This is the July 20, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
I went to see “The Odyssey” last week, and it was nothing short of an extraordinary cinematic experience. Academy Award-winning director Christopher Nolan’s epic adaptation took in $264 million worldwide this weekend — the biggest opening of his career.
Nolan joined “Morning Joe” today to discuss working with Homer’s ancient poem, making the first film ever shot entirely on IMAX, and putting Matt Damon through the toughest shoot of his life.
JS: Where did you get the inspiration for something this colossal?
CN: Coming out of “Oppenheimer,” I had an opportunity to get something made that I might not otherwise have been able to. You look for a gap in movies, in culture — and Greek mythology, though it underpins all of Western literature, has never really been told as a modern film. For a director, that’s a thrilling opportunity.
JS: How do you turn a densely packed 3,000-year-old text into a sub-three-hour film?
CN: I read it again and again, then put the original text to one side and worked from my emotions and memories of what the poem felt like. It has a wonderful nonlinear structure — the oldest foundational text of Western literature, but incredibly adventurous — and that lets you jump around in the story and jam quite a bit in.
JS: You’ve talked about revolutionizing the moviegoing experience — from “Dunkirk” to “Oppenheimer.” What are you after as an artist?
CN: A lot of it is about trying to get back to the experience I had as a kid going to the movies. My dad took me to see a re-release of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” on 70 mm film when I was 7 or 8, and it made such an incredible impression — you feel like that screen is so much larger than life and can take you anywhere.
JS: This was the first film ever shot entirely on IMAX. How did you pull that off?
CN: I’ve wanted to do this since I was 16, when I saw IMAX documentaries at a museum in Chicago and thought, what if we could tell a dramatic feature this way?
The cameras are incredibly noisy — you’ve never been able to shoot dialogue with them — so I went to IMAX and they built a 300-pound blimp system that silences the camera. Now you can shoot intimate scenes with the camera 6 inches from an actor’s nose.
JS: Your wife, Emma Thomas, produced the film. What was her reaction to the script?
CN: She looked at it and said it’s not one movie — it’s seven or eight movies strapped together. But then she said, we know how to do all of them. We’ve just never done them all at once before.
JS: Matt Damon said this was the hardest film he’s ever done — and the capstone of his career. What made it so difficult?
CN: We’re taking the biggest story I know and trying to make it real for the audience. That means going to six countries, climbing mountains, out on the ocean, into caves. We had an entirely wooden boat built to ancient specifications. And there’s nowhere to hide on an open boat pitching around in real waves.
JS: There’s something about this story that felt especially timely — Odysseus pushing away from home, the question of whether civilization holds up. Did you feel that as you were making it?
CN: Whether Homer is a he, she, they, no one really knows. But the work has fascinated people for 3,000 years because there are primal, relatable truths in it. As you adapt it, you find things that speak to you in the modern era — and the goal is to bring that out as powerfully as possible.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.
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