‘Bring Him Home’: How a Matt Damon meme perfectly captures Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

MUMBAI – Hollywood has spent almost three decades, and an estimated US$600 million (S$776 million), trying to get Matt Damon home, to the point that it has even spawned a meme.

Steven Spielberg sent an entire platoon, along with a US$70 million production budget, to rescue the American actor’s character, Private James Ryan, in Saving Private Ryan (1998).

Christopher Nolan marooned astronaut scientist Mann on an icy planet in Interstellar (2014) to the tune of US$165 million, but he failed to escape it.

Ridley Scott shelled out US$105 million to bring stranded space botanist Mark Watney back to Earth from Mars in The Martian (2015).

Now, Nolan is at it again.

In his US$250 million adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, which opens in Singapore cinemas on July 16, Damon plays legendary Greek king Odysseus, whose voyage home to Ithaca from Troy after the Trojan War stretches into an arduous 20-year odyssey filled with monsters, gods and impossible temptations.

Waiting for him in Ithaca are his devoted wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and their son Telemachus (Tom Holland), who has grown into a young man while his father remains lost at sea.

Also joining the star-studded cast is Zendaya as the goddess Athena, alongside Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Robert Pattinson and Jon Bernthal.

When The Straits Times asks Damon at The Odyssey’s Mumbai press junket on July 11 whether his first reaction to Nolan’s offer was “not again”, the 55-year-old laughs it off.

“Not at all,” says Damon, who won the best screenplay Oscar for Good Will Hunting (1998) with American actor-director Ben Affleck. “The movies in which they are trying to get me home are Saving Private Ryan, Interstellar, The Martian and this one. So you can keep losing me as much as you want. These are four films I’m very, very happy to be in.”

Nolan chuckles when the long-running meme is brought up.

“I definitely looked at The Martian tagline, ‘Bring Him Home’, and I thought, well, we could just steal that tagline,” he says.

But behind the joke lies the very reason the Oscar-winning writer-director wanted to adapt Homer’s 3,000-year-old epic in the first place.

“Homecoming narratives are very important in movies,” the 55-year-old British-American film-maker tells ST in a separate interview.

Our conversation unfolds inside the Taj Mahal Palace overlooking Mumbai’s historic Gateway of India, where Nolan, Damon and Holland are in the bustling Indian metropolis for The Odyssey’s Asian premiere. “It is one of the reasons I wanted to make The Odyssey. Obviously, this is the ultimate homecoming narrative.”

Eternal human desire to return home

Nolan has taken audiences into dreams (Inception, 2010), black holes (Interstellar) and the birth of the atomic bomb (Oppenheimer, 2023). Yet, he realised there was one foundational story Hollywood had somehow never fully and truly embraced.

“As a film-maker, you are looking for something you can challenge yourself with – something you have not done before, and something you can bring to audiences that hopefully they have not seen before,” he says.

“It was a surprise for me to realise that Homer’s foundational epic had not really been told in this way. That is a huge opportunity for a film-maker.”

While many people recognise Odysseus’ name, Nolan believes surprisingly few know the complete story. “I really wanted to bring this adventure story to audiences as a movie, so you do not have to know anything about Homer coming into the film.”

When asked how a 3,000-year-old story is relevant today, Nolan says he found himself drawn to something far more universal.

“I found it in my other films. In Inception, that element plays; Interstellar certainly plays with it.”

That timeless and eternal human desire to return home binds together every strand of The Odyssey: a husband’s longing to reunite with his wife, a father desperate to see the son he barely knows and a young man searching for the parent whose absence has shaped his life.

“There is Tom Holland telling this coming-of-age story. There’s a love story at the heart of it. It’s a film about war and loss and death,” says the celebrated auteur, who won best picture and best director Oscars for Oppenheimer.

“I think that is why generation after generation has been fascinated by this story for 3,000 years.”

Father and son – on screen and off

That emotional centre extended beyond the screenplay.

Damon and British actor Holland, 30, spent weeks rehearsing scenes together before the cameras rolled, developing the father-son bond that anchors the film.

“So much of it was just so clear on the script,” says Damon, who is married to Argentina-born producer Luciana Damon. The couple have four daughters, aged 15 to 27. “The screenplay is a real masterwork. Chris is an extraordinary writer.”

Holland agrees. “We were really lucky that the three of us – Matt, Anne and I – bonded really quickly,” he says. “It felt like Chris gave us such a clear north star of what he wanted us to achieve.”

Off-screen, their relationship proved just as effortless, as Holland had grown up watching Damon.

Holland says: “Getting the chance to work with him was incredibly exciting. I’m delighted to say Matt goes above and beyond any expectation I ever had.”

The admiration flowed both ways.

Damon says he already knew of Holland’s reputation long before they met, thanks to mutual friends from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Damon had made cameos as an Asgardian actor in Thor: Ragnarok (2017) and Thor: Love And Thunder (2022).

Holland has played the friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man in three standalone superhero movies – Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) and Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) – and appeared in Captain America: Civil War (2016), Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019).

Holland’s next web-slinging outing is Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which opens in Singapore cinemas on July 30.

Says Damon: “I had heard absolutely glowing reports about Tom from crew members, fellow castmates and people on the business side.”

He adds: “He completely exceeded my expectations.”

When asked whether he became a father figure to Holland during filming, Damon rejects the idea immediately.

“Tom’s got it fully figured out,” he says. “I did not feel the age gap, even though there is one. I really see him as a colleague.”

Living a fairy tale

If Damon arrived as Nolan’s trusted collaborator – The Odyssey marks their third film together after Interstellar and Oppenheimer – Holland, a new Nolan recruit, entered the production with the excitement of someone fulfilling a lifelong dream.

The experience became even more surreal because he was sharing it with his wife, American actress Zendaya, 29, who is also a first-timer in a Nolan film and Holland’s Spider-Man co-star.

Asked whether the celebrity couple had moments when they simply looked at each other and marvelled at the fact that they were in The Odyssey together, Holland smiles.

“Yeah, all the time. My mum called me when we were away filming in Morocco, and she said, ‘It’s like you are living your own fairy tale.’

“It really is kind of nuts that we get to do this together. I could not be more grateful to Chris for giving both of us the opportunity.”

That sense of wonder never really left him.

During the press conference earlier, when The Odyssey team addressed a host of Indian journalists, Holland – who has been in his fair share of big-budget blockbuster productions – recalled being in awe of the scale of his latest project.

On his first day visiting the Moroccan set, he crested a sand dune, expecting a normal filming location. Instead, he found himself staring at what looked like another civilisation. “It felt more like I had gone back in time than I had walked onto a film set.”

Thousands of performers filled the landscape. Ships lined the shore. Horses charged across the beach.

“I remember an assistant director saying, ‘Just go that way, and eventually you will find the crew.’ I walked for what felt like miles,” Holland says.

Eventually, he spotted Nolan and Damon standing at the centre of the organised chaos.

“I just remember pinching myself. This is unlike anything that I have ever done before – and probably ever (will do) again.”

Besides Morocco, The Odyssey was shot across six different countries, including Greece, Iceland, Italy and Scotland.

Spectacle with a heartbeat

Damon had a similar moment while filming the sacking of Troy. Odysseus was the strategic mastermind of the Greek forces, and orchestrated the decisive end to the long war by devising the Trojan horse that allowed Greek soldiers to infiltrate and conquer the city.

He recalls: “Buildings were on fire, thousands of people were battling and somebody ran past me on fire, just as a little detail in the shot.”

When Nolan finally called “cut”, the chaos instantly dissolved.

“Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema took the camera off his shoulder, handed it away, turned to me and said, ‘You realise this is a flashback,’” says Damon, laughing.

“That was my moment where I went, ‘This is really big. This is as big as it gets.’”

Remarkably, the spectacular sequence serves merely as the backstory to Odysseus’ titular journey. For Holland, that is precisely what makes The Odyssey so unusual.

“You will see things you have never seen before. But you will also feel the heartache and longing,” he says. “Moviegoers will feel a sense of connection to Chris’ work that feels really unique and perfect.”

For Holland, Telemachus’ journey is ultimately about protecting his mother Penelope from the suitors lusting after her and the empty throne of Ithaca.

That emotional story becomes even more powerful because Nolan chose to shoot the three-hour film entirely with IMAX film cameras, making it the first feature film to ever do so.

“Shooting those really intimate moments on an IMAX camera felt like the audience was already in the room with us,” says Holland.

“There was a sense this movie is a love letter to cinema – and therefore to our audiences.”

Making mythology feel human

That same philosophy shaped every creative decision.

Even the score avoids the sweeping orchestral sound traditionally associated with Hollywood’s sword-and-sandal epics.

Working with three-time Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Goransson, Nolan deliberately sought something more grounded. The Swedish musician most recently won best original score for Oppenheimer.

“We did not want to be like the Hollywood movies of the 1950s and 1960s,” says Nolan. “We wanted an earthy and accessible world.”

Rather than relying on lush romantic orchestration, he experimented with ancient Mediterranean-inspired sounds and traditional Greek instruments, creating a score that feels rooted in the culture from which Homer’s poem first emerged.

“It prompted him to think in a different way,” Nolan says. “There is nobody better at doing that than Ludwig.”

Odysseus is no flawless hero. He makes catastrophic mistakes. He carries unbearable guilt. He lives with the consequences.

“I needed somebody who could keep the audience on side even as we are seeing Odysseus do some questionable things,” Nolan says, explaining his casting of Damon.

“Matt is an incredible actor. He has the charisma and the empathetic ability to open up a character to the audience and bring them into his way of seeing the world... Matt makes him accessible.”

For Damon, that complexity is exactly why the role has become the defining performance of his career.

“Encountering this story again in my 50s, it struck me very differently,” he says. “As a young man, I probably saw it as a coming-of-age story. Now I relate to someone who has lived a lot of life.”

Asked to sum up Odysseus, he pauses, before saying: “You live with the consequences of your choices. So choose, and care for them.”