Christopher Nolan turned a hillside castle in western Sicily into a working film set, but getting there meant more than a drive up the road. When the planned access route failed to materialize at Castello di Santa Caterina on Favignana, the crew had to lean on helicopters, a mountain platform and a steep climb to keep The Odyssey moving.
That kind of workaround is now part of why the film is drawing attention. Nolan has made a career out of chasing real locations and real conditions, and he said his job is one long attempt to find “some moment of magic in a real place — a real sunset, a real castle.” At this castle, the setting was not just scenic; it was the production problem. The path zigzagged up the hillside and took 45 minutes to summit, and the director said it could not be widened.
Favignana, once known as Aegusa, or goat island, sits in western Sicily, and the site carries a mythic edge to match the film. Odysseus and his crew are thought to have stopped there before their encounter with the Cyclops, which gives Nolan’s choice of location a neat fit for The Odyssey, one of his newest films. On the mountain, everyone who could walk up did so. The rest went by helicopter, which also ferried equipment up and down while the crew built a lunch platform on scaffolding sturdy enough for 200 crewmembers.
Nolan said that early in planning, the team would have used 4x4s to move everyone up. Then, fairly late in the process, it became clear the road they expected in the back was never going to happen. So during the shoot, the crew spent two weeks at the location, starting at the bottom of the path at call and making the 900-foot climb as best they could. The setup was demanding, but it stayed workable because the production adjusted to the terrain instead of trying to defeat it.
Robert Pattinson, who plays Antinous, described a different kind of production fix from Tenet in Estonia, when the team bought two BMWs because the pod equipment would not work with the cars they already had. “We only lost, like, 45 minutes,” he said. “After all this planning and we just bought them, and that’s it — done.” Tom Holland plays Telemachus in The Odyssey, and Pattinson’s character is one of the sleazy suitors of Odysseus’s wife, Penelope. For Nolan, the message from Sicily is straightforward: he got the castle shot he wanted, but only by making the location itself part of the story.
