Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
Warning: Spoilers for The Odyssey ahead.
How do you play a character who encompasses the breadth of human experience? Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey offers one version of Homer’s epic poem, but its portrait of Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, is as complicated and varied as the character’s many interpretations over the centuries: He is alternately clever, guileless, boastful, impotent, brilliant, dumb, brave, kind, violent, cruel, smug, loving, remorseful. That’s a lot to portray while trying to maintain a consistent sense of character. Nolan says that he called on Damon because of the actor’s ability to play both an Everyman and a hero in previous films, but that actually undersells Damon’s achievement here. Because this Odysseus can never really lose our allegiance and interest. And more importantly, the entire film hinges on a monologue he has to deliver near the end of the film that represents the emotional denouement of the whole story. The actor, it’s safe to say, understood the assignment. He also understood its importance. “It was the role of my career,” he says.
What do you think Christopher Nolan saw in you?
That is a question for him! I don’t know. I really felt just overwhelmed with gratitude. Chris has built a stable of actors over many years. The leading men that he’s cast, like Christian Bale and Tom Hardy and Leo and Hugh Jackman and John David and Rob and Cillian, it’s an incredible list of actors who all would have been fantastic in this role. I felt so lucky that it came my way. It was the role of my career. Just given what the character goes through, there’s so much to do as an actor. It felt more like an expedition than a film. Day to day and week to week, Friday night would come and we’d look at each other like, “Wow, did we just do that? “
How do you prepare for a part like this? Both physically and psychologically, are you doing research? Odysseus has been written about so much, and everybody has their interpretation. There’s so much you can do. How do you know what to do?
This might make me sound like a bit of a rube, but the answers I really needed were in the screenplay. Before I read the script, I reread The Odyssey, and I was listening to some lectures online about it, and then I read the script and from that moment on, I really used the script as my main source of material and inspiration. Because it’s really dense and there’s a lot going on in it. As actors, you’re trained in the theater that everything you need to know can be found by investigating the text, and I find Chris’s writing to be like that in the most helpful way. I talked to Chris about it while filming. We would each reread the script once or twice every weekend when we had a down day, just to level-set and prepare everything for the next week, because Monday mornings were like getting fired out of a cannon.
I don’t know that people appreciate how great a writer Chris is. I think it gets overshadowed by his directing. On Oppenheimer, I remember being on that set and there was a dense, great Pulitzer Prize–winning book that Chris adapted. So everybody read that. And the thing about that group, just about every scientist involved with the Manhattan Project wrote a book, including Leslie Groves. I remember I asked Chris one day, “I read the book the script is based on, and are there any other books that you’d recommend?” And he kind of looked at me and said, “Read the script.” Because he put so much thought and care into crafting the script that everything you really needed was there.
And then physically, I assume there was a ton of training involved.
Yeah. But Chris gave me the role in September and we started shooting in February. In the past, I’d ask, “Okay, what day does my shirt come off in the movie?” And then I’d train to that day, and then take my foot off the gas a little bit. But in this case, I just wanted it to look consistent the whole time. I just wanted it to look like my body. So it was just major lifestyle changes and diet and training and all of that stuff. But that time before in preproduction is really a great time to just troubleshoot anything that might come up, and Chris was very clear about what he wanted me to look like physically. He wanted me to look lean and strong, like somebody who was battle-hardened but could also use a meal if it was offered. Then, month after month, I’d go to L.A. and do fittings. Chris sits in on every fitting, and during one of the fittings in, I think, January, he finally said, “What’s your weight at now?” And I told him, and he said, “Okay, lock it in here. Don’t lose anymore. Don’t gain anymore. This is exactly where we want you.” So I stayed at this level for the whole movie. Some actors, if you’re playing a superhero or something like that, they have weights on set and things like that. But this wasn’t like that. I just wanted it to look real. I didn’t want to pump up or do push-ups before scenes or anything like that.
Odysseus is obviously one of the oldest heroes in literature, the platonic ideal of a hero, in some senses. And yet at the same time, he’s constantly at the mercy of forces beyond his control, which is sort of the tension of the character — sometimes he’s active and sometimes he’s passive. As the guy who actually has to play the part, how do you approach that as a performance? How do you maintain the sense of a consistent character?
It’s really about knowing the story, and that’s really Chris’s job, to situate each actor where they need to be in a scene. I know what you’re asking. I said that to Chris early on: “I need to know when I’m on your back, and when you’re on mine, performance wise.” Because the character is at the center of the film, but he’s also taking a lot of it in as it’s happening to him, and the audience needs to do that, too. But the screenplay, the adaptation was so beautiful. I don’t think we’re really allowed to talk about this idea before the film comes out, but it’s the most famous homecoming story, and the twist is that he doesn’t really want to go home because of the shame that he feels. The first thing I said to Chris when I read the script was, “Wow, this is trafficking in a lot of the same themes as Oppenheimer.” This guy is wrestling with what he’s done and what it means for the world, and he’s seen in his mind’s eye before everybody else that civilization is going to collapse. And it’s going to collapse in large part because of this trick and because of what he’s done. The shame that he carries for that is very personal and relatable, and something for an actor to play and to carry. That’s underneath everything in the performance. Even the quiet moments, it’s underneath everything, but it’s only revealed at the end. The script was so specific that there was never really any doubt as to when I needed to lean in. I mean, when you’re strapped to a mast and you’re passing sirens, it’s pretty clear what you have to do as an actor there.
Let’s talk about that sirens sequence. You go through a million emotions in a very brief period of time in that scene. We don’t hear the siren song — we experience it almost entirely through your performance really. What’s going through your mind in a scene like that?
In the script, there’s that little voiceover when I’m describing what I heard, which I learned as a monologue. Only one line was meant to be on camera: the last line, when I’m talking about the song and I say it told me I didn’t really want to go home. But we filmed it as a scene, and there are a lot of clues in that monologue. He’s talking about the itch that you can’t scratch, and there are a lot of details that are kind of an insight into what he’s heard.
There was another incredible thing that Chris did. We shot some wide shots of that sequence the afternoon before. And I knew we were doing that scene the following day. We were going to be out at sea on the boat, and we had a bunch of pieces to get — the guys putting wax in their ears and shots of the sirens and all this stuff — to build that sequence. The actors would get up and get in costume and hair and makeup, and then we’d report to the dock at six. Normally, everyone was just jumping on boats and we’d all take off, and Chris and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema would go ahead on their own boat because they’d have to get the cameras ready, because it was about an hour-long boat ride to get out to where we were shooting. But they were waiting for me that morning. I walked up and said, “Good morning,” and Chris said, “Hey, so we were thinking of just starting with the close-ups of you and just shooting all of that, because that’s the real emotional center of the sequence. We’ll shoot till we’re happy, and then we’ll pick up all the other pieces that we need to get afterwards. Is that all right with you?” And I said, “Absolutely.”
It seems like a very simple thing, but what he’d done there is really important. When you have a scene like that and you don’t know when it’s going to come in the day, you have to be ready to go at a moment’s notice. But by saying, “We’ll shoot till we’re happy,” that basically means we’re not moving on until we all agree that we’ve got it. Which is a huge relief in a movie where you’re out in the elements and you’ve got to keep pushing, because you can’t let up on the momentum of the film. It really put me at ease. And the other thing is this: When shooting call is seven o’clock, Chris is always rolling cameras by 7:02. So now I know I have an hour to get my mind right for this sequence, and I know that the second I step off the boat onto the picture boat, I’m getting tied to a mast and we’re doing this. And if you give any actor in the Screen Actors Guild an hour to prepare, and you say, “In one hour we’re going to shoot this scene of you,” and then you lash them into an actual mast and you pass a real island with people on it, you’ve basically given that actor every possible advantage. Any professional actor can do that. So he took what is a difficult scene and made it as easy as possible for me.
What was the hardest scene to do for you?
Oh man, it’s tough to say. None of it’s easy, it’s The Odyssey. But like that scene, Chris made it as easy as possible on the performers. You really were immersed in a world that you could really believe in. But the return is the emotional center of the movie, that sequence with Anne. You can’t copy Chris’s scripts because they’re in red, but I wrote that final monologue into my phone. And we didn’t have phones on set, but just in my spare time, whenever I had 20 minutes, I would do that monologue and work on it. And if I had any questions, I was asking him months in advance about them — a line here or a line there, or “What do you think about this?” So that when we got to that, it was completely seamless and exactly what we wanted. So that was the one that I probably focused on in my spare time more than any of the others, just because if you can get that piece right, then the whole movie really works, because the audience has been on the whole journey with him. The reveal is that he is what he’s carrying, and it still chokes me up thinking about it — that he couldn’t face her, because he knew that when he did, he was going to have to tell her what he’d done.
I know on Oppenheimer he had already figured out ways to use the Imax camera for close-ups, but so many scenes here require such a level of intimacy. How did you go about achieving those while also dealing with an enormous camera that could probably kill you if it fell on you?
It was a technical challenge, which was also the fun of it. We knew we were the first people to ever try to do this. Remember, for a standard film load, the magazine is 11 minutes, but for Imax, that motor rips the film so fast through the system that it’s a two-and-a-half-minute magazine. And so, if you have a scene that’s seven minutes long, you’re going to have two reloads. You’re going to shoot two and a half minutes, you’re going to have to stop in the middle of the scene, hold, and then resume once the camera’s reloaded. So that was a challenge. I mean, I found it fun because it felt like the first time I did a movie and was just so shocked that the camera was so big and so present and in your face and “How do people do this?” But the blimp that Imax built so we could shoot with sound was so brilliant and yeah, it was huge. And the mirror system that Chris developed so the actors could see each other around the camera worked so well. When he pitched it to me in preproduction, I instantly said, “The eye lines aren’t going to work.” And then he told me this mirror idea. So Annie could sit next to the camera and look in a mirror that reflected off another mirror right by the lens, and I would hear her. I could hear her breathe, I could hear her talk, I could feel that she was right there, and looking at her face in this mirror, it was completely seamless. I was convinced she was right there. Even thinking about the scenes in retrospect, in my memory, I was looking right at her, but obviously I was looking at this mirror. But that’s not how it lives in my memory. It was really intimate.
Chris didn’t announce that he was going to shoot the whole film in Imax at first, because we didn’t know if we’d be able to do it. In fact, I remember the day we shot that scene with Himesh Patel at the end of the sirens scene, Chris came to me and said, “What do you think about doing this whole scene?” I said, “Yeah, I learned it as a monologue so that we could just capture all the sound here.” And he said, “Yeah. But we need the blimp for this.” We were all the way out at sea. He said, “We’d have to go back to the harbor to shoot this if we’re going to use the blimp.” Because the blimp was so heavy, it wasn’t supposed to come on the boat. We just sat looking at each other for a second, and Chris said, “Turn the boat around.” So, we went back an hour and a half into the harbor to shoot that scene with Himesh. And when the boat turned around, Hoyte came up and hugged me from the back and he said, “We’re doing the whole thing on Imax!” He knew that if Chris is willing to turn the boat around and give up an hour and a half to get this bit, it meant Chris was dead set on doing the entire thing on 15-perf Imax. Because nothing stops Chris’s momentum. On Interstellar, I remember there was some trouble with the Imax cameras one day on the glacier, and Chris never stopped. He just picked up the Super 65-mm. camera, kept going. But on this film, he just completely committed. I guess it had been his dream to do it 100 percent in Imax and now that we had the blimp, as cumbersome as it was, he could. I mean, you should see the grip and camera department lugging this thing around. When it was all put together, it was like 400 pounds. It was really massive, and you saw the locations we were at. These were not easy places to get to. That was part of the rush for everybody involved. We knew it hadn’t been done before, and it wasn’t going to be easy.
The film has such an interesting relationship to the gods, who are all over Homer’s Odyssey. But here we only see Athena, and even then we’re not sure if she’s really there or an illusion. How did you approach that element of the story? When you’re talking to Athena, is she there for you, for that character?
To him, she’s there. You’ve seen the film, so you know who she is. She’s a girl who conflates basically the end of our humanity and what we’ve done. She’s murdered in front of him, and then she becomes Athena, so she’s like his conscience. She’s what he has wrought, and she’s living in his head, like his conscience. But we played it like an interior monologue, almost like a soliloquy. When I’m talking to her after I see the guys and they’ve slaughtered the cattle, it’s this walk-and-talk where she just appears and then disappears. Like he’s having this conversation bouncing around in his head. That’s obviously revealed when she comes and sits on the steps when he’s with his wife at the end. And then she’s gone when the story tells you who she actually was.
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