scylla, a giant, six-headed, tentacled monster who dwelled in a rocky cliffside opposite the ravenous whirlpool Charybdis. How did Nolan and his production team bring this whirlpool to the screen? With the help of jet skis.
"We took the boat through that passageway and Chris had, on one side, jet skis doing donuts in the water. This is true — to really create a small whirlpool, that the visual effects could use the actual movement of water as a guide," Damon explained during a roundtable discussion for Wired.
For the scenes where Scylla snatches some of Odysseus's men out in the sea, George Coddle, the film's stunt coordinator, executed a stunt using six ratchets on the boat.
"[Coddle] rigged a ratchet system and pulled stunt guys up out of the deck of the boat," Damon said. "It was the most incredible thing."
The cast hiked 1,000 feet uphill every day
Looks like the cast of Nolan's film had an odyssey of their own to conquer at the start of their work days. Because the 15th-century Castello di Santa Caterina in Sicily, which was the location for the film's Ithaca scenes, lacked road access, the actors were required to walk to set themselves. What resulted was a 45-minute uphill trek each day in sandals and full armor. They had to walk down the hill too.
"We had helicopters to bring equipment up or to bring members of the crew, cast, who, for whatever reason, couldn't make the hike. But the bulk of people, because we needed 250 people up there, you know, we had to hike," Nolan told People. "It was honestly incredible that everybody was prepared to do that."
Luckily, Hathaway did not have to hike to and from set.
"I had my boots ready to go to hike up to the top, and then I think that the executive decision was made that because Penelope was the queen and she couldn't arrive looking as rugged as the suitors or some of the other members of the Ithacan royal court, that I should be helicoptered up," Hathaway told BBC News. "So I got to take a helicopter to work every single day, which was amazing."
Damon's stunt double was a woman
Not all of the stunt performers on The Odyssey were men. In fact, Damon's stunt double for the film's forced-perspective scenes was a woman.
"When we did the forced-perspective stuff of the Laestrygonians, I don't know if there's been a thing about how we did it, but there were, you know, there were these kind of stuntmen who were all seven feet, right? And then they got stuntmen who were under five feet, and so my double was a woman, a female stunt performer, who had the greatest arms I've ever seen," Damon told Joshua Horowitz for Happy Sad Confused.
The first time Damon met his stunt double was in the catering tent, where he thanked her for all her hard work on the film.
"I went up and I hugged her," Damon said. "It was almost 100% my arms in the movie, but I gotta give it up where it's due."
This wasn't the only time Nolan used stunt women in The Odyssey…
Stunt women portrayed the film's sirens
In the film, after Odysseus is allowed to leave the island of the sorceress Circe (Samantha Morton), he sails past a small group of sirens hiding among the rocks. Odysseus orders his crew to tie him to the boat's mast so he can safely hear the deadly song of the sirens without jumping into the sea. The sirens, Damon told content creator Tamsin Wong, were actually portrayed by stunt women.
"There were sirens on the rock, but they were stuntwomen because they were the only ones who were qualified to get on and off of that rock," Damon explained. "It was a dangerous entrance and exit."
Damon 'delivered the goods' while strapped to a mast in open water
Given that Damon was actually strapped to a mast on a boat in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, it's safe to say he was committed to nailing the film's pivotal (and emotional) sirens scene. Nolan, in retrospect, felt bad about how many times Damon had to act out the grueling moment.
"Shooting Matt's close-up, you know, you strap him to the mast, you know, we're out on a real boat, real water, sirens on the rocks, you know, going past it, through the fog, all that," Nolan told ITV News. "It took days and days and we weren't seeing dailies, the prints of what we shot for a few days, because we're shipping back to L.A."
Nolan finally got to sit down and watch Damon's takes a few days later. It was at that point he realized he may have asked more of Damon than was necessary.
"So about four days later, I sat for hours watching and hearing him screaming and screaming in the background of everybody's shot and I thought, 'Yeah, OK. That was asking a lot.' And he delivered the goods," Nolan said.
Stunt performers were also buried in the sand
When Odysseus visits the underworld, he encounters dead spirits, also known as shades, rising from the ominous, dark black sand. To visualize the dead spirits, the film's production team buried stunt performers using hidden snorkels.
"The stunt people were buried. They had snorkels that you couldn't see and each person had a safety person on them, and a timer went the second the first person was covered up," Damon told IGN. "Even though the stunt people could move, because they rise up out of the sand of their own power, if you put just like one inch too much of sand on somebody, suddenly they're completely immobilized."
Damon added, "So there was this whole aspect of safety alongside this incredible visual spectacle that's all in-camera."
That thing with the pigs
Who could forget the scene where Circe turns all of Odysseus's men into pigs? Himesh Patel, who plays Eurylochus, the king of Ithaca's brother-in-law and second-in-command, told U.K. bookseller Waterstones that "absolutely nothing you see in that sequence is CGI."
"It's all practical effects," Patel said. "I watched it happen in front of my eyes."
Hathaway and Tom Holland, who plays Telemachus, Penelope's and Odysseus's son, discussed the scene further while chatting with IMDb. Holland learned the scene was "all animatronics" after watching the film for the first time.
"They worked with an artist to create something that Samantha could sculpt with live on camera," Hathaway added.
"The movie ended, and Chris was sat behind me," Holland said. "I literally turned around. The first thing was, 'How did you do that thing with the pigs?' And he was like, 'Oh, it's just camera angles and animatronics, and a bunch of actors that were really game to do something crazy.'"
