Christopher Nolan revealed that his next epic The Odyssey will be shorter than Oppenheimer, offering a little comfort to audiences ahead of what is shaping up to be one of the most ambitious films of the decade.
Addressing the Associated Pressthe Oscar-winning filmmaker simply confirmed the news: “It’s an epic film, as the subject demands. But it’s shorter.”
Oppenheimer lasted 180 minutes, so The Odyssey it will last less than three hours, although the exact runtime has not yet been announced.
The scale of the project is extraordinary in every way.
Nolan previously revealed to Empire Magazine that he shot more than two million feet of film in 91 days of production.
The Odyssey also marks the first Hollywood feature film shot entirely with Imax cameras, a technical challenge that required a newly developed body called a “blimp” to reduce camera noise enough to capture dialogue scenes on large-format film.
Matt Damon headlines film as Ulysses, reuniting with Nolan after Interstellar And Oppenheimer.
Tom Holland plays his son Telemachus, with a cast that also includes Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron and Jon Bernthal.
Nolan spoke candidly about the importance of adapting one of the most famous stories in human history.
“There is enormous pressure. Anyone who takes on The Odyssey “supports people’s hopes and dreams for epic films all over the world and with that comes a huge responsibility.”
He took lessons learned from The Black Knight trilogy while thinking about how to approach the beloved source material.
“What people want from a film about a beloved story, a beloved set of characters, is that they want a strong, heartfelt interpretation. They want to know that a filmmaker went down to the wire for that.”
He also explained why he felt the story was never really done justice on screen.
“What I saw was that all these great mythological works of cinema that I grew up with, the Ray Harryhausen films and other things, I had never seen that done with the kind of weight and credibility that an A-budget, big Hollywood Imax production could have.”
THE Odyssey hits theaters July 17 from Universal Pictures.
