Filmmaker Christopher Nolan has opened up about the deeply personal creative impulse behind his latest epic, 'The Odyssey' — revealing that the project grew directly out of the psychological weight of directing 'Oppenheimer', his 2023 Academy Award-winning drama about the birth of the atomic bomb.

Escaping the Shadow of Oppenheimer

In an interview with USA Today, the 55-year-old British-American filmmaker described emerging from 'Oppenheimer' with a conflicted emotional state. 'Coming out of Oppenheimer, I had a funny combination of despair and optimism. That film was almost a horror film for me. It was a very disturbing subject to live with for a couple of years, thinking non-stop about nuclear war and what humans bring to the table,' Nolan said.

He added that he was 'quite glad to move out of that' — yet, with characteristic self-awareness, acknowledged that the escape was incomplete: 'When you see The Odyssey, you start to realise that I didn't quite manage to escape it.'

Drawing on the Dark Knight Trilogy

Nolan also revealed an unexpected creative thread linking 'The Odyssey' to his celebrated Dark Knight trilogy, which starred Christian Bale as Batman. The filmmaker said the exercise of building a mythic yet human protagonist — something he refined across three Batman films — directly informed his approach to Odysseus.

'It has to do with creating an icon that is relatable and yet larger than life. Those three films were a continual experiment in trying to be human, and coming to The Odyssey, it's that same balance. On the surface, I didn't think there'd be much of a relationship, but what I learned doing the Dark Knight films really helped with this,' he explained.

Scorsese's 'Last Temptation' as Unlikely Inspiration

Perhaps the most surprising influence Nolan cited was Martin Scorsese's controversial 1988 film 'The Last Temptation of Christ', which the production team screened during pre-production. He described it as 'a stunning movie and a shocking film,' noting that Scorsese's technical choices were instructive — but that the deeper lesson was thematic.

'The figure of Jesus and what he does with him was very, very challenging to the audience. That was quite inspiring from the point of view of Odysseus. You want to be true to all the difficulties of the character, and that's what Temptation is,' Nolan said.

The Cast and a Landmark in IMAX Filmmaking

'The Odyssey' stars Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, and Tom Holland, adapting Homer's ancient Greek epic for the contemporary screen. The film holds a notable technical distinction: it is the first feature to be shot entirely on IMAX 70 mm cameras. Nolan has expressed hope that this achievement will encourage fellow filmmakers — citing 'Sinners' director Ryan Coogler by name — to embrace the format.

With 'The Odyssey', Nolan continues a career-long pattern of using genre and scale to wrestle with questions of human fallibility — whether in a Gotham alley, a Los Alamos laboratory, or the wine-dark sea.