Matt Damon appeared on the latest episode of the New Heights podcast and revealed that he lost so much weight for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey that at one point during filming he weighed as much as he did in high school. Damon will reunite with director Nolan following Interstellar and Oppenheimer to star in the epic adventure film as Odysseus.
“I had a beard like you for about a year,” Damon told podcast co-host Jason Kelce (via Entertainment Weekly). “I was in really good shape. I lost a lot of weight.[Nolan]wanted me to be lean and strong. Another thing I did with the doctors was I stopped eating gluten. I used to walk around between 185 and 200, but I was in that movie at 167 the whole time. And I hadn’t been that light since high school. So it took a lot of training and a really strict diet.”
It’s a far cry from when Damon had to gain weight for his roles. The Oscar nominee told EW at the time that he gained 30 pounds for 2009’s The Informant by “eating like crazy and drinking dark beer.” “In between meals on set, I would eat a number one value meal at McDonald’s and have Doritos on top. It was heaven.”
Damon expanded on “The Odyssey,” marveling at how Nolan achieved the feat of making the first Hollywood feature film shot entirely with IMAX cameras.
“The IMAX camera is really loud. When the camera gets close, it makes a noise like a blender and a Cuisinart in your face. So we’ve never had this kind of conversation[in IMAX scenes]before,” Damon said. “You couldn’t have this conversation with a regular Imax camera, because you wouldn’t be able to hear us. They built this huge thing around the Imax for the dialogue scenes and put a system of mirrors so your line of sight would be closer to the camera and you could talk to the other actor. How much effort went into figuring out how to do that? He wanted to do it 100 percent in Imax, and he did it.”
“Odyssey” cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema previously told Empire magazine that he shot IMAX test footage of a child reading the lyrics to David Bowie’s “Sound and Vision” to prove whether IMAX film cameras were advanced enough to record dialogue. A new Imax film case called “Blimp” was created to significantly reduce the noise produced by Imax cameras.
“The airship system is a game changer,” Nolan told Empire. “You can shoot your feet in the face (whispering) and get a usable sound. What that opens up is an intimate performance moment in the most beautiful format in the world.”
Damon shot “The Odyssey” all over the world, including Greece, Iceland and Morocco, and said he was surprised by Nolan’s ambition for the locations.
“When I got there, I just started laughing,” Damon said. “I would say, ‘Nobody has any business filming here! Of course he wants to film here. It’s a chase.’ He has a really great crew. His crew is really bad. And everyone enjoyed the movie to the fullest and we made the most of the day. We actually finished ahead of schedule. It was a great experience.”
“The Odyssey” opens in theaters on July 17th. Watch Damon’s full interview on the “New Heights” podcast in the video below.
