For those who didn’t read Homer’s poem The Odyssey in school, it’s a hero’s journey filled with magic, monsters, gods, and sorceresses. But when writer-director Christopher Nolan and his Oscar-nominated Oppenheimer production designer Ruth De Jong set out to make their star-studded big-screen adaptation (now in theaters), the two were determined to make the fantastical realms look and feel as physically realized as possible. “We both believe in the ethos of practically building an entire set,” De Jong tells Architectural Digest. “And we’re not interested in having actors engage with blue or green screens. We wanted to immerse them completely—as well as the audience.” So, where was The Odyssey filmed?
The epic 91-day production started with a simple objective. “I asked Chris, ‘What are my parameters?’” she recalls. “And he said, ‘The entire world.’” De Jong and her team took that challenge as an invitation to capture the full breadth of the 20-year-long quest that Greek king Odysseus (Matt Damon) endures to return to wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland) after the Trojan War. “We looked at everything from forests in Japan and beaches in Australia,” she says.
She landed on atmospheric locales with texture, scale, and a sense of the unknown—from the rugged cliffs and stormy waters of Scotland (where Odysseus meets Samantha Morton’s Circe) to the black sand beaches of Iceland (which stood in for Hades) to the gorgeous remote coast of Morocco (home to Charlize Theron’s sea nymph Calypso). With additional locations in Greece, Italy, and the United States, production took place across six different countries in total.
Creating Odysseus’s Ithaca
The ambitious undertaking centered around creating Odysseus’s home base of Ithaca. Exteriors of the Bronze Age palace were filmed at the 15th century-era Castle of Santa Caterina situated high atop the island of Favignana in western Sicily. (Yes, the cast and crew really did hike up the 900-foot terrain.) “Once we saw the bones of it, we thought, ‘Wow, what a backdrop this gives us,’” De Jong says. The megaron, or hall in Odysseus’s home where the nefarious suitors such as Robert Pattinson’s Antinous besiege Penelope and vie for the empty throne, was constructed on a three-story-high Los Angeles soundstage that spanned the length of two football fields. “I worked really hard to make all the ins and outs look seamless so you would never guess we were on a set,” she says.
Crafting Odysseus’s treacherous journey home
Each time Odysseus and his fellow warriors sailed the Mediterranean Sea, filming really took place on open water. “We needed a fleet of sea-worthy ships to carry all these actors and rowers and take on the waves,” says De Jong. She sourced the main 115-foot-long vessel from Stavanger, Norway and transformed it into a Greek warship. “We accentuated it with our own ornamentation like bronze decaling on the front and back,” she says, adding that the functioning boat traveled from Scotland to Morocco. “It had quite the journey.”
That level of craftsmanship also went into restaging the momentous Trojan War. Shot primarily in the historic mud-brick village in the Ouarzazate province of Morocco, the set piece “needed to be massive and grand because Troy was like the New York City of the ancient world,” she says. De Jong built two-and-a-half acres worth of sets—including the Temple of Athena and its gates, doors, towers and stairs. Even the surrounding olive trees were brought in to enhance the environment. “We built everything that catches fire in the movie,” she notes. “And then we utilized the village when everyone was weaving through the narrow streets.”
As for the iconic Trojan horse? The hollow wooden statue used to infiltrate Troy’s protective walls was designed and built in LA at the start of production and then shipped overseas. The actors actually packed inside the structure’s belly as it sat half-submerged in freezing water on the beach.
Looking back, De Jong still marvels at the scope of what the team accomplished. “This movie is like the Lawrence of Arabia of our times,” she says. “When I think about what this crew signed up for and said yes to and executed, I just don’t know if it will ever be done again.”