Oscar Winner Matt Damon on the Grueling Experience of Making ‘The Odyssey’

Matt Damon has made a lot of movies. He has never described one the way he described The Odyssey.

"It was the best experience of my life," Damon told Rich, "because it was the hardest. And it was the hardest for everybody."

That second half is the whole story. Christopher Nolan shoots everything in camera, which means if you see a ship in the background, there is a ship out there. No CGI. Damon said it was done the way it would have been done 80 years ago, except on a format that has never been attempted, because the entire film is IMAX.

"The movie kind of felt more like an expedition than a movie," he said.

The proof is a 60-foot puppet, and Damon knew how it sounded while he was saying it.

The Cyclops sequence was shot in Zeus's Cave, the landmark in Greece where Zeus is said to have been born. The crew hiked up and rigged the interior so thoroughly that Damon said you would forget you were standing in a real place and think you were on a Hollywood sound stage. Bill Irwin plays the Cyclops, and they built him a miniature cave to work in. Everyone else performed opposite the giant puppet in the real one.

"I am not joking," Damon said, twice, unprompted.

Rich came armed with his son's ninth grade copy of The Odyssey, notes still in the margins, and asked whether Damon went back to the text. He did, though his praise went somewhere else. Damon has made three movies with Nolan now, counting Interstellar and Oppenheimer, and he treats the screenplays as the thing.

"They're like works of art in themselves," he said. "It's really dense and really specific."

Damon's Nolan origin story is worth the price of admission. He told his wife he was going to slow down from acting unless Christopher Nolan called, and this was before Oppenheimer.

"Guess who called?" he said. The yes was immediate.

The Interstellar script arrived under conditions that sound invented. Damon was shooting The Monuments Men with George Clooney in rural Germany when Nolan's team reached out. Nolan is secretive, so rather than mail the script they sent a production assistant to hand carry it. The kid showed up at 9:00 at night. Damon had a 5:00 a.m. call time and said he would read it the following evening. The PA explained he could not leave the script.

So the kid spent a day touring rural Germany. Rich called it a Ferris Bueller situation. Damon confirmed he had the best day.

The point of the story was the reading. Damon, away from his kids that week, said he was a puddle. He had never reacted to a script that way, and had not again until this one.

The physical piece was a full lifestyle change. Nolan told him in September, giving Damon six months to get lean. The note, as Damon relayed it, was battle hardened but wouldn't pass up a meal.

The locations were the hard part. Damon compared it to making six or seven different movies, because every one was difficult in a completely different way. Iceland, where they shot nights on black sand plains for the Hades sequence in the pouring rain. Scotland. Morocco. Rich had to stop him mid-sentence just to appreciate the geography of what he was saying.

What Damon keeps returning to is the crew. He was watching the grips build a platform off the side of a cliff when the first AD, a veteran who is unflappable and has seen everything, sidled up next to him.

"You know, it's funny when you realize that every single person here could be working on an easier movie for more money."

Damon said it landed as the absolute truth. Every department head was a repeat customer. They knew what they were signing up for.

Rich compared it to a championship sports team. Damon did not soften it.

"I have never been more proud to be a part of a team."