Inside the Making of 'The Odyssey'

In western Sicily, there is an island called Favignana, which is popular with Italian tourists in the summer and used to be called Aegusa, or “goat island.” Odysseus and his crew are thought to have stopped there before their ill-fated encounter with the Cyclops. These days the island hosts a defunct tuna fishery and a ruined castle, the Castello di Santa Caterina, which the director Christopher Nolan found himself hiking up to, 900 feet straight into the air, one day late in 2024. Nolan, in his films, often operates in heightened or alternate worlds: Inception, Interstellar, Tenet, the Batman trilogy. But he is also, more than perhaps any other director working in the blockbuster genre, a devotee of the real. On some level, he thinks of his job as one long attempt to find “some moment of magic in a real place—a real sunset, a real castle.”