The Odyssey making-of: Nolan nixed Pattinson's wig and Holland's shorter skirt

Christopher Nolan kicked off The Odyssey's Oscar campaign Tuesday night with a 75-minute making-of documentary, "Behind the Scenes of The Odyssey," screened at the Spielberg Theater on the Universal lot. The $1.8 billion blockbuster is Nolan's biggest hit, and the doc came loaded with eight fresh behind-the-scenes revelations.

Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus, moderated an hourlong Q&A with 12 department heads afterward. The big takeaway from Damon: he never had to loop a single line. "I did not loop a line for this movie," he said. Sound mixer Willie Burton explained the rule. "There's no ADR with Chris," Burton said. "Does not want to do ADR, and he also wants the boom mic to be on a cable." That meant Burton spent storm sequences below deck, running cables under the floorboards with water pouring down on him, and moonlighting as the ship's snack clerk.

Nolan's veto power got plenty of screen time. Robert Pattinson, who plays Antinous, called hair head Gloria Casny on his first fitting day to ask for a long wig. "The answer was no," she recalled. Tom Holland quietly asked for a shorter skirt so he'd look taller, and the change lasted two seconds in front of Nolan. "How come the skirt is shorter?" the director asked.

The Cyclops, the Trojan horse and 35 gongs

The Cyclops began as a desk lamp test. Nolan didn't want a "very cartoony, very unthreatening" monster, so VFX supervisor Andrew Jackson filmed actor Bill Irwin improvising in a dark office with a lamp on the floor, then moved one eye to the center of his face. Meanwhile, the Trojan Horse was still stuck in customs when Nolan moved the shoot up two days in Morocco. "The horse is in boxes in customs," production designer Ruth De Jong remembered. "Yeah, anyways, carry on," he replied.

Composer Ludwig Göransson shut himself in his studio during the LA fires with about 35 bronze gongs and spent 10 days learning to write for them. He had heard gongs before, he noted, "in the theme song for Mortal Kombat." The end-credits song "When I'm Home" uses Travis Scott's original vocal from the film.

Nearly 7,000 background performers passed through hair and makeup, with artists erasing tattoos, earring holes and modern eyebrow shapes. Nolan once described Homer as writing "the Marvel films of his time." Damon, 54, was filmed doing pullups on a ladder. "My whole life was kind of leading up to this movie," he says.

The full 75-minute cut was a one-time screening; a shorter version arrives with the film's digital release Nov. 17. The campaign continues Wednesday when Robert Downey Jr. hosts an Imax 70mm screening at the TCL Chinese Theatre.