Nolan didn't know how to film the Trojan Horse scene until the day of shooting

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The Odyssey's Matt Damon has revealed how a scene 'inside' the iconic Trojan Horse was brought to life in surprising fashion on set.

So, how do you film such a suffocating sequence with bodies stacked on top of bodies? As it turns out, we aren't the only ones who wanted to know.

"It was the question I had the day before we shot," Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus, recalls to GamesRadar+. "I said, 'We're doing the Trojan Horse tomorrow. How are you going to do that?' And Chris [Nolan] just goes, 'I don't know.'"

Damon continues, "It was a real lesson: he goes, 'We're just going to cram in there and figure it out."

For a director with such an eye for detail, Damon makes the surprise admission that Nolan can wing it with the best of them – and hundreds of millions of dollars in budget doesn't dampen the director's indie filmmaking spirit.

"There's this thing that he does that is so incredible, which is he understands all of these elements that he's going to need, but he's not prescriptive about it," Damon says. "You still feel like you're shooting on an independent movie."

As for the sequence itself – we won't get into spoilers here, only to say the scene is among The Odyssey 's most striking and unique depictions of the mythological trick that has been handed down across millennia. The day itself proved just as challenging to its actors, too.

Damon explains, "We literally got in there, me and the guys jammed in, and Chris jammed in with [cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema] – Hoyt had the camera – and we figured it out. That feeling of claustrophobia, that was all just developing organically… Hoyte was looking through the lens, and Chris was right next to him. They just built that in real time. It was so cool to see. If we had planned it out, I don't think it would have had that same energy."

For more, check out 2026's other remaining significant movie release dates . Then, dive into our current, pre-Odyssey ranking of the best Christopher Nolan movies and our extensive The Odyssey beginner's guide .