23 Years Before Nolan's 'The Odyssey,' This Oscar-Winning Film Already Modernized the Ancient Epic

The run-up to Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has many of us looking back at previous attempts to bringthe Greek epic to the big screen — and most often, the film that comes to mind is 2000's Oscar-nominated O Brother, Where Art Thou?. But a few years before the Coen Brothers first brought Homer to the U.S., author Charles Frazier took a similar idea for his 1997 novel, Cold Mountain. That historical tale mashed up The Odyssey with Civil War America — and director Anthony Minghella would adapt it into an Oscar-winning feature film for Miramax in 2003.