Matt Damon claims ‘The Odyssey’ is the “last chance” of major-scale Hollywood production
Matt Damon has claimed that The Odyssey is likely the “last chance I was ever going to have” of filming a major Hollywood production of the same scale.
The Hollywood stalwart is taking on the central role of Odysseus in the Christopher Nolan film, adapted from the ancient literary epic by Homer, that is set to hit cinemas on July 17th.
Damon has already spoken at length about the grand scale of the production, which has made history as the first-ever film to be shot entirely on Imax cameras.
However, in a new interview with GQ, the actor reflected on the scale of Hollywood productions as a whole and how something as massive as The Odyssey is increasingly becoming an anomaly.
“Because of where the movie business is going, it was a really weird movie for me personally, in the sense that I had almost a nostalgic feeling the entire time I was making it, because it felt like movies were when I started working,” he said.
To this end, he added: “And I know that that’s going away. I knew that this was the last chance I was ever going to have to do something like this.”
A major part of why The Odyssey will inevitably stand out to Damon is not just the filmmaking techniques, but the extreme lengths he went to in order to take on the central role.
He underwent a huge physical transformation for the part, explaining on the New Heights podcast in January, “I was in really good shape. I lost a lot of weight.”
With Damon revealing that he got his weight down to just 167 pounds, he also said in the GQ interview that it was one of the most challenging movies he has ever worked on.
With the shooting locations for The Odyssey spanning seven countries, he said: “Every single location on this movie would’ve been the hardest location on any other movie I’ve ever done. And they just went back-to-back.”
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