Christopher Nolan said it would be at least three years before he made another film as the scale of The Odyssey had pushed him and his crew to “the limits” of their stamina.
The Oscar winner’s latest film, The Odyssey, an adaptation of Homer’s Greek epic, follows Odysseus’s long journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War as he battles monsters, gods and mythical foes while his wife Penelope fends off suitors and their son Telemachus searches for him.
Matt Damon plays Odysseus, Anne Hathaway Penelope and Tom Holland Telemachus. The ensemble cast also includes Robert Pattinson as the suitor Antinous, Zendaya as Athena, Samantha Morton as Circe, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy. Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, John Leguizamo, Himesh Patel, Elliot Page, Bill Irwin, and Mia Goth feature as well.
In a new interview, the Inception director confirmed that his fans would need to wait “at least” three years before he made a new film. It took Nolan three years to release The Odyssey after his previous film, Oppenheimer.
“I definitely hit the limits of my own stamina and everybody’s stamina, I think,” he told Today’s Kaylee Hartung.
“I mean, it’s The Odyssey, of course it should be difficult. We are not doing the job right making a film of The Odyssey if it doesn’t seem difficult.”
He had spent about two decades considering how to adapt the Greek epic before deciding the time was right, Nolan said.
“Now, I can get something made that I couldn’t otherwise get made. For me to take on Greek mythology on a big modern cinematic canvas is something that hasn’t been done.”
The Odyssey is the first feature film to be shot entirely on IMAX film cameras, made possible after the director worked with IMAX to develop lighter, quieter equipment capable of handling dialogue-heavy scenes.
The Odyssey, released on 17 July, is Nolan’s highest-ranked film on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, beating The Dark Knight, Interstellar, and The Prestige.
The Odyssey boasts a score of 95 per cent on the review aggregator, one per cent more than indie psychological drama Memento, Batman Begins and its sequel The Dark Knight.
In her five-star review of the new movie, The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey described it as “Nolan’s best work to date”.
Nolan’s “stamp is all over the film – this is intellectual, brutalist, muscular Hollywood fare – yet it never wavers in its commitment to, and comprehension of, its source text,” she wrote. “There is not a single decision here that’s been thoughtlessly made, nor that I imagine Nolan himself couldn’t easily defend, much to the imagined chagrin of certain lawless parts of the internet.”
The Odyssey is enjoying a record-breaking theatrical debut with a $264.1m worldwide opening, including $124.5m in the US and Canada, making it the biggest global opening of Nolan’s career.
The Odyssey is screening in cinemas now.