Why Christopher Nolan Feels The 'Pressure' of Odysseus

The AP’s Summer Movie Preview hit yesterday, and I immediately flipped to the Christopher Nolan section to read all I could about his upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey (releasing July 17).

I think it’s inarguably the most anticipated movie of the year, and there’s a lot at stake for his theatrical follow-up to Oppenheimer.

With a movie this large and with so many people watching, it’s hard to imagine a situation that comes with more pressure in Hollywood….and Nolan knows that.

So, how is he channeling his protagonists to get the job done?

Let’s dive in.

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The Batman Blueprint

It’s so funny that Nolan is obsessed with time, and has all these movies that I think provide intertextuality and sort of wind up referencing each other when he lays them all out.

For example, The Odyssey is about one man’s journey to return to his people. In it, his protagonist, Odysseus, knows that if he doesn’t return, it will likely mean the death of his family. Those are some real stakes….and pressure.

Nolan feels the same about delivering the movie.

‘There’s a massive amount of pressure. Anyone taking on ‘The Odyssey’ is taking on the hopes and dreams of people for epic movies everywhere and that comes with a huge responsibility.’

While speaking to the AP, Nolan compared the “massive pressure” of this project to his work on the Dark Knight trilogy, which took years to complete and had billions of fans waiting for his work.

For him, the stakes of adapting a 3,000-year-old foundational text to so many were nearly identical to handling the world’s most famous superhero.

‘What I learned from that experience is that what people want from a movie about a beloved story, a beloved set of characters, is they want a strong and sincere interpretation.’

A Technical Everest: 100% IMAX Film

The pressure doesn’t just come from the story you put on paper, but how you bring it to the screen as well.

The Odyssey is pushing the medium and will be the first feature film shot entirely on 15/70mm IMAX film.

Doing this has been a severe undertaking that I think will launch movies forward in maybe one of the biggest ways of the early century.

Getting there will be a battle.

IMAX cameras are famously loud and heavy, making intimate dialogue scenes a technical puzzle for DP Hoyte van Hoytema. But for Nolan, the “event” feel of the 70mm frame is the only way to capture the scale of a journey from Troy to Ithaca.

Because the film is shot entirely on IMAX, we also have a hard cap on the runtime.

That’s a funny way to have the medium actually dictating part of the storytelling.

Nolan confirmed that due to the size of the 70mm platters on a projector, the movie has to be under three hours. “The longest we’ve ever been able to get onto the IMAX projector is three hours… I can say the film is shorter than Oppenheimer.”

I can’t wait.