SerpApi.Org
How do you actually build a Trojan Horse? When Christopher Nolan calls upon you to bring to life The Odyssey, that’s a question you suddenly have to consider in practical terms. Ruth De Jong, the production designer behind Nolan’s Academy Award-winning film Oppenheimer in 2023, had to create that and make a myriad of other decisions all to bring a 2,800-year-old historic—and mythological—epic to life. It’s a $250 million feat that De Jong says was “definitely harder” to pull off than the 20th century saga that earned her an Oscar nomination two years ago.
Released in theaters this weekend, Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s classic poem is the first film ever to be shot entirely with IMAX, which allows the audience to gawk in the highest resolution possible at its awe-inspiring sets, which were shot over months in six countries: Greece, Morocco, Italy, Iceland, Scotland, and the United States. “I just had a giant canvas,” says De Jong.
Although both she and Nolan buried themselves in multiple different translations of Homer’s text, they did not feel bound by historical or textual conventions. As the poem itself was sung and reworked by each of its tellers for hundreds of years even before it was written down in the late 8th century BC, The Odyssey’s unfixed and mythical legacy gave the filmmakers a sense of “total freedom” to run with their imaginations. “We knew from the onset that Chris’s vision was to make it his Odyssey, our Odyssey,” says De Jong.
The world they created on film is both breathtakingly fantastical and human in its scale. It feels simultaneously ancient and chillingly modern, tackling contemporary anxieties surrounding warfare and a civilization’s slide into chaos and barbarism.
“We were designing a feeling as much as we designed a space,” says De Jong. “Chris and I wanted an earthy, modern, relatable tone to ground the story.”
First, they committed to grounding every scene with a real on-location set—no green screens—whether that meant constructing entire fleets of seaworthy warships or battling the snows of the Scottish Highlands.
Then, to begin their odyssey of a production, De Jong pulls together individual visual references. “I start every film this way—and I did the same in Oppenheimer. I take an image for every single scene,” she explains. “That image might be a nature shot, it might be a piece of art, just anything that inspires me about that scene, and I present that to Chris. Then as we start going out and scouting, we start replacing those ideas and concepts with a real location photo.”
For the famous sequence in the cyclops Polyphemus’s cave, for example, she drew from the Black Paintings of Goya and Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin.
She and Nolan also watched films together to prepare. “I look to nature, flora and fauna, fine art, and photography to root my designs mostly, but a couple films that stood out in prep that Chris and I watched were Ran and Andrei Rublev for scope, scale, and tonality,” De Jong adds. (Ran is Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 retelling of King Lear; Andrei Rublev is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Soviet-era film about a medieval icon painter.)
The design of Ithaca, Odysseus’s home island, on the other hand, was inspired by a serendipitous vacation De Jong took over 10 years ago to Palermo. It was then that she discovered the Sicilian island of Favignana, which would become the shooting location for the Palace of Ithaca. “We knew we wanted to open the movie in the Mediterranean, and end in the Mediterranean,” says De Jong. Her and Nolan’s intention was for the audience’s visual journey to mirror that of Odysseus and his crew.
To achieve the “homely” atmosphere the pair envisioned for the protagonist’s kingdom, De Jong built Ithaca’s palace with deliberately low ceilings, keeping its design modest to juxtapose the “otherworldly” grandeur of King Menelaus’s palace in Sparta. There, opulent gold leaf coats grand dining halls, while in Ithaca, she kept the interiors simple, with plaster and frescoes of Mycenaean flora and fauna. They picked the arid and dry natural beauty of Favignana to help represent the welcoming and pure ambience Nolan envisioned for Odysseus’s home.
De Jong also amplified the differences between characters and kingdoms through the decoration of the film’s many ships. While Agamemnon’s ships had “huge bright bronze filigree,” the ornamentation of Odysseus’s fleet was kept “more subtle, [using] darker blackened bronze and just not as showy,” says De Jong.
Each and every boat on camera, however, was “100% seaworthy,” she notes. The actors went to a camp in Greece for many weeks to learn how to man them. Not only did the team actually row and sail the boats, they also genuinely “tore them apart” for scenes, such as when the Laestrygonians attack Odysseus’s fleet.
The cast and crew had to battle seasickness and their fair share of weather challenges between February and August of 2025 while shooting the many ocean scenes. “We were up in the Highlands in Scotland. It was snowing,” says De Jong. “It looks beautiful, but you’re also freezing,” says De Jong.
Matt Damon and Charlize Theron’s scenes on Calypso’s island were filmed on the serene white beaches of southern Morocco. De Jong recounts how it was so windy, the two delivered their lines with buckets of sand “blasting [Theron] in her face” and getting stuck in Damon’s hair.
Many of the film’s most breathtaking shots take place on beaches, including the hero’s treacherous journey to the underworld. “Chris knew early on he absolutely wanted to shoot Hades in Iceland,” says De Jong of the black sand beaches of Reynisfjara, which audiences might recognize from Game of Thrones or Star Wars. “It all about texture, and I think it’s almost like this minimalistic, brutalist direction we were interested in going. My aim was to design worlds that were not just brutal and beautiful, but combined myth and reality while keeping it all as though it was simply unearthed.”
Perhaps the most striking set piece designed for Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s masterpiece had been in the works long before shooting began. “I’ve had an image of that horse sinking into the sand in my head for 20 years,” Nolan told The Independent, after his brief attachment to the 2004 film adaptation of Troy. The Trojan Horse De Jong and Nolan ultimately crafted has a hand-carved head and legs and a steel shiplap body.
“Neither of us were interested in the sort of rudimentary version that you see in Troy and other representations of it in art,” says De Jong. The towering, metallic horse constructed for this retelling has a “less naive” and “really large, ominous presence” that powerfully echoes the film’s grander themes of the dark reality of war, as Odysseus must reckon with the harrowing consequences of the deceptive device he conceives to help the Greeks enter—and sack and burn—Troy.
A detail that De Jong is particularly proud of, one that may go unnoticed on a first watch, was her subtle design of “all the Athenas” in the film. These include a statue in the temple of Troy, another at a shrine in Pylos, and the Athena pin that Odysseus carries for 20 years. They were all crafted to resemble the features of Zendaya, who plays the goddess.
After thousands of years of adaptation, Nolan and De Jong now join the ranks of Tennyson and Joyce in an interpretive legacy epic in its own right. Perhaps as though “a muse sung in him,” Nolan’s modern telling of Homer’s legendary tale marks a new generation’s experience of the wandering man of many ways, Odysseus.
