Matt Damon Reveals Christopher Nolan Had No Plan for The Odyssey’s Best Scene

Christopher Nolan building a Trojan horse from scratch and then saying, basically, we will wing it? That actually happened. And Matt Damon was there for it.

Nolan, the Trojan horse, and a rare shrug

Damon told Empire that before shooting The Odyssey's big Trojan horse sequence, he asked Nolan how the team was going to pull off the movie's largest set piece. The answer was not the usual Nolan hyper-precision.

"I don't know. We'll just get in there and figure it out."

Now, to be clear, Damon says Nolan had the whole thing mapped out — the guy is famous for meticulous drafts. But the way he plays it on set, he is not coy. If the script says Odysseus is tied to the mast hearing the Sirens, you are going to see it. If it says there is a Cyclops and you are running for your life, you are running for your life. And yes, that Trojan horse was built for real, from the ground up, because of course it was.

Some last-minute nerves would make sense given the scale: The Odyssey shot for 91 days and chewed through more than 2 million feet of film. That is a lot of IMAX-ready muscle to move around.

This one is Nolan in full summer mode

Oppenheimer was a phenomenon, but not exactly popcorn-and-fireballs. Damon says The Odyssey is that big summer spectacle — the kind you want to see with a crowd — and calls making it the best experience of his career. Expect something that is both massively entertaining and genuinely mythic, which tracks with Nolan swinging for the fences.

Nolan almost made Troy first… then didn't

Fun bit of history: more than 20 years ago, right after Memento and Insomnia, Nolan was offered Brad Pitt's Troy. That would have been his first studio-size epic. He passed, and the dominoes fell toward Batman Begins and the Dark Knight trilogy instead.

Cut to now, and he is finally tackling Homer's epic head-on. He told Empire that he looks for gaps in what movies have tackled before, and he has never seen the larger-than-life mythology he grew up on — think Ray Harryhausen and company — done with the full weight and credibility of a modern A-budget, IMAX-scale production. The Odyssey is him aiming to fill that gap, and it is being positioned as his biggest blockbuster yet.

Quick hits

• The Trojan horse was constructed practically, not a digital build.
• Production ran 91 days and used over 2 million feet of film.
• Damon name-checks Sirens and a Cyclops chase as the kind of set pieces Nolan is not shying away from.
• Damon previously worked with Nolan on Interstellar and led Oppenheimer, which was a summer release but not a traditional summer blockbuster.
• Nolan turned down directing Troy in the early 2000s after Memento and Insomnia; he then committed to The Dark Knight trilogy.
• For context, Wolfgang Petersen's Troy sits at 7.3 on IMDb, 53% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and 74% with audiences.
• More 70mm screens are being added ahead of release to showcase this one at full scale.
• The Odyssey is set to hit theaters on July 17, 2026.

Bottom line: Nolan is going mythic with real-deal scale, Damon is all-in, and that Trojan horse sequence should be a monster on a giant screen.