NEW YORK – Christopher Nolan was in an admitted state of anxiety.

“It’s very nerve-racking,” the British-American writer-director said of the period before a film opens. “You work on something for a long time, you care about it a lot, but movies belong to the audience. So, it’s kind of in the eye of the beholder.”

His tension was particularly acute a few weeks before the July 17 debut of The Odyssey, his latest high-stakes adaptation after Oppenheimer, his 2023 biopic that won a slew of Oscars.

“It was a big undertaking, unquestionably,” Nolan said of translating ancient Greek poet Homer’s monumental poem for the screen. “I don’t think I would have felt ready to take on this film until now.”

The first commercial feature filmed completely in IMAX, The Odyssey is a three-hour sword-and-sandals epic the likes of which are hardly made any more, shot in six countries with a cast and crew of thousands, and practical effects in lieu of full computer-generated imagery.

It stars Nolan stalwarts like Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as his wife Penelope, as well as new and sometimes unexpected players – Tom Holland as their son, John Leguizamo as a blind swineherd, and rapper Travis Scott as a bard. IMAX screenings began selling out almost a year ago.

“I wanted to make a very accessible movie,” Nolan said. But the challenges were immense, requiring new engineering and choreography.

For Nolan and his cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, IMAX invented a “blimp system” to encase and manoeuvre its enormous, and enormously loud, camera; castmates used mirrors to see one another around the equipment.

“Halfway through the shoot, Hoyte and I kind of looked at each other and realised, ‘Yep, this is gonna work’,” Nolan said.