On Location peels back the curtain on some of your favorite films, television shows, and more. This time, we take a look at The Odyssey.
The Odyssey is one big travel nightmare. It’s all there—Odysseus and his crew get delayed, they get lost, they get separated, their vessels break down, they get low blood sugar that makes them mutinous. You definitely do not want to travel like Odysseus, but the latest adaptation of Homer’s epic by Christopher Nolan may have you wanting to visit some of their journey’s destinations on purpose.
The text of The Odyssey is set in two primary locations: Troy, or present-day Turkey, and Greece, namely the Greek islands. Some are mythical, others, like Ithaca, actually exist. Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his dwindling crew spend ten years voyaging from Troy to Ithaca, where his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland) loyally await. In order to create this diverse world, Nolan and production designer Ruth De Jong looked beyond the expected locales (although Greece and Italy, a country of classical Mediterranean appearance, do ultimately feature quite heavily) and shot in Morocco, Iceland, and Scotland as well.
De Jong, who sat down with Traveler to tell us where The Odyssey was filmed, says, “We wanted to start in the Mediterranean, and we wanted to end in the Mediterranean. But Chris and I were not interested in an entire sun bleached sort of vibe.” Scouting took them all over the world—De Jong looked at Australian beaches and Japanese woodland—before they landed on the final locations, the relative proximity of which were more logistically appealing. Below, De Jong takes us through her favorite places to film.
Greece
“We were there for a month,” says De Jong of shooting in Greece. Scenes filmed in Odysseus’s ancestral home included his unfortunate adventure into the Cyclops Polyphemus’s cave, which took place at Nestor’s Cave, a well-known site in the Peloponnese region, near Pylos. Telemachus’s visit to Sparta, where King Meneleus reigns with his newly-returned wife Helen (Lupita Nyong’o, who also plays Helen’s sister Clytemnestra) in search of news of his father, stopped at an olive grove in Messinia for the hunting scene. The homecoming of Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) to Clytemnestra was shot outside at Methoni Castle in Messinia as well as outside Athens at the monolithic Acrocorinth. “That worked well, with the flags and the banners,” says De Jong. “And Chris wanted to just make sure that it was so clear how windy our entire shoot was. So, so windy.”
