‘The boundless ocean set into a rage’: Why we are still drawn to shipwrecks

Legend has it that the painter William Turner — born in London in 1775 and obsessed with depicting the fury of the sea — had himself tied to the mast of the Ariel (a small sail-and-steam vessel) during a harrowing storm that lasted several hours, an ordeal he would turn into his famous painting Snow Storm (1842). Art historians such as James Hall debunk this anecdote, which nonetheless echoes the stories circulating online about the filming of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. In fact, Instagram is full of reels about the difficulty of mounting heavy IMAX cameras on the unstable boats used in the film (the main one is actually a replica of a Viking ship) and some actors recall that motion-sickness pills ran out during the shooting of the shipwreck scene on the island of Ogigia, where Calypso (Charlize Theron) detains Odysseus (Matt Damon) after his crew’s death. Again, Nolan’s aim was to capture the sea’s wrath with the highest level of detail and realism, exposing his crew to actual storms.

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