Last year on a vast beach in Morocco, waves were shaking one of humanity’s oldest plot devices.
Christopher Nolan’s version of the Trojan Horse – 35 feet tall and standing on hind legs – was found half-buried in the sand on the Atlantic coast. In the filmmaker’s imagination, the trick of hiding the Greek warriors inside the wooden device was more believable if it looked like a water offering to the gods left by a departing army.
The horse would become a centerpiece in Nolan’s brilliant interpretation of “The Odyssey” and a vessel for some of the film’s most interesting scenes and important symbols. It would be emblazoned on movie posters, erected as a propaganda monument outside theaters and presented in plastic as a $70 popcorn holder.
However, on the beach, it was unclear whether the horse would survive his ordeal. Nolan’s crew watched anxiously as the surf tore their massive prop of fiberglass, wood, and steel to pieces. Later it faced even more difficulties as they worked out how a horse weighing 8,000 pounds could be pulled by the actors over dunes and log rollers with the help of ropes.
As far as the director’s responsibility for all this? “I felt as good as a cucumber in those moments,” Nolan recalled in a recent interview. last twelve movies It gave him confidence that his team could solve the myriad challenges facing his 13th, biggest production of his career.
“The Odyssey” was supposed to capture the grand scale and mythological weight of Homer’s epic poem, the original hero’s journey, which has been the source of Western storytelling for thousands of years. And because Nolan is a filmmaking purist and one of Hollywood’s most high-profile champions of the theatrical experience, his “Odyssey” also had to work on behalf of cinema.
As the first Hollywood feature shot entirely with IMAX film cameras, the film is marketed as an awe-inspiring spectacle from a director whose fans will be disappointed by anything less. Its fantastical elements, from the ambush on Troy led by Matt Damon’s Odysseus to a giant Cyclops who swallows his men in a cave, were created primarily with physical effects for greater visceral impact.
Nolan’s task was to somehow make the myths believable. “My rule for everything in this movie,” he said, “is that we have to give the audience a reason to believe.”
‘The Odyssey’ is performing similarly in theatres. Its The opening weekend grossed $264.1 million worldwide.The biggest global debut ever for a director.
The image of the beach horse first came to Nolan’s mind 20 years ago when he was in the running to direct a film based on another Homeric epic, “The Iliad.” But instead of directing “Troy,” which starred the dazzling Brad Pitt as Achilles, Nolan began the genre-changing Batman trilogy.
After the director’s “Oppenheimer” grossed $976 million in theaters in 2023 and won seven Oscars, Nolan got Universal Pictures to back a $250 million production of “The Odyssey” with A-list actors, which required 5,300 costumes and 91 days of filming in six countries.
Nolan’s biggest leap was in trying to shape a Bronze Age story into an entertaining summer popcorn movie.
In Homer’s “Odyssey,” about the hero’s 10-year quest to return home from the Trojan War, the story zigzags between locations, time periods, and narrators. Odysseus himself does not appear in the book until Part 5.
The story of the “Wooden Horse”, as most translations call it, receives only brief references in Homer’s epic, cited as an example of Odysseus’s cunning. How this actually works is less detailed.
Our collective image of a giant horse on wheels derives from artists’ interpretations over the centuries: a Greek vase from 675 BC. 18th century painting by Italian artist Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. Grand movies in the sword-and-sandal category, such as 1956’s “Helen of Troy,” directed by “Sound of Music” filmmaker Robert Wise.
Nolan made his horse stand on two legs to make it more mobile and massive. He took the pose from a photograph taken of his production designer Ruth de Jong behind a rearing mount.
He buried the horse in the sand behind its haunches as a cinematic homage: “My inspiration was actually the Statue of Liberty at the end of the original ‘Planet of the Apes,'” said the director.
But for all of Nolan’s visual certainty, his crew faced technical unknowns. The director’s method was to work on the specifics of the film’s environments, namely the beaches of Essaouira, Morocco, and the mountain village of Ait Benhaddou, where Troy was built.
“We’re having meetings about how do we keep that thing standing? How heavy is it? How many people do we need to pull it?” recalled cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, who had also shot Nolan’s previous four films, starting with “Interstellar”.
The crew learned to quickly repair the horse damaged by the waves, and found that it took approximately 250 actors and stunt performers to pull the giant prop.
Nolan said, “Once we realized these guys could actually do it, they got excited about it. They would pull this thing right over the dunes. It was incredible.” “So Hoyte and I can just look at it and say, ‘Okay, let’s put a camera on this. Where do you want to shoot?’ “
Van Hoytema said that wrestling with the physics of the school bus-shaped prop was a way for the filmmakers, and thus the audience, to experience something closer to the real world.
The cinematographer said, “Working with Chris has always been like the filmmaking version of method acting.” The horse was “the latest example of his exploration of fandom. To me, it’s a very Nolan-esque icon.”
At a crucial juncture in “The Odyssey,” when Odysseus’ son Telemachus (Tom Holland) searches for news of his missing father, Greek general Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) offers a war story from Troy.
“You have heard the story of the horse,” says Menelaus, “but have you heard it from the inside?”
This line is as if Nolan is prompting his audience to say, look at this: a human pyramid of Greek commandos packed into a dark hollow. They struggle to stay quiet and survive as seawater floods, the horse capsizes and a Trojan sword falls into their hiding place – and at least one body.
To create the sequence, Nolan’s team built a type of silo on the beach, installing small LED lights to mimic sunlight seeping through the shimmer in the horse’s hull. Damon, Bernthal and 25 others crammed into the damp vessel and clung to its cross beams as cold water rushed in and the silo shook.
Nolan and Van Hoytema were also equipped with an IMAX camera to capture the action inside, which was “much like a documentary”, the director said, “a very short, nasty, claustrophobic documentary.”
The Wooden Horse bookends “the odyssey”, in which fragments of time and the plot rotate in on themselves, a signature of Nolan’s films. Like the cataclysmic explosion perpetrated by his hero in “Oppenheimer,” Odysseus’s move unleashes a massacre that horrifies the hero and helps explain his harrowing journey and violent return home.
“It’s exactly what I wanted,” Nolan said of his two-decade-long cinematic vision, “but it’s so much more than that.”