Why Filming 'The Odyssey' Was "the Best Experience" Of Matt Damon's Life

There was a 60-foot puppet in a cave in the side of a mountain. That is not a metaphor. Matt Damon had to say it twice because Rich did not believe him the first time.

"It was the best experience of my life," Damon said of shooting "The Odyssey," "because it was the hardest."

That formula runs through everything he told Rich about the production. Damon has been doing this a long time, and he said flatly he has never experienced a movie like it. The ambition was enormous, and the method was the reason why. Chris shoots everything in camera.

"If you see a ship in the background, there's a ship out there," Damon said. "It's done the way it would have been done 80 years ago."

Which is how a movie stops behaving like a movie.

"The movie kind of felt more like an expedition," Damon said. "Because we were really out there. Everyone's in the same boat, so to speak."

Rich could not resist the obvious add: even when they were not in a boat, they were in the same boat.

The locations were the point. Tops of mountains. Caves. Places all over the world that Damon said he had simply never seen before. And when Rich asked, half joking, whether the cyclops was real, the answer got specific in a hurry.

They shot the sequence in what is called Zeus's cave. The crew hiked up to it and then built into it, and the rigging was so complete that Damon said it felt like a sound stage in Hollywood. You would forget you were standing in a real place.

Then the punchline. "In that cave was a 60-foot puppet."

"Come on now," Rich said.

"I'm not joking," Damon said. "I am not joking."

Rich also noticed something else, and admitted he does not normally bring this stuff up. Damon looked ripped.

The explanation was a calendar. Damon got the word in September and had six months to get there. He was already in decent shape when the call came, but this became a full lifestyle change. The ask was to lose weight and look battle hardened, and Damon noted the character would not have passed up a meal.

When Rich circled back to whether this was really the toughest thing he had ever done, Damon did not hedge.

"By far. Without a doubt. I mean, not even a question."

The reason is that it was not one hard movie. "It was almost like doing six or seven different movies," Damon said, because every location was difficult in a completely different way. Water. Mountains. Iceland, where they shot nights on black sand plains for the Hades sequence.

And everyone was grinding.

"No matter what direction you looked in, you were looking at somebody who was absolutely giving everything they had for the movie," Damon said.

The line that stuck with him came from the first AD, a veteran who has seen everything. He sidled up to Damon early on and said, "You know, it's funny when you realize that every single person here could be working on an easier movie for more money."

Damon knew instantly it was true. Every department head was a repeat customer. They had worked with Chris before. They knew exactly what they were signing up for.

"This is really hard for everybody here," Damon said, "and everybody's exactly where they want to be."