MOVIE NEWS – One of The Odyssey’s most famous trials was not treated as a comfortable soundstage illusion. Matt Damon was tied to a real mast, on a real boat, on the open ocean, because Christopher Nolan wanted the Sirens sequence to hit with actual physical force.
At a time when blockbuster movies make extensive use of special effects, and when more filmmakers are embracing the possibilities afforded by generative AI, Christopher Nolan still likes to keep it real. The director is known for preferring practical effects, and he is taking that instinct to the next level in The Odyssey. The movie follows Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, and his long struggle to get home to Ithaca after fighting in the Trojan War.
“Chris doesn’t fake anything,” Tom Holland, who plays Odysseus’ son Telemachus, told GQ. “Everything’s real. Everything you’re reacting to is what he wants your visceral human response to.” Robert Pattinson, who plays one of the suitors trying to court Odysseus’ wife Penelope, played by Anne Hathaway, gave a specific example from a scene where his character had to react to a loud sound in the distance, even though he could barely see what was happening. “I can’t see anything, apart from the camera, and I was just asking Chris, because I’m supposed to react to this noise and I’m like, ‘Are you going to cue the noise? Where should I look?’ And he said, ‘Oh no, we’ve got Damon doing it.’ And Matt and Anne Hathaway are doing the entire scene about 200 feet away and I can’t even see them. And he’s walking and talking just to kick a bowl. F***ing crazy.”
Unsurprisingly, Damon himself has the wildest stories. Even if you have never read The Odyssey, you probably know a couple of its most famous moments, including the scene in which Odysseus is lashed to the mast of his own ship so he can resist the song of the Sirens. Because this is a Christopher Nolan movie, a moment like that was not going to be reduced to a safe studio setup with digital water and imaginary wind added later. “He writes everything out in the script,” Damon said. “There are no secrets. If you read the script and you’re working on the movie, you know exactly what you have to do that day because it’s all very clear. And so if you write the Sirens when…. It’s in the story. He gets lashed to the mast and he has a f***ing existential crisis. You’re going to do that and you’re going to be on the open ocean and you’re going to be on a real boat and you’re going to be tied to a real mast and that’s going to happen.”
For Damon, there is also a real gift in knowing that as an actor, because it means the ordeal is not sprung on him without warning. “But there’s a real gift as an actor to knowing that, right? Because you know what to prepare for. It’s not like you get to work and you’re on a soundstage and they go, ‘Oh, we’re shooting the scene where you’re tied to the mast,’ and suddenly you’re tied to the mast.” Nolan may demand a lot from his actors, but the work is clearly mapped out before they step onto the set, or in this case onto the boat.
As Nolan revealed to Esquire in November 2025, he really did spend four months shooting scenes for The Odyssey on the open sea. Sometime during that shoot, Damon was presumably tied to a mast and screamed at his crewmates to release him, just like Odysseus does in Homer’s story, while actual seawater sprayed in his face. A newly released behind-the-scenes look at The Odyssey shows a little bit of Nolan at work on the water around the 0:44 mark. The Odyssey will be released in theaters on July 17, and there is still time before then to catch up on some other great classic epics, though Nolan’s version sounds less like a polite literary adaptation than mythology dragged onto a real boat and forced to fight the sea.
Source: MovieWeb
