The Patron Saint of Movie Theaters has returned to CinemaCon, the exhibition industry’s annual trade show.
Christopher Nolan made his way to Las Vegas to talk up “The Odyssey,” his historical drama based on Homer’s Greek epic. Not that he needs to convince exhibitors to schedule any of his films. Movie theater operators adore Nolan because he’s the rare director who can get people to the big screen based on his name alone.
Naturally, he was greeted with a standing ovation as he walked on stage at the Colosseum. An introvert, the filmmaker tried to deflect the attention, joking that he’s just happy that he’s not following Steven Spielberg during Universal’s presentation to exhibitors. (Spielberg’s new film “Disclosure Day” was teased later in the afternoon.)
He got right to the point, addressing his decision to adapt the original epic for today’s audiences. Matt Damon stars as Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, and the story chronicles his long and perilous return home after the Trojan War.
“Why ‘The Odyssey?’ ‘The Odyssey’ is a story that has fascinated generation after generation for 3,000 years,” Nolan mused. “It’s not a story. It’s the story.”
Nolan treated exhibitors to an extended look at “The Odyssey,” which opened with Damon’s Odysseus, shirtless on the beach with a burly beard. He’s been gone a long time and admits to Calypso (Charlize Theron) that he “can’t remember anything before Troy.”
“Did I have a wife? Children? Maybe a son?” he asks. “If I had a son, how old would he be now?”
Most of the footage revolved around “the story of the horse” — the famous Trojan horse attack, which the Greeks used as cover to enter the city of Troy at the end of the war. As the massive wooden figure washes up on the beach, thousands of men have to pull the Trojan horse out of the water and onto the sand before they can wheel it into the city. In the tense and thrilling sequence, the Greeks are forced to stay quiet as the Trojans plunge swords into the statue to see if anything was hidden, with one blade even slicing into the face of a hidden soldier.
Later, there are shots of Odysseus urging his soldiers to keep rowing through a storm, and then slinging arrows as they launch their full-scale attack in the dark of night. The footage ended with a quick shot of Odysseus and his soldiers as they face the man-eating cyclops Polyphemus; the massive brute picks up a man in his hand before the screen cuts to black. He’s one of many mythical beings — Cyclops, sirens and Circe among them — who Odysseus will encounter as he ventures to reunite with his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland).
Along with Damon, Hathaway, Holland and Theron, the stacked ensemble includes Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, John Leguizamo and Himesh Patel. Given the robust call sheet, Nolan joked there were too many stars to feasibly bring with him to CinemaCon.
“How do you go about bringing this to a modern audience? Obviously, we start with the cast,” Nolan said. “It’ll be quicker for me to tell you who isn’t in the movie. I would have brought them all here, but the massive weight of extraordinary talent would have collapsed the stage.”
Nolan described a treacherous filming process, which brought them all over the world as they shot across Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland and Scotland.
“This has been an absolute nightmare to film — but in all the right ways,” he said. “We had an amazing time.” He singled out his leading man, referring to Damon as his “partner on this journey” and calling his work “incredible.”
“He was there on the boats, up the mountains, in the caves, in the beating sunshine, sideways rain, wind,” Nolan said. “You’ll be pleased to know how difficult it was. It was meant to be; that’s the nature of this story.”
“The Odyssey” will be the first movie shot entirely with Imax cameras, a feat that Nolan called his “longest-held ambition.” His prior blockbuster, “Oppenheimer,” was particularly huge in Imax, with the premium format contributing a massive 20% of overall box office grosses. Some movie lovers even crossed state lines to see “Oppenheimer” in 70mm Imax, selling out those particularly large auditoriums for weeks. Nolan’s other major films include the “Dark Knight” trilogy, “Inception” and “Interstellar.”
“As a boy, all I wanted to do was tell large-scale [stories] using that technology, putting the audience into the world,” Nolan said in reference to Imax. “And I spent many, many years trying to bring that to fruition, starting with ‘The Dark Knight,’ back when I was in my 30s. We shot the action sequences [in Imax], but we were never able to shoot the entire film. My crew did an incredible job figuring out how to do this for the first time.”
