Christopher Nolan on Matt Damon Revealing The Odyssey Spoilers; Shares Behind-the-Scenes Stories

Wow, they love you. Christopher Dole. Oh my gosh. Welcome to the show. Congratulations on The Odyssey. It's the biggest movie in the world. Congratulations. The Odyssey you saw when you were five years old, I read somewhere, on stage? I first encountered the story, I think it was about four or five, watching a play at school that the older kids were doing bits of The Odyssey. I remember Odysseus being strapped to the mast for the sirens, and I remember they did some version of the horse. But I think, like a lot of people, it's just kind of in your bones. It's like you've experienced different adaptations of things when you were a kid. It's stuck in your brain and you go, oh yeah. Yeah, all the greatest hits kind of thing. Did you realize, you wouldn't think, I want to be a director at five, right? You wouldn't know what that is. No, no, I was about seven, I think. He waited a couple years. Yeah, smart. Exactly. But you've made some of the biggest movies that we all love. You made Interstellar, Oppenheimer, Inception. The Odyssey is no different. It's a massive undertaking. This was a 91-day shoot across six countries. I've read everything about this. You've worked with thousands of actors on this movie. Yeah, the proverbial cast of thousands, absolutely. It's the first film in history to be shot in IMAX with IMAX cameras. Yes. I first encountered IMAX when I was a kid. I was about 16. I went to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, saw a documentary shot on IMAX. Right then, I was like, if you could ever do a feature film that way, this would be the format to do it on. Finally, I got around to doing it. We first used the cameras on The Dark Knight. So for the introduction to Heath Ledger's Joker, the bank heist at the beginning, the truck flip, that kind of stuff, we shot those things on IMAX. But was it the old IMAX, the loud IMAX camera? Well, it was exactly. You could shoot action with it and everything, but the cameras are incredibly loud because the film is huge and it's running through very fast. So it sounds kind of like a generator or a tractor or something. So you can't do dialogue. So you can't do dialogue, and we've never been able to do dialogue. On this film, I finally called IMAX and I'm like, look, if ever there was a story that you were going to try and do every frame in IMAX, it would be The Odyssey. So can you find some way to help us record the dialogue? And what they did is they built this sort of high-tech box for us called a blimping system, and you put the camera in it and it made it silent. So we could then do all the scenes on IMAX, including the dialogue scenes with the actors. How much film did you use? Two million feet of film. A lot of film, yeah. Wow! Look at this. This right here, you're directing the giant IMAX camera. Oh, my God. And then here's using the blimp technology with the cover, the case, to make it quiet. But it's so big, the camera, that actors can't see. If you're doing a close-up scene, you can't see across from you. Yeah, you can't see the other actor past it because it's this giant box. So you invented another invention. So we invented a mirror system that the camera guys figured out how to use it. You're like a crazy inventor now. Well, my director of photography, Hoyte Van Hoytema, he's a great artist, but he's also kind of an engineer. And so when you set him a challenge, and I said, well, what if we use two mirrors and do some kind of periscope thing, he and his guys found a way to do it. This is kind of the mirror system, if you can see. That's looking into it. So you can act across from each other. That's fantastic. Yeah, so the actors can make real eye contact and actually perform together. Did you ever, ever think to yourself, man, next movie, I want to do an easy one? How about Christopher Nolan rom-com? I think doing a rom-com would be incredibly difficult. I love watching those movies. But no, I think comedy, like people who direct comedy, people who do comedy, I think that's one of the hardest things in the world to make people laugh that way, and particularly the risk of taking. When you make a film, if I show a film to people and maybe they don't respond to bits of it, I'm like, ah, they don't get it. There's no hiding behind that when you do comedy. Yeah, trust me. I would be terrified of doing something like that. But everything on this movie is shot practically. I mean, these ships are actual ships. Where did you get those ships? Stavanger in Norway. We found a Viking ship that had been built exactly according to those ancient specifications. And it was very much the hull shape and the rig that we needed to do a Bronze Age ship. Where are you when the ship is going? Are you on a different ship? I'm on the ship with everybody cast and crew. And Odysseus' men, you know, his group of guys, they had to learn how to row it. They had to learn how to put the sail up. We took the crew. It's a crew of about 26 people needed for that vessel. And we put their crew all in our costumes. They became part of the movie crew, as it were. And Odysseus' guys, the actors, joined in with them. And they figured out how to raise the sail, how to rig it, how to row it, all this stuff. And they were on there for months. Do you feel like you kind of went through an odyssey? I think everybody involved with the film genuinely feels that way. You know, when I first talked to Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus, when I first, yep, he's incredible. And he was the key to it, really. Because I said to him, look, it's going to be hard. And he said, yeah. And I said, no, really hard. And it was. But he valued being there, doing that. He saw every challenge as an opportunity. So everybody else, you know, he's leading from the front. The rest of the cast and all the crew. It reminded us all how lucky we are to do what we do, to be there doing it. And he's just a tremendous leader in that regard. And you have just the greatest reputation. Everyone who's come on the show says how much they love you and how great of a leader you are to everybody. And you just made everyone feel so comfortable that you're so smart and you are directing. But it's a massive thing. What you see in your eyesight, in your brain, is what we see on the screen, right? It's as big as you can think. I mean, there's a scene I don't want to give too much away, but there's a scene where all these ghosts are rising out of the sand. Yeah. And Matt Damon told me they were actual stunt actors buried. Yeah. With, like, snorkels. Very carefully buried. To breathe. What other secrets did he give away? Sorry. I don't want to spoil the ending. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The ship sinks at the end. No, I don't. I'm making that up. That's a different movie. But he said watching that was just something he never could imagine. You would think visual effects would do that. Yeah. But you combine them. The Cyclops is a real actor. Well, everything in that sequence, we used every trick in the book. A lot of different methods. Frightening. From puppetry, animatronics, CG, everything. But it's all guided by my good friend Bill Irwin. Bill Irwin. And Bill had puppeteered the robot, TARS, and provided the voice in Interstellar. So every time that robot moved, you know, he went all around the world, including, you know, way steep in water in Iceland, moving this thing and creating a sense of personality. Because Bill is a great actor. He's also a clown. No, no, I mean an actual clown. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Respect to all the clowns out there. Yeah, yeah. You're speaking to one. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. But not as good as Bill Irwin. He's fantastic. He's amazing. And I called him right away when I knew we were taking this on because I knew that one of the things I learned from my good friend Guillermo del Toro is a monster is never just a monster. And if you can look at these creatures with some kind of individuality, if they can have a presence behind them, a personality, they're going to mean more in the film, whether it's threat or whether it's something you care about, you know, all of that. And so it needed to be guided by a performer. And so everything we did with Cyclops, and there's a lot of different ways we took it on, Bill is behind all of it, you know. It was frightening. It's unbelievably scary. It's frightening. But also, the sets aren't even sets. Were you in, like, a real cave? We were in a real cave. And my production designer, Ruth de Jong, you know, when we were scouting, we found this giant cave. And she said to me, well, let's just film it here. And I was like, well, I've done a lot of cave movies. We always build the cave. We're going to wind up building the cave. Batman, anyone? Exactly. Hello. I think I've seen a bat cave or two. Yeah, yeah, hello. And, you know, eventually Ruth just convinced me. It's like, no, this really could work. We had an incredibly high ceiling, a hole in the top so we could rig down through it and, you know, bring all of our stuff in. And so every morning, everyone would hike up this, the path that you see in the film. Like, that's the approach to it, you know, where they go up. That's how you get to set. That's how you get to set, just like Odysseus got there and into the cave. And then, yeah, everything that happens in the cave really happened in the cave. Yeah. We've had a bunch of cast on the show. We've been very lucky. And they've all said, oh, my gosh, getting the call from Christopher Nolan is an immediate yes. Have you ever gotten a no? Have I ever gotten a no? Yeah, I have. Besides me when I said I didn't want to do Batman. No, the only no I would cop to is David Bowie for the prestige. He was my great idol and everything, and I thought he'd be perfect to play Nikola Tesla. And we sent him the script and everything. He said no. And first time really ever, I went back and said, can I just go and meet him? Can I try and convince him in the room? And they agreed. And I hastily wrote him a better speech for his first appearance, turned up with a new script, and, you know, basically begged and got him to do it. So I turned the no into a yes. Yes! But you did get a no from the coolest kid in school. Exactly.