A new feature piece at TIME Magazine has gone into detail about Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” with the director talking about some of the key creative choices he made for the film.
With it come all sorts of new factoids about the movie. Amongst them:
– Bill Irwin, who voiced and puppeteered the robot in “Interstellar,” was hired to guide the performance of the mythical Cyclops.
– Odysseus’s loyal dog Argos “has been promoted from a cameo to a bit player”.
– More time is given to scenes between Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his son Telemachus (Tom Holland).
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– Samantha Morton is playing Circe and “gets a humanising update” with an “unsettling yet sympathetic performance”.
– Lupita Nyong’o is not only playing Helen of Troy, but also her sister Clytemnestra with the characters married to Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) and Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) respectively. The latter marriage is “acrimonious” at best.
– The Sirens will indeed appear and will essentially “psycho-analyze him [Odysseus] through song”.
– Scenes set in Hades were shot during Iceland’s white nights.
– The scenes where Odysseus encounters the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) were shot on a beach in Morocco where it was so windy the sand kept getting into people’s eyes.
– Composer Ludwig Göransson was told not to use an orchestra because they “didn’t exist back then”. He rented 35 bronze gongs of varying sizes, experimented, and recorded them with synths.
– Nolan explained rapper Travis Scott’s appearance in the film as a bard: “I cast him because I wanted to nod towards the idea that this story has been handed down as oral poetry, which is analogous to rap.”
– The choice of everything from boats to weapons to armour was all about drawing on records, not just from the Bronze Age but also Homer’s era centuries later. So, “the oldest depictions of Homeric characters tend to be depicted in the manner of people living in Homer’s time” which gives Nolan leeway for some anachronistic choices.
For the full article, head over to Time.com. “The Odyssey” releases in cinemas on July 17th.
