Christopher Nolan has revealed that his upcoming epic The Odyssey will be shorter than Oppenheimer, offers a little reassurance to audiences ahead of what promises to be one of the most ambitious films of the decade.
Speaking to Associated Pressthe Oscar-winning filmmaker confirmed the news simply: “It’s an epic film, as the subject demands. But it’s shorter.”
Oppenheimer ran to 180 minutes, then The Odyssey will clock in at under three hours, although the exact running time has yet to be announced.
The scope of the project is in any way extraordinary.
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 shot entirely on Imax cameras, a technical challenge that required a newly developed enclosure called a “blimp” to reduce the cameras’ noise enough to capture dialogue-driven scenes on large-format film.
Matt Damon leads 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 famous stories in human history.
“There’s enormous pressure. Anyone who puts on weight The Odyssey takes on the hopes and dreams of epic movies everywhere, and with that comes a great responsibility.”
He drew on experience 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 that 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 really been done justice on screen.
“What I saw is that all this amazing mythological film work that I had grown up with, Ray Harryhausen films and other things, I had never seen it done with the kind of weight and credibility that an A-budget and a big Hollywood, Imax production could do.”
The Odyssey opens in theaters July 17 from Universal Pictures.
