On a vast beach in Morocco last year, waves were pummeling one of humanity’s oldest plot devices.
Christopher Nolan’s version of the Trojan Horse—35 feet tall and rearing on hind legs—was half buried in sand on the Atlantic coast. In the filmmaker’s imagination, the trick of hiding Greek warriors inside a wood contraption was more believable if it looked like a waterlogged offering to a god left by a departed army.
The horse would become a centerpiece in Nolan’s moonshot interpretation of “The Odyssey,” and a vessel for some of the movie’s most riveting scenes and important symbolism. It would be emblazoned on movie posters, erected as a promotional monument outside theaters and rendered in plastic as a $70 popcorn holder.
On the beach, however, it wasn’t clear if the horse would survive its scenes. Nolan’s crew watched anxiously as the surf tore pieces off their colossal prop of fiberglass, wood and steel. Later it took further beatings as they worked out how the 8,000-pound horse could be dragged over dunes and log rollers by actors with ropes.
As for the director responsible for it all? “I’m feeling cool as a cucumber in those moments,” Nolan recalled in a recent interview. Twelve previous movies gave him the confidence that his team could solve the myriad challenges posed by his 13th, the biggest production of his career.
“The Odyssey” had to conjure the grand scale and mythic weight of Homer’s epic poem, the original hero’s journey, which has been a wellspring 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 needed to deliver on behalf of cinema itself.
As the first Hollywood feature shot entirely with IMAX film cameras, the movie has been marketed as an awe-inducing spectacle from a director whose fans would be disappointed with anything less. Its fantastical elements, from the ambush on Troy led by Matt Damon’s Odysseus to a giant cyclops that gobbles his men in a cave, were created primarily with physical effects for a more visceral impact.
Nolan’s mandate was to somehow make myths plausible. “My rule of thumb for everything in this movie,” he said, “we have to give the audience reasons to believe.”
“The Odyssey” has been doing just that in theaters. Its opening weekend generated $264.1 million worldwide , the largest global debut ever for the director.
The image of the beached horse first lodged in Nolan’s mind over 20 years ago when he was in the running to direct a movie based on another Homeric epic, “The Iliad.” But instead of helming “Troy,” starring a glistening Brad Pitt as Achilles, Nolan embarked on a genre-shifting Batman trilogy.
After the director’s “Oppenheimer” raked in $976 million in theaters in 2023 and won seven Oscars, Nolan got Universal Pictures to back a $250 million production of “The Odyssey” stacked with A-list actors, requiring 5,300 costumes and spanning 91 days of filming in six countries.
Nolan’s biggest leap was in trying to shape a tale from the Bronze Age into a gripping summer popcorn movie.
In Homer’s “Odyssey,” about the hero’s 10-year quest to return home from the Trojan War, the story zigzags among locations, time periods and narrators. Odysseus himself doesn’t appear in the book until part 5.
The story of the “Wooden Horse,” as most translations call it, gets only brief references in Homer’s epic, cited in passing as an example of Odysseus’s cunning. Details of how it actually worked are few.
Our collective image of a humongous horse on wheels came down from centuries’ worth of artists’ interpretations: A Greek vase from 675 BCE. Paintings from the 18th century by Italian artist Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. Grandiose movies in the swords-and-sandals category, such as 1956’s “Helen of Troy,” directed by the “Sound of Music” filmmaker Robert Wise.
Nolan stood his horse on two legs to make it more dynamic and monumental. He borrowed its pose from a photograph taken of his production designer, Ruth De Jong, on the back of a rearing mount.
He sank the horse in sand past its haunches as a cinematic homage: “My inspiration was really the Statue of Liberty at the end of the original ‘Planet of the Apes,’ ” the director said.
But for all of Nolan’s visual certainty, his crew faced technical unknowns. The director’s method was to work out the specifics in the film’s environments, namely the beaches of Morocco’s Essaouira and in the mountain village of Aït Benhaddou, where Troy was constructed.
“We’re having meetings about how do we keep the thing standing? How heavy is it? How many people do we need to drag it?” recalled cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, who also shot four previous Nolan films starting with “Interstellar.”
The crew learned to quickly repair the horse damaged by waves, and discovered it took about 250 actors and stunt performers to haul the giant prop.
“Once we realized these guys could do it for real, they got excited about it. They would just drag this thing right up over the dunes. It was incredible,” Nolan said. “So Hoyte and I are able to just look at it and go, ‘OK, let’s put a camera on this. Where do you want to shoot from?’ ”
Wrestling with the physics of a school bus-sized prop was a way for the filmmakers—and thus the audience—to experience something closer to a real world, van Hoytema said.
“Working with Chris is always a little bit like the filmmaking version of method acting,” the cinematographer added. The horse was the latest example of “his pursuit of plausibility. For me, it’s a very Nolan-esque icon.”
At one turning point in “The Odyssey,” as Odysseus’s son Telemachus (Tom Holland) searches for news of his missing father, the Greek general Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) offers up a war tale from Troy.
“You hear the story of the horse,” Menelaus says, “but did you hear it from the inside?”
The line is like Nolan nudging his audience to say, check this out: a human pyramid of Greek commandos packed into a dark hollow. They struggle to stay silent and survive as seawater floods in, the horse tips over and a Trojan sword plunges into their hiding place—and at least one body.
To create the sequence, Nolan’s team built a sort of silo on the beach, rigging it with minuscule LED lights to mimic sunlight leaking through chinks in the horse’s hull. Damon, Bernthal and up to 25 others crammed into the dank vessel and clung to its cross beams as cold water pumped in and the silo rocked.
Nolan and van Hoytema were in there, too, armed with an IMAX camera to capture the action inside “pretty much like a documentary,” the director said, “a very small, grubby, claustrophobic documentary.”
The Wooden Horse bookends “The Odyssey,” in which time fragments and the plot circles back on itself, a signature of Nolan’s films. Like the cataclysmic detonation set off by his protagonist in “Oppenheimer,” Odysseus’s ruse unleashes a slaughter that scars the hero and helps explain his tortuous journey and violent homecoming.
“It’s exactly what I wanted,” Nolan said of his cinematic vision two decades in the making, “but it’s so much more.”
