New Delhi: Hollywood star Matt Damon says he didn't need much convincing to say yes to Christopher Nolan's next feature adventure, The Odyssey, which adapts the extraordinary tale of Homer's Trojan War hero Odysseus.
Damon, the star of the Bourne and Ocean's franchises, graduates to a leading role in a Nolan film after featuring in Interstellar and then playing a supporting role in the filmmaker's previous directorial venture, Oppenheimer.
"I said yes before he even told me what it was. Chris said, 'Don't you want to hear the pitch?' I said, 'Okay, sure.' And he said two words: 'The Odyssey'," Damon said in a statement.
The film, which is set to open in theatres worldwide on July 17 and in India on July 16, will see Damon play Odysseus, the legendary King of Ithaca, who embarks on a long and perilous journey home following the Trojan War.
Throughout his voyage, he is forced to confront the whims of gods, mythological monsters and trials that stretch both his cunning and his humanity to the breaking point.
Damon leads an ensemble cast that also includes Anne Hathaway as his wife Penelope, Tom Holland as Telemachus and Robert Pattinson as the villainous Antinous.
Nolan said he approached Damon to headline the movie because he needed someone "who had extraordinary talent and an incredible connection with the audience".
"He was just in the right place in his life and career to play this part. Odysseus is somebody with great imagination and wisdom, but he has a weary quality, too. It is a mature role with a lot of complexity to it and very difficult to play, but Matt really sunk his teeth into it."
The Oscar-winning director said the movie was "unthinkable" without Damon, who won his first Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay alongside fellow actor-writer Ben Affleck for Good Will Hunting when he was 27.
"I needed someone who was not just willing to go on a rigorous journey but help lead it. Matt brings such positive energy to everything he does. He is able to channel the angst of difficult shooting circumstances into a character. He is an incredible motivator and a wonderful example to the rest of the cast and crew," Nolan said about his lead star.
Damon, on his part, was awestruck by the filmmaker's adaptation of the mythological tale.
"It reminded me of his script for Oppenheimer, because that film was also drawn from a dense, substantial book, and he found an amazing way to distil it to its essentials without losing any of its plot, themes or richness.
"Chris has restructured the narrative in an artful way that gives it real economy, and the themes he emphasises give it a distinct identity and meaning. But it is still very much Homer's Odyssey. It also has a strong emotional core and through-line that feels deeply personal. There is a universality in its specificity that I think will move anyone. The themes certainly resonated with my own life. It was an incredible piece of writing."
Nolan also spoke about his decision to shoot the entire film in the IMAX format, making it the first feature film to do so.
"As a kid, I went to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and saw Omnimax films.
"I would also go to the Great America theme park outside Chicago and see IMAX films. Every time I watched one of those films, it was the same excitement for me. I would also wonder: What if you did a fictional film that way? Not just a great documentary, like the incredible work directors like Toni Myers did about the space programme. What if you made a Hollywood action film that way? And so, for me, it has been a long-held dream since I was about 16, to do an entire film in IMAX."
With IMAX, Nolan started by filming small sequences for his 2008 hit The Dark Knight and gradually expanded its use in subsequent films, culminating in The Odyssey.
"We have always been guinea pigs for IMAX," Nolan said.
Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, who worked with Nolan on Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet and Oppenheimer, said an IMAX camera has remarkable depth and resolution.
"It is a camera that does not lie… It is a masterpiece of organic image creation," he said.
Nolan said the biggest hurdle to shooting an entire feature with IMAX film cameras had long been the noise they generated, which made filming close-up dialogue scenes difficult because actors had to raise their voices to be heard.
Ahead of his 2020 film Tenet, Nolan and van Hoytema worked with IMAX engineers to develop a sound-dampening casing, dubbed "the blimp", but it still failed to sufficiently reduce the camera noise.
While writing The Odyssey, Nolan said he challenged IMAX engineers to revisit the problem, believing he was finally making the film he had always envisioned in the format.
Their efforts resulted in a next-generation IMAX camera known as "The Keighley", named after late IMAX Chief Quality Officer David Keighley and his wife Patricia, longtime advocates of the format.
"I went to IMAX, without telling them what the film was. And I said, 'I know you guys are building new cameras. If you can find a way to encase them so that I can record sound with them, we are going to commit to making the entire new film with IMAX cameras.' And they stepped up to that," Nolan said.
The director, Damon and Tom Holland are set to visit Mumbai over the weekend for the India premiere of the movie.
The Odyssey also stars Lupita Nyong'o, Samantha Morton, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie and John Leguizamo.
