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Film-maker Christopher Nolan’s 13th feature film, The Odyssey, is every bit as epic as the heroic tale it recounts – the story of Odysseus’s 10-year quest to return home from war to his loyal wife and son. On the way he battles turbulent seas, mythical beasts and his own emotional flaws.

In bringing this action-packed saga to the big screen on the grandest of scales, Nolan too has faced monumental challenges – from assembling an all-star cast and marshalling thousands of extras, to shooting in far-flung locations and inventing technology that allowed him to film entirely using IMAX® cameras.

The movie begins with the conquering of the coastal city of Troy – which allows Nolan to bring Odysseus’s supreme piece of strategic deception to heaving, shattering life. Seemingly abandoning his attempts to take Troy, Odysseus (Matt Damon), King of Ithaca, leaves a giant wooden horse in the surf as his army sails away. It appears to be an offering to Athena, the goddess of wisdom and warfare, so she might favour the Greeks’ long voyage home, or so the Trojans think. They haul the horse into the city, and you don’t need to have read a single word of Homer’s poem on which the film is based to know what happens next. That night, a select band of warriors creeps out of the horse’s huge hollow body and opens the city’s gates to the returning Greek army; Troy’s impenetrable walls have at last been breached.

Such immersive, eye-widening set-pieces are Nolan’s raison d’etre. Who can forget the 18-wheeler truck flipping upside down as Batman chases the Joker through downtown Gotham in The Dark Knight? Or Inception’s zero-gravity fight scene staged in a rotating hotel corridor? Or the atomic explosions rendered via chemical combustions and forced perspectives in Oppenheimer, for which he won the best director Oscar? Throughout his singular career, Nolan has insisted on the weight, the power, the authenticity of practical effects – no matter how fantastic the story he tells.

“Creating a world that feels as real as a contemporary movie set anywhere in our modern world,” was his mission statement for The Odyssey. Nolan set out to forge an intelligent and emotive blockbuster that blends mythology and concrete realism. For the Trojan Horse prologue, Nolan oversaw the construction of multiple 10-metre-high (35ft) horses and marshalled thousands of costumed extras. He shot at the ancient walled town of Aït Benhaddou, in Morrocco, with the earthen architecture augmented by elaborate sets to allow for 360-degree shooting. And that’s just one sequence in this action epic.

Audiences can also expect huge ships pitching on tumultuous oceans (Nolan, his cast and crew spent months shooting on the open sea, with some of them vomiting overboard between takes); windswept scenes set atop dramatic peaks, that were scaled each day by the cast and crew; and a 12-metre (40ft) animatronic puppet that is symbiotically paired with the acting of Bill Irwin to bring the one-eyed monster Cyclops to terrifying life.

The gods and monsters of Greek mythology have long inspired Hollywood pictures – most famously the action-adventure movies Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and Clash of the Titans (1981), both boasting the stop-motion skills of legendary animator Ray Harryhausen. But never before has this type of movie been mounted on such a grand scale.

In Homer’s foundational tale of Odysseus’s 10-year quest to return to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland) on the island of Ithaca – a journey that takes in monsters, nymphs and lots of really stormy weather – Nolan detected the opportunity to dream big. And that included assembling even more big names to complete his all-star cast: Zendaya as Athena; Robert Pattinson as the arch-villain Antinous, who has designs on Penelope; and Charlize Theron as the mythical sea nymph Calypso.

“I was intrigued by the idea of a Hollywood studio taking on the biggest of stories, with a top-level budget, a top-level cast, and pouring all the techniques and resources of a massive Hollywood production into this world,” says Nolan. No wonder the film-maker has cited cinema’s silent epics with their extravagant sets and casts of thousands. For The Odyssey, more than two million feet of film were shot during six months of principal photography in Greece, Morocco, Iceland, Italy, Scotland and the US, while costume designer Ellen Mirojnick and her 400-strong team created in excess of 5,300 costumes. It’s enough to make Cyclops’s eye bulge.

Even by Nolan’s spectacular standards, The Odyssey is ambitious. “For me, it has been a long-held dream to do an entire film in IMAX®,” he says, recalling how he used to visit Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry in his childhood to watch 360-degree presentations of Omnimax films. “I would wonder: what if you did a fictional film that way? Not just a great documentary … what if you made a Hollywood action film that way?”

Since shooting 2008’s The Dark Knight, Nolan has been crafting select scenes in IMAX®, utilising the format’s enhanced depth and resolution to bring maximum impact. But now, working with Oscar-winning director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema for the fifth time, he has finally realised his ambition of shooting a whole film with IMAX® cameras, inventing technology to muffle camera noise and solving the myriad technical issues (weight, actors’ eyeline complications) that previously made it impractical. Never mind David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia or Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings – you’ve never seen supersized cinema like this.

The Odyssey, you might say, is Nolan’s Ithaca, the culmination of his legendary cinematic career to date, one that has conjured many indelible sights and experiences along the way. And Nolan, you might also say, is the closest that 21st-century cinema has to Homer, for he makes enduring movies that take on mythic proportions. As Nolan’s wife and producing partner Emma Thomas reflects: “The thing I loved about the poem when I read it again … was seeing how perfectly it fit into the way Chris tells stories. It’s very quirky as a narrative; there are scares, thrills, and great reveals. It really felt as if it was made for him to adapt.” It almost sounds like a homecoming. And one that demands to be seen on the biggest possible screen.

The Odyssey, in cinemas Friday 17 July. Book tickets now