Ten years ago, writer-director Michael Winterbottom released The Trip—a hilarious and semi-improvised midlife-crisis travelogue following British comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon through Northern England’s enchanting Lake District as they dined at Michelin-star restaurants, swapped off-kilter observations, and performed spot-on impressions of Mick Jagger, Michael Caine, and Marlon Brando. Since then, their cinematic sojourns have taken them to Italy (2014) and Spain (2017).
Now, in their fourth and final installment, The Trip To Greece (streaming May 22), the duo, playing semi-fictional versions of themselves, brings their barbed brand of comic one-upmanship to the land of Odysseus, retracing the steps of Homer’s hero from Troy to Ithaca. On the eve of the film’s release, we spoke to Winterbottom about some of his latest film’s off-the-beaten-track locations and why a story about two guys on an exotic road trip couldn’t possibly come at a better time.
What made you settle on Greece for the last chapter in The Trip series?
Obviously it’s very beautiful, it’s the Mediterranean! And it’s got a huge amount of culture and history that you can draw on, which made sense when we decided to nick from The Odyssey to help us shape the journey and give the film something slightly more serious running underneath it. The whole film has an emotional coming home aspect to it. Or at least it’s supposed to.
I don’t think it’s just the emotion that will resonate with audiences. It also arrives at a time when we’re all stuck at home, so it lets us travel vicariously.
Well, let’s hope so.
How did you choose the individual spots to shoot? You seemed dead set against using obvious picture-postcard spots like the Acropolis.
That’s the fun. It’s part of the reason you do it, is you get to pick a country you want to spend time in and pick the restaurants you want to eat in and call that work. One of the things we try and do is find places where Rob and Steve’s conversations can start with something vaguely connected to the place like Greek drama or Greek democracy, and then wander off into their usual inanities.
Even though the film is The Trip to Greece, it actually doesn’t kick off in there. How did you come to that decision?
We knew we’d start in Troy [now Tevfikiye], which is in Turkey, and end in Ithaca, because that’s the route that Odysseus took home after the Trojan war. And to get from Troy to Ithaca in six days sensibly, it’s quite hard work. I liked the idea that we would visit not only Troy, where, as Rob says, there’s not a lot to see, but also Assos, which was a small Greek city about an hour’s drive away and has the Temple of Athena. It’s a very small place now, but peaceful. I would definitely recommend going there.
Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan during one of their many meals in The Trip to Greece.
It’s also where Rob and Steve have one of the most idyllic-looking meals in the film. Where did they eat?
That was at Ida Blue Adatepe, which has this beautiful outdoor garden. It’s brilliant. The hotel’s fantastic. There’s a really sweet guy who owns it. I went to stay there with my family and fell in love with it. The whole village is incredibly tiny and it’s 20 minutes from Assos. I want the places in these films to be places I like. Hotels I like or restaurants I like, people I like, places I like.
From Assos, Rob and Steve take the ferry to Lesbos, which obviously has ancient history, but also a very contemporary story with its influx of Syrian refugees. As expected, Rob and Steve’s characters don’t seem very concerned with that.
I think we’re all like that. In principle, we’re very sympathetic to people who are trying to escape somewhere and make a new life. But when we go on holiday, we just want to have a good time and we want to not think about it. So, they represent us in that respect. Lesbos is one of the main islands where refugees have been coming to from Turkey. There’s a big refugee camp on the island, which is briefly in the film. I think their lack of interest is very true to them—they just want to get on the next ferry into Kavala and Macedonia.
Is that where they visit the amphitheater at Epidaurus?
Exactly. So that is actually quite famous and busy. But we needed a backdrop that shouts Ancient Greece and connects them back to it. So, it didn’t matter that it was on the nose. And the theater is an amazing place. They had a play on there that night. Oedipus, I think. It’s 2,500 years later and they’re still performing the same plays in the same theater. Incredible.
One of the next stops is Hydra, which is famous for having been the bohemian enclave in the ‘60s where Leonard Cohen lived.
I was a bit reluctant to visit Hydra, I don’t know why. The great thing about it is it’s an hour and a half from Athens and visually, it’s beautiful—especially in April. It’s a proper little working port—and I love ports. You might think, “Oh, they’re a bit naff and touristy,” but it had a great restaurant called Omilos, which was there in the ‘60s. I listened to Leonard Cohen when I was young, but I always imagined that his time on a Greek island was in some incredibly remote, deserted, hippy-zen place. But Hydra is a bit of a party island and completely the opposite of how I imagined his life there would have been. We got lucky there because once a year they have this this big fireworks celebration for Greek independence and somehow we managed to time it just right.
One of the most striking locations in the film is the Diros Caves, which Rob and Steve explore in a rowboat like they’re floating on the river Styx.
Normally I do all of the scouting myself, but that was actually one that my daughters found when they were traveling around the Peloponnese. In Greek mythology, that was said to be the entrance to the Underworld, so you’re right about that. From there, we made one of our final stops in Pylos, which has this spectacular view out over Ox Belly Bay. I mean, basically Greece is all mountains and olive groves falling down into the most amazing sea everywhere. It’s hard to pick a bad spot to shoot.
