Christopher Nolan, Matt Damon and Tom Holland on Adapting 'The Odyssey'

For Christopher Nolan, this week's stop in Mumbai was less a premiere than a homecoming long overdue. The director once shot portions of Tenet in the city without ever getting the chance to bring the finished film back to its audience; this time, his adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey opens in India alongside the rest of the world on 17 July 2026.

The film stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, joined by Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson and Zendaya, and holds the distinction of being the first commercial feature shot entirely on IMAX film. At a press conference ahead of the premiere, Nolan, Damon and Holland spoke candidly about the particular pressure of adapting a story that has survived nearly 2,700 years, and the very different pressure of bringing it to the screen at this scale.

Respecting a 3,000-Year-Old Story

The line drew laughter, but the point beneath it was serious: take on a story this fiercely guarded by generations of readers, and everyone arrives certain they already know how it should be told. Nolan said he'd met a version of that same resistance before, while making The Dark Knight trilogy, another adaptation built around a character audiences felt they already owned. His answer hasn't changed since: make the best film possible, and trust the work itself to read as respect for what came before it.

A Character Worth Growing Into

Damon, who plays Odysseus, said revisiting the character in his fifties reshaped how he understood him entirely. Where he once read the story as a coming-of-age tale in his younger years, he now recognizes a man defined less by his cunning than by the weight of his choices, someone who doesn't always choose well, and has to live with that anyway. Behind the camera, Damon, a producer in his own right, admitted he was glad this particular shoot wasn't his to run. Producer Emma Thomas had warned him early on that it would feel like six or seven films stitched into one; the two had already learned as much from the water-logged demands of Dunkirk and the vertical ambition of the Batman trilogy.

Shooting the First Feature Entirely on IMAX Film

Tom Holland, who plays Odysseus' son Telemachus, pointed to the shoot's technical demands as one of its steepest challenges, likening the coordination it required from the camera team to the precision of a Formula 1 pit crew. A stage play he'd done the year before, he said, had prepared him more than he expected: film doesn't offer a second chance at a take you miss, so he carried that same onstage discipline onto set, staying present for every fleeting moment rather than assuming there'd be another.

For Nolan, the stop in Mumbai carried its own weight. He recalled how pandemic-era timing had kept Tenet, partly filmed in the city, from ever premiering there, a gap this visit finally closes. He's said before that few places match India's appreciation for what cinema can be, and with The Odyssey now opening there alongside the rest of the world, that connection comes full circle.