Christopher Nolan banned the orchestra for 'The Odyssey': The sound of gongs, scrap metal and more

Every historical epic has a sound you already know before the film starts. Sweeping strings, a swelling horn section, the Hans Zimmer school of ancient-world grandeur. For The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan asked particularly for none of that.

The director's instruction to acclaimed composer Ludwig Göransson, his collaborator on Tenet and Oppenheimer, was simple and slightly ruthless: no traditional orchestra.

Göransson later explained the logic to Time Magazine, pointing out that an orchestra wasn't even around in the world the film is set in. He called the restriction both a challenge and an opening to build something genuinely new.

Building an ancient world out of scrap metal

With the orchestra off the table, Göransson had to find his instruments elsewhere, sometimes literally outdoors. Working off Nolan's suggestion that bronze should run through the film as a recurring motif, given its Bronze Age setting, Göransson acquired 35 bronze gongs in a range of sizes and began layering their recordings with synthesisers.

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The search for texture went further than that. Göransson has described hitting walls, railings, air-conditioning units, whatever scrap metal he could find, and hunting for sounds that didn't already exist in any sample library. The result sits somewhere between field recording and film score, closer to archaeology than to a studio session. There's a nice visual detail buried in the film's featurette too: Nolan himself is seen taking a swing at the gongs; whether out of genuine interest or simple enjoyment is hard to say.

Reviving instruments most audiences have never heard

Two period instruments anchor the rest of the score. The aulos, a double-piped reed instrument that shows up across ancient Greek and Roman pottery and carvings, became central to the film's sonic identity. Göransson has called it the closest thing the ancient world had to a rock star instrument, one that dominated its era for roughly a thousand years.

The lyre followed at Nolan's suggestion, chosen for a very specific narrative beat. The director wanted its plucked sound to stand in for the moment Odysseus draws his bow, using the instrument's texture to do work a full string section usually handles.

Alongside the ancient instrumentation, James Blake lends his voice to the score, a creative pairing that carries over from his work with Göransson on Sinners. Göransson has described Blake's contribution as providing the score's emotional pacing, giving the film something contemporary and human inside a sound world built almost entirely from instruments most audiences will never have encountered before.

Modern synthesisers still run underneath all of it, so this isn't a strict historical recreation. It's closer to Göransson using ancient references as raw material for something electronic and new, the same way he's approached constraint-driven scores before, reversing audio for Tenet's temporal structure being one earlier example.

None of this is guesswork from a composer finding his footing. Göransson is a three-time Oscar winner, for Black Panther, Oppenheimer, and most recently Sinners, and he picked up that third statuette only months before The Odyssey was finished. He's also built a career around being handed impossible briefs and finding a way through them. Nolan handing him an instrument-less mandate isn't a rookie risk. It's a director trusting his most reliable collaborator with his hardest problem yet.

Nolan has framed the whole exercise as an attempt to make the ancient world feel recognisable without falling into the visual and sonic shorthand of past classical epics, instead chasing something he calls more timeless. It's the same instinct that shaped his decision to shoot the film for IMAX, built to make audiences feel the experience rather than just watch it.