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  • 20 hours ago
Take a look at the 'In Studio: Ludwig Göransson' Featurette for The Odyssey, the latest mythological action retelling of Homer's tale from the mind of Christopher Nolan. Hear from the composer of the film, Ludwig Göransson, and Christopher Nolan on the creation of the soundtrack for the upcoming film. The Odyssey is in theaters on July 17.

Christopher Nolan’s next film, The Odyssey, is a mythic action epic shot across the world using brand new IMAX® film technology. The film brings Homer’s foundational saga to IMAX® film screens for the first time and opens in theaters everywhere on July 17, 2026.

The Odyssey stars Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson and Lupita Nyong’o, with Zendaya and Charlize Theron.

The Odyssey is produced by Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan for their company, Syncopy. The executive producer is Thomas Hayslip.
Transcript
00:02I love writing film scores because everything I get to do is so different.
00:08The first conversation we had was Chris telling me that he wanted something completely unique
00:13for this film. No orchestra, no familiar sounds that you've heard before in a movie like this.
00:21We wanted the film to feel like a recognizable world to people,
00:25even though it was going to be ancient Greece.
00:28We don't want it to look and feel like previous movies that take on this kind of classical world.
00:34What can we do that's more timeless than that?
00:36I knew that in order to create this completely original world,
00:40I also had to get out of my comfort zone and find sounds that I haven't worked with before.
00:45Ludwig went very deep on researching the sort of instruments that they might have had at that time.
00:53Chris had mentioned early that he was interested in aulos. He was interested in lyre.
01:02The aulos is an ancient Greek instrument. It was the most popular rock star instrument for a thousand years.
01:11This is a replica of an aulos, the original dates from between the 6th century and the 5th century B
01:18.C.
01:19We don't have any surviving reads, so I worked with two other people and we spent a while trying to
01:27work out
01:27and figure out how this bit worked at the top. We had to read lots of ancient source material and
01:32try and work out how they did it.
01:39This is a reconstruction of an ancient Greek lyre. To be able to play it in a philological way,
01:46we have to do research between iconography, philological sources, and the personal experience as a musician.
02:00Nice! Wow! You nailed it!
02:04Another thing that Chris mentioned too early on in our conversations was to use bronze.
02:08You know, this is the Bronze Age, so gongs, you know, for example, made of bronze.
02:12You know, you can make these instruments sound a way that you never heard of them before.
02:17I started to experiment with a lot of other stuff, hitting walls, hitting railings, hitting, you know,
02:23any kind of things you could find outside like scrap metal or air conditioning units.
02:32Using vocals kind of became how we could also like add on to some of the more emotional pacing of
02:40the score.
02:43There's real intimacy and humanity in the soundtrack.
02:48And I love that because it sort of subverts all your expectations.
02:57I think Chris has a way of pulling in when you're watching his films.
03:01The music is definitely a very, very unique world.
03:05And I hope people are able to be part of it and fully immerse themselves in this world.
03:10The music is definitely a really good job.
03:11And we're all in this world.
03:11I think we're all in this world.
03:13I'm the best for it and all the world.
03:18You can see it's really bad.
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