Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” has received its first official enthusiastic response, courtesy of the director’s brother Jonathan Nolan. The “Westworld” co-creator and “Fallout” executive producer told CinemaBlend that his brother’s upcoming epic is “spectacular” and “tremendous.”
“I’m not working on ‘The Odyssey.’ I’ve seen ‘The Odyssey.’ It’s amazing. It’s an incredible accomplishment,” Jonathan Nolan said. “I was fascinated by The Iliad and The Odyssey when I was younger, and I had a great conversation with Chris about where we wanted to take this. It’s a great movie…I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this, but yeah, it’s amazing.”
Jonathan and Christopher Nolan’s careers are linked because Christopher’s blockbuster 2000 feature Memento was based on Jonathan’s short story. The brothers would go on to co-write The Prestige, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, and Interstellar. Jonathan also wrote the screenplay for Batman Begins, but was uncredited.
Matt Damon will be reuniting with director Nolan after “Interstellar” and “Oppenheimer,” and will be headlining the film as Odysseus, the main character in “The Odyssey.” Tom Holland plays his son Telemachus. This vast ensemble also includes Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, and Jon Bernthal.
In an interview on the New Heights podcast last month, Damon marveled at how Nolan accomplished the feat of making The Odyssey, the first Hollywood feature film shot entirely on 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.”
Nolan told Empire magazine last year that he was interested in adapting Homer’s Greek epic for the big screen as his next film after his Oscar-winning Oppenheimer. It’s an opportunity to do things that modern Hollywood doesn’t do.
Director Nolan told the magazine why he chose to adapt Homer’s “The Odyssey” into a film: “As a filmmaker, I’m looking for gaps in film culture, things that haven’t been done before.” “And what I saw was that all of the great mythological films that I grew up watching, like the Ray Harryhausen movies, I had never seen them done with the weight and authenticity that you could get in a low-budget, big-budget Hollywood IMAX production.”
“Odyssey” will be released in theaters by Universal on July 17, 2026.
