The Odd Squad

How Hollywood’s three leading-est men led a cast and crew of hundreds to help Nolan create his most epic and ambitious blockbuster to date.

- By ZACH BARON

MATT DAMON, ROBERT PATTINSON, TOM HOLLAND & CHRISTOPHER NOLAN on the making of ‘THE ODYSSEY’

In western Sicily, there is an island called Favignana, which is popular with Italian tourists in the summer and used to be called Aegusa, or “goat island”. Odysseus and his crew are thought to have stopped there before their ill-fated encounter with the Cyclops. These days the island hosts a defunct tuna fishery and a ruined castle, the Castello di Santa Caterina, which the director Christopher Nolan found himself hiking up to, 900 feet straight into the air, one day late in 2024. Nolan, in his films, often operates in heightened or alternate worlds: Inception, Interstellar, Tenet, the Batman trilogy. But he is also, more than perhaps any other director working in the blockbuster genre, a devotee of the real. On some level, he thinks of his job as one long attempt to find “some moment of magic in a real place—a real sunset, a real castle.”

Santa Caterina is a real castle. One perfect for the movie version of Ithaca, the island home of Odysseus and one of the most important locations in Nolan’s newest film, The Odyssey. But it also presented Nolan and his production designer, Ruth De Jong, with one notable problem. The path on which they would trek up to it, which zigzagged up the hillside and took 45 minutes to summit, was paved but not wide enough for the armada of people, equipment and trucks that a Christopher Nolan film set requires. It wasn’t possible to widen it, Nolan told me. So Nolan’s line producer started talking to local authorities about what to do and they decided: build a new road in the back. “We would have used 4x4s to get the whole crew up,” Nolan said. “And then fairly late in the process, it started to become apparent that this road was never going to materialise.”