After starring in dozens of feature films, Matt Damon thought he knew what working on a challenging project would feel like.
Then Christopher Nolan tapped him for โThe Odyssey.โ
In the July 12 episode of Sunday Sitdown, Damon, who plays the titular role of Odysseus, told Willie Geist that Nolan cautioned him about the upcoming epic, saying that it would be difficult to make โ even for an actor with decades of experience.
โHe was like, โThis movieโs gonna be hard.โ And I looked at him like, โIโve made, I donโt know 80 movies,โโ Damon told Willie. โAnd he goes, โNo.โ He goes, โThis movieโs gonna be really hard.โ He, to his credit, was not lying.โ
The two had teamed up before for Oscar-winning films โOppenheimerโ and โInterstellar.โ But for Nolan, bringing one of literatureโs most iconic heroes to life meant filming the ancient story with a unique, old-school approach: no green screens, far flung international locations and IMAX cameras that created their own technical challenges.
The result was a production that โfelt more like an expedition than a movie,โ according to Damon.
Everyone was โpushed to kind of the limit of what they could do,โ he said. โBut the beauty of it is you look around and everyone is going through it with you.โ
Damonโs fellow castmates โ including Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland and Zendaya, among other stars โ were certainly no strangers to ambitious productions, either. But even so, the film pushed the actors into unfamiliar territory.
On top of filming in locations like Greece, Morocco and Scotland with their own natural obstacles, filming only on IMAX posed a unique technical challenge, Damon explained. Because the cameras could only capture about two-and-a-half minutes of footage at a time, the actors had to stop and freeze whenever a scene ran longer so the crew could reload the cameras โ a process that took about five minutes each time.
In a recent Fandango interview, โSpidermanโ actor Tom Holland said โno experience will be as challenging as making [The Odyssey].โ
But as the cast acted, froze and acted again on cliffs and in treacherous waters, Nolan himself was also subject to the challenging environments, Damon said.
โDirecting is by far the hardest job on set,โ he told Willie. โWhen youโre out there kind of in the middle of a storm and youโre soaked and youโre cold and youโre like, โMan, Iโm in discomfort right now,โ it is helpful to turn and see the person with the harder job … looking like a drowned rat, just as cold, just as wet, and never complaining.โ
Plus, given the physical expectations of the film, Damon also had โhis own cross to bearโ while preparing for the movie at 55, he said.
The film, or as Damon would put it, โexpedition,โ is set to hit theaters July 17.
