There’s a level of seriousness to many Christopher Nolan movies that you don’t always get from big budget films. That’s not to say there aren’t moments of levity, but there’s something about his direction (and his red scripts) that makes it all feel really grand and important. At least that’s how it comes across to viewers when you’re watching Oppenheimer or The Prestige or The Dark Knight, and apparently, it’s how it comes across a lot of times on the set too.
That was especially true while shooting The Odyssey this time around, both because it’s an over-the-top mythic adventure and because the famed director made the practical decision to shoot all of it with IMAX cameras. He’s worked extensively with the high tech format in the past for action scenes, but on The Odyssey, he decided to shoot the entire movie with IMAX cameras, which means he could only shoot for three minutes before calling cut.
The combination of that pressure to get things right, plus the gravity of the material they were shooting was a lot to deal with, at least for star Anne Hathaway. She recently told CinemaBlend during an interview at The Odyssey junket that it felt like being in a “birthing suite.” Here’s a portion of her quote…
I remember thinking, gosh, these rooms can, when you’re acting in them, they can often feel like a birthing suite, like, you know, like just a room where something is being born. And so you don’t want to speak too loudly. And where else would you ever want to be? It’s a joy to be present in that. It’s not going to last forever. You know, the day will end. So yeah, so I just kind of went with it and tried not to… And suppress every instinct I had to crack a joke.
Anne Hathaway plays Penelope in The Odyssey, who is the wife of Matt Damon’s title character Odysseus. She has, by all accounts, quite a few intensely emotional scenes in the movie. She’s also, by all accounts, great in the film, and I’m sure a lot of that has to do with her being able to stay with the emotions of her characters while stopping every three minutes. Because of that, it makes a lot of sense that everyone remained really serious.
That’s not to say there wasn’t the occasional break in character though. Hathaway said some takes definitely got disrupted, but her rule of thumb was she couldn’t break character or interrupt the seriousness unless Christopher Nolan did. If he broke then all bets were off…
Chris is a good reason not to break. If he does, if he breaks, you can break, but not before him.
It’s hard to call a movie a Best Picture frontrunner in July, but there are high hopes for the movie to put it modestly. It’s at the top of pretty much everyone’s Oscar boards at this point, and the early buzz from the set and the screenings has been overwhelmingly positive. Fans are going to love it, and like everyone involved in the movie, they’ll take it very seriously.
