Christopher Nolan Shot Nearly 400 Miles of Film for The Odyssey, Spending Four Months on the Open Sea

Christopher Nolan just wrapped his Odyssey. Literally. His adaptation of Homer’s epic finished principal photography after a little over three months, and, because it’s Nolan, he didn’t fake the water. He went out onto the actual ocean and took the cast with him.

Nolan vs. the sea

Speaking to Empire, Nolan said he put this thing through the wringer: more than two million feet of film shot — yes, that’s almost 400 miles of footage — with scenes staged on open water. He also says he personally spent four months at sea to get it done, which is longer than the shoot itself, so you can imagine how much time was sunk into chasing the right conditions and wrangling boats between setups. He called the experience primal, and you can hear the grin and the exhaustion in that choice of words.

"We shot over two million feet of film."

"It was pretty primal."

"...the world pushing back at you."

• Production wrapped after a little over three months
• Nolan says he spent four months at sea
• Over two million feet of film shot (nearly 400 miles)
• Cast playing Odysseus’s crew actually worked on real waves, in real locations
• Release date: July 17, 2026 (in theaters)

Why shooting on water makes filmmakers sweat

Filming on the ocean is the final boss of location work. Weather flips on you, the surface is always moving, and anything that floats wants to drift away from everything else, which makes matching shots a nightmare. It’s such a well-known headache that Steven Spielberg once told Kevin Costner not to shoot Waterworld on the ocean. Costner did anyway, and the production that followed became one of the most notoriously punishing and expensive in movie history. Nolan decided to tackle that same problem head-on — and apparently embrace the pain — because he wanted the world to literally push back on the story.

Which fits the myth

The Odyssey is a tale born of people who treated the sea like a god you don’t turn your back on. Ancient Mediterranean sailors usually hugged the coast so they wouldn’t lose their bearings; going far offshore was dangerous in ways both practical and, to them, supernatural. You could figure out latitude by the stars, sure, but longitude? That puzzle didn’t see a real solution until an accurate measuring instrument arrived in 1773. So when Nolan talks about capturing how brutal those journeys really were — the risk, the faith, the uncharted everything — shooting on the actual ocean is the blunt, sensible choice.

Bottom line: he chased the real thing. We’ll see how that gamble plays on the big screen when The Odyssey sails into theaters on July 17, 2026.