Joe sits down with Christopher Nolan
This is the July 20, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
I went to see “The Odyssey” last week, and it was nothing short of an extraordinary cinematic experience. Academy Award-winning director Christopher Nolan’s epic adaptation took in $264 million worldwide this weekend — the biggest opening of his career.
Nolan joined “Morning Joe” today to discuss working with Homer’s ancient poem, making the first film ever shot entirely on IMAX, and putting Matt Damon through the toughest shoot of his life.
JS: Where did you get the inspiration for something this colossal?
CN: Coming out of “Oppenheimer,” I had an opportunity to get something made that I might not otherwise have been able to. You look for a gap in movies, in culture — and Greek mythology, though it underpins all of Western literature, has never really been told as a modern film. For a director, that’s a thrilling opportunity.
JS: How do you turn a densely packed 3,000-year-old text into a sub-three-hour film?
CN: I read it again and again, then put the original text to one side and worked from my emotions and memories of what the poem felt like. It has a wonderful nonlinear structure — the oldest foundational text of Western literature, but incredibly adventurous — and that lets you jump around in the story and jam quite a bit in.
JS: You’ve talked about revolutionizing the moviegoing experience — from “Dunkirk” to “Oppenheimer.” What are you after as an artist?
CN: A lot of it is about trying to get back to the experience I had as a kid going to the movies. My dad took me to see a re-release of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” on 70 mm film when I was 7 or 8, and it made such an incredible impression — you feel like that screen is so much larger than life and can take you anywhere.
JS: This was the first film ever shot entirely on IMAX. How did you pull that off?
CN: I’ve wanted to do this since I was 16, when I saw IMAX documentaries at a museum in Chicago and thought, what if we could tell a dramatic feature this way?
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Former Rep. Joe Scarborough, R-Fla., is co-host of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” alongside Mika Brzezinski — a show that Time magazine calls “revolutionary.” In addition to his career in television, Joe is a two-time New York Times best-selling author. His most recent book is “The Right Path: From Ike to Reagan, How Republicans Once Mastered Politics — and Can Again.”
