Christopher Nolan has finally opened up about one of the most talked-about shots in ‘The Odyssey,‘ and it turns out the idea has been sitting in his head for twenty years.
His new take on Homer’s epic stars Matt Damon as Odysseus and opens with a striking picture. The giant wooden horse is half buried in sand on a beach, looking more like an old ruin than a weapon of war. Nolan says this image comes from something very personal, going back to a job he almost had years ago.
The Real Story Behind The Odyssey’s Trojan Horse Scene
Back in 2004, Nolan was briefly in line to direct ‘Troy‘ before the project went to Wolfgang Petersen instead. He has said he kept picturing his own version of the Trojan horse scene ever since. He told the Independent, “I’ve had an image of that horse sinking into the sand in my head.“
Nolan traces his love for this story even further back, to when he was five or six years old and watched older kids act out the epic at school. He told Empire that the story feels almost “embedded” in people, something built into nearly every kind of storytelling we have.
Why The Odyssey’s Buried Horse Scene Echoes ‘Planet of the Apes’
One detail critics keep bringing up is how much the buried horse looks like the ending of ‘Planet of the Apes,’ where astronaut Taylor finds a half-buried Statue of Liberty and realizes he’s been on Earth the whole time. Some reviewers say Nolan’s horse plays like a direct nod to that famous shot, a symbol of a fallen civilization sticking out of the sand instead of the water.
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Nolan has confirmed this wasn’t an accident. Talking to the LA Times’ Kenneth Turan, he described the horse as “listing over in the sand.” Instead of the usual scene of soldiers rolling the horse through the gates of Troy on wheels, Nolan shows it exactly as he always imagined it, dragged across the beach by hundreds of men while Odysseus and his men hide inside in the dark and the filth.
Christopher Nolan on Filling the Gaps in Cinematic History with ‘The Odyssey’
Nolan has talked about the project as a way of filling a hole in film history. He told Empire that filmmakers are always looking for gaps, for things that haven’t really been done properly yet, and that growing up on Ray Harryhausen movies made him want to give this kind of story a real big budget treatment.
Choosing a fallen, broken-down horse instead of the classic wheeled version has stuck out to reviewers as a sign of the film’s tone. The Hollywood Reporter points to the siege that follows, once the horse is inside Troy’s walls, as the moment that haunts Odysseus for the rest of the story, something the outlet jokingly called “Ancient Greek PTSD.”
‘The Odyssey’ Cast and the Giant Horse Statues Taking Over Movie Premieres
The horse has also become the face of the movie’s marketing. At the New York premiere on July 14, a nearly 40-foot horse statue towered over the red carpet. It is one of several giant horse statues that have been touring the US and UK to promote the film.
Tom Holland, who plays Odysseus’ son Telemachus, has talked about how personal this project feels to Nolan. He called it the best script he has ever read, and separately described being on set as the job of a lifetime.
Twenty years after missing out on ‘Troy,’ Nolan has basically made his own version of that world anyway, just through Homer’s ‘Odyssey‘ instead of ‘The Iliad,‘ built around an image that never really left him.
‘The Odyssey‘ also stars Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o and Charlize Theron, and is playing in theaters now.
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