There is an image that is worth more than any official synopsis, and it is that of a fifty-five year old director, sitting in the Noos studio next to Alberto Angela, who recounts his first memory of the Odyssey: he was four or five years old, he was at school, he watched a play of the Trojan horse and the sirens who attempted to seduce Ulysses. Forty years later that child directed two hundred and fifty million dollars of budget to return the same scene to the big screen. This, aired on Sunday 12 July on Rai1 in the episode that reopened the fourth season of the popularisation programme, was enough to understand how much Christopher Nolan considers the Homeric poem not just one subject among many, but the very matrix of storytelling.
To Alberto Angela, who interviewed him together with Matt Damon, protagonist of the film as Ulyssesthe British director made a confession that no one expected from a Hollywood blockbuster of this magnitude: his true sources of inspiration are not the colossal American historians, but two Italian authors apparently very distant from his world, Sergio Leone and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
The return of Ulysses to Ithaca, Nolan explained, was meant to evoke Leone’s cinema, the suspended tension of “Once upon a time there was the West“, that unnatural silence that falls on the farm an instant before the danger manifests itself. E the method with which he constructed the film – shot entirely outside the studios, in real places, with real sailors who taught the cast to row and hoist the sails – takes you straight back to Pasolini of the “Gospel according to Matthew“, that way of putting the camera on your shoulder and discovering reality as it reveals itself, keeping together the most intimate detail and the epic dimension of the whole.
It is no coincidence that an important part of this semi-documentary experience passed through Italy, and in particular Sicily. When Angela asked her guests where they had felt Homer’s presence closest, Nolan didn’t hesitate: Favignana, the Egadi island where the crew spent weeks filming on the beaches and along the coasts, in a connection with the Mediterranean that the director defined as profound. It is there, and in Lipari, that one of the most famous episodes of the poem was reconstructed, the encounter with the sirens, while to the north-east of Panarea, between the rocks of Pietra Lunga and Pietra Menalda, Nolan found his version of the “wandering cliffs” of the twelfth canto. Ten vintage sailing ships moored in the port of Pignataro, on the eastern side of Liparibecame for weeks the base of operations for a crew that included Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron and Lupita Nyong’o: a rarely seen ensemble gathered around a single project.
The rest of the world of Ulysses was assembled elsewhere, with logistics that alone speak for the ambition of the project: the cave of Polyphemus reconstructed in a natural cavity in the Peloponnese, near the beach of Voidokilia, where Damon said he made his way through thousands of bees at the mouth to shoot the scenes with a flock of forty sheep; the walls of Aït Ben Haddou, in Morocco, transformed into the burning Troy; the dunes of Western Sahara lent to the island of Calypso, a choice that raised controversy due to the disputed sovereignty of the territory; the Scottish coasts of Burghead and Buckie, where the Draken Harald Hårfagre was moored, the largest Viking ship ever rebuilt in modern times, which became Ulysses’ ship; and finally Iceland, a land to which Nolan has been linked since “Interstellar” and “Batman Begins”. Filming began on February 25, 2025 and closed eight months later on August 8before final completion at Universal studios in California.
Then there is a technical choice which, more than any statement, says how much Nolan considers this film an act of cultural resistance: “Odyssey” is the first feature film in history shot entirely on IMAX 70 mm film, the highest resolution analogue format ever used for an entire work. The estimates released by IMAX they speak of visual information between fourteen and sixteen thousand pixels for a single color in each frame, a quantity of detail that no digital machine can fully replicate today.
Behind this choice there is an almost obstinate refusal of shortcuts: film that must be cut and glued by hand, noisy cameras that required custom-made soundproofing enclosures so as not to ruin the audio of the actors’ whispers, a negative that weighs as a physical as well as artistic commitment. In Italy, however, only five theaters are equipped to screen this full version – the Arcadia of Melzo, the Lumière of Bologna, the Cinergia of Conegliano, the Metropolitan of Naples and the 4 Fontane of Rome – a detail that tells how the technology chosen by Nolan remains, after all, a rare and almost liturgical experience, reserved for those willing to seek it.
But if you stop at the technique you lose the heart of what Nolan said Noos. To Angela’s question about the meaning of adapting a three-thousand-year-old text to the present, the director responded with a simple yet radical idea: it is not a question of faithfully following the original, but of going through it, reading it several times, letting it settle, and then writing relying above all on memory. In doing so, he discovered that the values of the Odyssey, starting from the principle of treating others as one would like to be treated, are not at all far from the present. Matt Damon added a piece that goes beyond film promotion: a war veteran on the crew told him that The Odyssey remains the most accurate text ever written on PTSDthe oldest testimony of a man who returns home changed by violence and struggles to recognize what he left behind.
This is where Nolan’s film moves away from simple spectacle to touch something deeper, the same ground on which the‘Odyssey has been walking for twenty-seven centuriesthrough Dante which places Ulysses in his own Hell, Joyce who titles “Ulysses” the novel that reinvents the novel. The return to Ithaca is not the end of the journey but the beginning of a new test, because the home you find is never the one you left behind, and those who return must learn to recognize a world that has changed along with themselves. It is the same truth that runs through every exile, every migration, every return from a war or an illness, every distance that time digs between those who leave and those who remain waiting, weaving and unraveling like Penelope the same web of patience. Nolan seems to have understood this well, which is perhaps why he chose to title his film “Odyssey” and not “Ulysses“: a precise philological signal, the desire to return to the original text instead of its infinite subsequent reworkings.
On July 16th, when “Odyssey” arrives in Italian cinemasaudiences will not find just one of the colossal most expensive in the history of cinemawith a cast that brings together some of the biggest names in Hollywood. He will find, if the film keeps the promises that emerged from the first screenings for the international press – which speak of a sequence never attempted before by Nolan and of a spectacle capable of standing comparison with Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” – a story that puts the oldest and simplest question that cinema can ask at the center: what does returning home really mean?.
