The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan captivates in cinemas and offers stunning visuals and fascinating effects. Yet even the actors were surprised to learn later how much of it is not CGI but real.
The Odyssey is currently on everyone’s lips. The epic by director Christopher Nolan has already grossed around $264 million in its opening weekend since its release on July 15th and 16th, as The Guardian reported. The Rotten Tomatoes score of 94% is also quite impressive.
The visuals of the film are also impressive, although with Nolan, the question always arises as to how much CGI, i.e., computer-generated imagery, is used. The director is known for preferring practical effects, such as building sets instead of adding them digitally.
In The Odyssey, a scene is particularly interesting in this regard, where the sorceress Circe meets Odysseus and his men. There, CGI was largely avoided, although modern Hollywood often relies on it.
Even before the film’s release, the trailer achieved high view counts on various platforms – here you can see it again:
A Real Mess
Warning, the following contains a spoiler for a story that is about 2,700 years old. If you still want to go into the film completely unaware, you should stop reading here.
Which scene is it about? On their journey, Odysseus and his men encounter the sorceress Circe. There, they are offered food. During the meal, the men suddenly transform into pigs, and in a gruesome manner.
The transformation, during which their faces and bodies contort, would likely be done with CGI in most cases in Hollywood today. However, Nolan does it differently: As actors Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland mentioned in an interview with IMDb on TikTok, the director used various practical techniques for the transformation.
These likely included animatronics, makeup, and cleverly used camera angles. The result is so convincing that even the cast of the film was surprised during the premiere. Hathaway and Holland admitted in the interview that they were also fooled by the scene, as they initially thought CGI was used there.
We were there, we were part of it; sometimes we contributed to the shots, and then we saw it and just thought: How did he do that?
Tom Holland
After the premiere, Holland reached out to Nolan to ask about it. Besides the aforementioned camera tricks and animatronics, the scene succeeded also because Nolan had a significant advantage on his side: “A bunch of actors who were really willing to do something crazy.”
Hollywood has been tending to forgo practical effects in favor of CGI for years. The result is often far less convincing, especially when the CGI budget and time are lacking to implement it.
Nolan continues to resist this trend, with visible success. Have you already seen the film, and would you have thought that the mentioned scene was shot with practical effects? Feel free to share your observations in the comments. One detail only becomes apparent if you pay close attention: There is a brilliant reference in The Odyssey, but only the true nerds among you can find it
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