Christopher Nolan reveals why he didn’t use an orchestra for ‘The Odyssey’ score

20 July 2026, 18:00

By Classic FM

@ClassicFM

The two-time Oscar-winning director told Jonathan Ross about his approach to scoring films and working with composer Ludwig Göransson on ‘The Odyssey’.

One of the most hotly anticipated films of 2026, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has been widely speculated over since audiences first began to learn of its details. One of the major concerns? Nolan’s apparent banning of orchestras, in composer Ludwig Göransson’s score.

Speaking to Classic FM at the Movies’ Jonathan Ross, Nolan expanded on that decision, and described what it’s like to work with composers like Göransson and Hans Zimmer, as well as his approach to scoring films in general.

“It’s really about finding collaborators,” Nolan told Ross, when it comes to hiring composers for his films. “It’s not so much about looking at other scores a composer has done and saying, ‘how can I apply that like a sauce on a meal you made’, or something like that. I don’t view music and films that way.”

Instead, for Nolan, a film composer is more of a creative partner – and far from music being relegated to the post-production rooms as is often the case, Nolan’s composers are brought onto the project much earlier. This might go some way to explain the longevity of Nolan’s director-composer relationships.

Read more: ‘Sinners’ composer Ludwig Göransson breaks down his movie soundtrack

Christopher Nolan on music, composers, and why there's no orchestra in 'The Odyssey'

David Julyan scored Nolan’s films up to and including The Prestige in 2006, which will be re-released this year for its 20th anniversary. From 2005, with Batman Begins, Nolan began to work with Hans Zimmer before joining forces with Göransson for Tenet in 2020 and Oppenheimer in 2023.

“With all the composers I’ve worked with, I’ve tried to involve them before I’ve even shot the film,” the director explained. “We’re really trying to make the music grow with the very conception of the film, all the themes, all the ideas.”

As part of that process for The Odyssey, Nolan said he and Göransson made the decision early on that they didn’t want to play into stereotypes or expectations for the Greek epic. Rather than mimic the mid-Atlantic accents and lush, Romantic orchestrations of 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, Nolan said he wanted the film to be “earthy and immediate and accessible.”

“We’re not going to look to the kind of Romantic tradition in art, visually,” he explained. “And so what does that mean for the music? Because we shouldn’t really, therefore, be taking a kind of Romantic era orchestra and orchestration and relying on that. And that is the underpinnings for a lot of my movie scores!”

Read more: Everything we know about Ludwig Göransson’s score for ‘The Odyssey’ so far

Full of praise for The Odyssey’s composer, Nolan said: “Ludwig is a brilliant composer, he’s also a brilliant producer.

“He has an incredible ear for sound and instrumentation and everything, so I think he got excited by that right away. Basically saying, ‘okay, take the orchestra off the table, let’s look to the ancient instruments and see what we can do with an aulos, do with a lyre’.”

Using silence for dramatic effect is also an important part of a Christopher Nolan film. He explained to Jonathan Ross how he begins his editing process: “I start editing every film exactly the same way. We start without music, we start without sound effects.

“We just cut the picture, cut the dialogue, and then we start layering in music and sound gradually.”

Does he ever use pre-existing music as a placeholder for his score, known as a temp track?

“Always music that’s been composed for the film,” Nolan is keen to stress. “The problem with [the temping] process is, by definition, if you love something, you have to then take it off the film.

“Temp love, composers call it. When music fuses to picture, you don’t want to have to unpeel that. You don’t want to use another film’s score. You don’t want borrowed honour. You want something bespoke, something that is grown with the film.”

Nolan’s process appears to have been a great success, setting a new box office record for the director in The Odyssey’s opening weekend, and leaving just one question remaining: where will this epic cinematic journey take him next?

The Odyssey is out in UK cinemas now.