Behind the Scenes of Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’: From Icelandic Hades to a Moroccan Troy

Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of Homer’s epic is shaping up to be a global production—and not just because the story spans a decade of wandering. For The Odyssey, the director and production designer Ruth De Jong scouted locations from Australia to Japan before settling on a mix of Mediterranean classics and unexpected stand-ins. The result? A film that stretches from the black sands of Iceland to the sunbaked villages of Morocco, with a few stops in between.

Greece anchors the mythological heart of the story. The crew spent a month shooting across the Peloponnese, using Nestor’s Cave near Pylos as the Cyclops’ lair and an olive grove in Messinia for a hunting scene. Methoni Castle and the Acrocorinth fortress outside Athens doubled for the homecoming of Agamemnon. Over in Italy, the sleepy island of Favignana, off Sicily’s coast, stood in for Odysseus’s Ithaca. De Jong remembered it from a vacation a decade ago and pushed for the 15th-century castle atop its hill. The cast and crew hiked thirty minutes up every day—Nolan and his wife Emma Thomas included—while construction materials were flown in by helicopter.

Iceland was Nolan’s only non-negotiable location: he wanted Hades shot on the island’s black sand beaches under the midnight sun. They bypassed tourist spots like Diamond Beach for a remote stretch near Hjörleifshöfði mountain. De Jong even tracked down Greek cattle grazing on a white sand beach six hours away. Troy, meanwhile, wasn’t built in Turkey but in the Moroccan village of Ait Benhadu, where the production constructed two and a half acres of sets to burn. The Trojan Horse was discovered on the Atlantic coast at Essaouira. And for Circe’s cliffside lair? Scotland’s Highlands, near Cullen, provided the craggy, otherworldly feel—never mind that Odysseus never sailed that far north.