Christopher Nolan hypes up ‘The Odyssey’ with bold new statement

Christopher Nolan has lifted the lid on his fiercely ambitious take on Homer’s The Odyssey, and it sounds like he’s gone all in, with nothing held back.

Speaking in a revealing interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes with Scott Pelley, the Oscar-winning director explained that he never wants to watch his films from a distance, instead, he drags audiences right into the heart of the action.

“I’m not looking at the characters from 30,000 feet,” Nolan said. 

“I’m trying to be in the race, in the maze with them.”

The Oppenheimer filmmaker revealed he always treats each project as if it could be his last, pushing himself to deliver the most intense and immersive experience possible.

“I feel a real responsibility to get as much on screen for the audience as possible,” he said, adding that he wants viewers to feel every moment, “what a place would smell like, what it would feel like.”

For The Odyssey, Nolan didn’t just direct but he also wrote the screenplay, reworking Homer’s ancient epic, believed to have been written nearly 3,000 years ago between 725 and 675 BCE. 

He admitted the writing process meant constantly imagining the audience’s perspective, trying to physically place them inside the story.

“When I’m writing, I’m visualising the film as an audience member,” he explained. 

“I’m trying to put them on the deck of Odysseus’s ship.”

But the scale came at a cost as The Dark Knight director confessed the film was one of the toughest he’s ever made.

He said that they “pushed pretty hard” and may have even “found some limits” along the way.

The production reportedly used around two million feet of IMAX film, with actor Matt Damon praising Nolan’s “incredibly ambitious” vision, including shooting the entire epic in IMAX for the first time ever.

Watch the trailer below: 

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