Christopher Nolan has revealed that his upcoming epic The Odyssey will be shorter than Oppenheimer, offering a small reassurance to audiences ahead of what is shaping up to be one of the most ambitious films of the decade.
Speaking to the Associated Press, the Oscar-winning filmmaker confirmed the news simply: “It’s an epic film, as the subject matter demands. But it is shorter.”
Oppenheimer ran to 180 minutes, so The Odyssey will clock in at under three hours, though the exact runtime has yet to be announced.
The scale of the project is extraordinary by any measure.
Nolan has previously revealed to Empire magazine that he shot over two million feet of film across 91 days of production.
The Odyssey also marks the first Hollywood feature to be shot entirely on Imax cameras, a technical challenge that required a newly developed casing called a “blimp” to reduce the cameras’ noise enough to capture dialogue-driven scenes on large-format film.
Matt Damon headlines the film as Odysseus, 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 weight of adapting one of the most celebrated stories in human history.
“There’s a massive amount of pressure. Anyone taking on The Odyssey is taking on the hopes and dreams of people for epic movies everywhere and that comes with a huge responsibility.”
He drew on lessons learned from The Dark Knight trilogy when thinking about how to approach beloved source material.
“What people want from a movie about a beloved story, a beloved set of characters, is they want a strong and sincere interpretation. They want to know that a filmmaker has gone to the mat for it.”
He also explained why he felt the story had never truly been done justice on screen.
“What I saw is that all of this great mythological cinematic work that I had grown up with, Ray Harryhausen movies and other things, I’d never seen that done with the sort of weight and credibility that an A-budget and a big Hollywood, Imax production could do.”
The Odyssey opens in cinemas on 17 July from Universal Pictures.
