“Who the hell thought that a movie could be shot here?”

When the team ‘The Odyssey‘ arrived at the Universal studios in Los Angeles after months of filming in Morocco, Greece, Iceland and Scotland, someone said: “How difficult is it going to be to film in a studio now?” Shortly afterward they were enduring Nolan putting some jet engines very close to them. It’s the Nolan method. And with ‘The Odyssey’ the method has included filming in the most inhospitable places.

Who the hell is it going to be? Matt Damon, who plays Ulysses in this adaptation whose premiere will be next July 17, sums up this spirit with the question that was repeated every time they arrived at a new location: “Who the hell thought that a movie could be shot here?” The answer, obviously, was always the same person. It always occurs to him.

I hate sets. Nolan seems to choose impossible locations precisely because they are impossible. According to your own philosophy A director’s job is to look for “magical moments in real places: a real sunset, a real castle.” For example: Nolan wanted to film in the Castello di Santa Caterina, in Sicily, as the setting for Ithaca. To reach the top you had to climb 275 meters along a path that was too narrow for the technical team. The solution was, after ruling out building an alternative road on the back slope, to install a scaffolding platform on the slope capable of supporting 200 people. Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland, of course, had to make the climb every day in “Roman clothing.” Any given Tuesday on a Nolan shoot.

Ninety-one days, six countries, 610 kilometers of film. The Odyssey was filmed between February and August 2025 in six countries: Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland and the United States. The total footage captured on 70mm IMAX film exceeds 610 kilometers and production wrapped nine days ahead of schedule. Despite this, the tour of different countries was, according to Matt Damon, an eternal unfulfilled promise: “Well, it will be easier in Iceland,” they said to each other. And then it rained heavily and it was bitterly cold. When they arrived in Los Angeles, the only environment they expected to be controlled, good old studio Hollywood, Nolan stuck some jet engines in their faces to simulate a storm.

Tied to a boat. One of Matt Damon’s most memorable sequences is the one in which he was tied to a real mast, on a real ship, in the open sea. According to him, these types of challenges did not make him nervous, but rather made it easier for him to prepare: “Knowing that it’s going to be like this is a real gift for an actor because you already know how to prepare. It’s not about arriving on set and being told: ‘Oh, to shoot the scene we’re going to tie you to a mast.'”

Bye bye. All the interviews that Matt Damon has been giving for months to talk about ‘The Odyssey’ have a nostalgic tone. He told GQ that this type of production “is disappearing” and that he was aware of having filmed something that would possibly never be repeated, at least for him, and that that made it “something finite, like a gift.” The counterpoint is that of Nolan himself, who claims that he has been hearing the same thing since ‘Inception’ in 2010, when he was told that filming in seven countries was impossible. “I thought we’d find a way to make it happen,” he says. And until now.