Where was Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey filmed? All locations explained

Dubai: Christopher Nolan built The Odyssey around a simple rule: no green screens, no digital environments, wherever it could be avoided.

That meant sending his cast and crew to six countries over roughly six months, hunting down real coastlines, castles, volcanoes and glaciers that could stand in for Homer’s ancient world without a single frame of CGI trickery.

Here is what each location actually became on screen, and why Nolan picked it.

Greece got the most obvious job, since it is the country Odysseus is actually trying to get back to. Filming took place across Messinia, in the Peloponnese, in March and April 2025. Voidokilia Beach, with its near perfect horseshoe shaped cove, was used alongside Nestor’s Cave nearby, reportedly the setting for the film’s Cyclops sequence with Polyphemus.

Troy itself was recreated at Aït Benhaddou, a UNESCO listed ksar, or fortified village, near Ouarzazate. Its earthen, mud brick buildings and defensive walls have made it a go-to filming location since the 1960s, previously standing in for the ancient world in Lawrence of Arabia, Gladiator and The Mummy, which makes it an almost natural choice for Nolan’s own ancient epic.

Additional scenes were shot around Marrakech, Essaouira and Tahanaoute, with the production also travelling further south to the Atlantic coast near Dakhla for extra coastal footage. The undulating dunes and centuries old architecture gave the film an atmosphere no set built from scratch could easily match.

Sicily and its surrounding islands did some of the heaviest lifting. Favignana, part of the Aegadian Islands and known locally as Goat Island, is widely believed to be the real island Homer described as the place where Odysseus and his crew rested and restocked supplies before their encounter with the Cyclops. Its jagged coves and turquoise water were used for naval manoeuvres, a shipwreck sequence and tense beach landings.

The Moray Firth coast, a roughly 500 mile inlet across northern Scotland known for its sea stacks and resident bottlenose dolphins, became the film’s version of Ithaca. Findlater Castle, perched on a cliff above the water, and the nearby Culbin Forest both appear on screen.