Forty live sheep, thousands of bees at the mouth of a cave and a smell that Christopher Nolan himself defined as “very, very humid and smelly”. To turn Odysseythe new film based on Homer’s poem, the director took the crew to five different continents in less than a year, in what he himself described as “an absolute nightmare, but in the right way”. The budget, around 250 million dollars, says a lot about the ambitions of the project, given that a significant part ended up traveling between Italy, Greece, Iceland, Scotland and Morocco, with the final filming completed in the studios of Universal City, California. The cast includes Matt Damon as Ulysses, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Tom Holland (Telemachus), Zendaya (Athena), Robert Pattinson (Antinous), Charlize Theron (Calypso) and Lupita Nyong’o (in the double role of Helen and Clytemnestra).
The Cyclops cave, among bees and sheep
The bulk of the filming took place in southern Peloponnese, Greece, where Nestor’s cave, near Voidokilia beach, served as a natural setting for the meeting with Polyphemus. Damon said that to enter the cave he and his colleagues had to literally walk through a cloud of bees. Inside, waiting for them, forty real sheep: in the myth they serve Ulysses and his men to escape by clinging to their bellies, and on the set they have left a legacy of a smell that no one seems to have forgotten.
Among the other Greek places chosen are the Venetian castle of Methoni and the acropolis of Acrocorinth, which we can observe in the images below.
@ Methoni Castle
@ Acrocorinth, the ancient acropolis of the city of Corinth / it.wikipedia.org
A Viking to act as Ulysses’ ship
In Scotland the production moved between the Culbin forest, the city of Burghead and the port of Buckie, where the Draken Harald Hårfagre was moored, the largest Viking ship built in the modern era: 35 meters long, built in Norway between 2010 and 2012, adapted to interpret Ulysses’ vessel.
@drakenhh.com
The director also shot scenes in Iceland, a country he has been linked to for some time (he had already set parts of Interstellar and Batman Begins there), but he maintained his usual confidentiality about the exact locations.
The Sicily of mermaids
The Italian parts are set mainly in the Aeolian Islands. The encounter with the mermaids was filmed in the municipality of Lipari, while the port of Pignataro, on the eastern side of the island, became the crew’s base of operations for weeks, with ten vintage sailing ships moored for stage and transport needs.
@ aerial view of the island of Lipari / commons.wikimedia.org
Other shots involved Vulcano, the rocks of Pietra Lunga and Pietra Menalda, Favignana and, across the border, the island of Malta.
Morocco and the controversies over Western Sahara
The first scenes of the film, those set in burning Troy, were shot in Aït Ben Haddou, the fortified UNESCO heritage village in south-central Morocco (pictured).
The crew also worked in Marrakech, Tahannaout and Essaouira. More controversial is the choice of the White Dune, near Dakhla, on the coast of Western Sahara, used to represent Ogygia, the island of Calypso, because the territory has been disputed for decades between Morocco and the Polisario Front, and the FiSahara festival publicly asked Nolan to suspend filming in the area, without receiving a response from the production.
Odyssey arrives in Italian cinemas on July 16th, we leave you with the official trailer:
