Matt Damon appeared on the latest episode of the New Heights podcast and revealed that he lost so much weight for Christopher Nolan''Odyssey” that at one point during filming he weighed the same as he did in high school. Damon reunites with Nolan after Interstellar and Oppenheimer to helm the epic adventure film as Odysseus.
“I had a beard like yours for about a year,” Damon told podcast co-host Jason Kelsey (via Entertainment Weekly). “I was in very good shape and had lost a lot of weight. [Nolan] wanted me to be slim but strong. It was only because of what I did with my doctor that I stopped eating gluten. I used to walk around weighing 185 to 200 pounds, and I shot the entire movie at 167. And I haven't been this light since high school. So it was a lot of training and a very strict diet.”
This is far from the case when Damon had to gain weight for the sake of his characters. The Oscar nominee gained 30 pounds for 2009's The Informant by “eating like crazy and drinking dark beer,” he told EW at the time. “Between meals on set, I would eat the No. 1 meal at McDonald's and then top it with Doritos. It was pure heaven.”
Continuing the Odyssey theme, Damon marveled at how Nolan managed to create the first Hollywood feature film to be shot entirely on Imax cameras.
“Imax cameras are very loud. When the camera is close to you, it sounds like a blender, like a Cuisinart. So those dialogues never happened. [scenes in Imax]- Damon said. – We couldn't have this conversation with a regular Imax camera because you wouldn't hear us. They built this giant Imax thing for the dialogue scenes and a mirror system to get your eyeline close to the camera so you could talk to the other actor. The amount of work spent figuring out how to do [that]because he wanted to make it 100 percent IMAX and he did it!”
Odyssey cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema previously said Empire magazine that he shot Imax test footage of a child reading the lyrics to David Bowie's “Sound And Vision” to prove whether Imax film cameras were advanced enough to record dialogue. A new Imax film housing, called the “blimp”, was created to significantly reduce the noise produced by Imax cameras.
“The airship system is a game changer,” Nolan told Empire. “You can shoot in your foot with [an actor’s] face while they whisper and get a useful sound. It opens up intimate moments of performance in the most beautiful format in the world.”
Damon filmed The Odyssey all over the world, in places including Greece, Iceland and Morocco, and said he was stunned by the scale of Nolan's ambitions on location.
“We'd get there and I'd just start laughing,” Damon said. “I would say, ‘Nobody has the right to shoot here! Of course he wants to shoot here. It's being tracked.” He has such a great team. His team is so cool. And everyone just gave it their all while working on this film and we had all our days. We actually finished ahead of schedule. It was an amazing experience.”
The Odyssey opens in theaters July 17. Watch Damon's full interview on the New Heights podcast in the video below.
