Sir Christopher Nolan nearly directed Troy.
The 55-year-old filmmaker is to helm a movie adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, but Nolan has revealed he had gone through Greek mythology years prior with Brad Pitt’s 2004 historical epic before director Wolfgang Petersen ultimately got the job.
Speaking with Empire magazine, he said: “Wolfgang had developed it, and so when the studio decided not to proceed with his superhero movie Batman Vs Superman], he wanted it back. Fair enough.”
“But at the end of the day, it was a world that I was very interested to explore. So it’s been at the back of my mind for a very long time,” the TV industry icon added.
He further mentioned, “Certain images, particularly. How I wanted to handle the Trojan horse, things like that.”
Nolan added he had been interested in Greek mythology from an early age.
He recounted: “I remember seeing a school play of Ulysses [the Latin variant of Odysseus] when I was five or six years old.”
The Dark Night moviemaker continued, “The older kids were doing it. I remember the Sirens and him being strapped to the mast and things like that. But that’s barely a conscious memory.”
“I think it’s in all of us, really. And when you start to break down the text and adapt it, you find that all of these other films – and all the films I’ve worked on – you know, they’re all from The Odyssey,” Nolan added.
Turning his attention to The Odyssey, Nolan said he used “over two million feet of film” on the movie.
The Oppenheimer director said: “I’ve been out on it for the last four months. We got the cast who play the crew of Odysseus’ ship out there on the real waves, in the real places. And yeah, it’s vast and terrifying and wonderful and benevolent, as the conditions shift.”
“We really wanted to capture how hard those journeys would have been for people. And the leap of faith that was being made in an unmapped, uncharted world,” Sir Christopher Nolan concluded.
The Odyssey also stars Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Mia Goth, Jon Bernthal, Charlize Theron, Anne Hathaway and Elliot Page.
