Why Christopher Nolan shot "The Odyssey" on IMAX film

Indiziert: 2026-05-17

[00:00:02]60 Minutes overtime.

[00:00:06]3 2 1 Director Christopher Nolan has made some of the most spectacular films of the 21st century.

[00:00:17]The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Oppenheimer. With each new film, the scale and ambition of Nolan's storytelling seems to reach new heights.

[00:00:33]So, it's only fitting that his latest, coming to theaters this July, takes on a nearly 3,000year-old Greek epic, The Odyssey.

[00:00:42]>> Let's go.

[00:00:44]>> Matt Damon plays King Odysius in The Odyssey. This is his third film with Nolan.

[00:00:51]I think what separates him from other directors is the stories he wants to tell are incredibly ambitious and the way he wants to tell them is incredibly ambitious because he wants to do it all in camera. In this case, he wanted to do it 100% in IMAX which had never been done and that wasn't even announced because we didn't know if we could do it.

[00:01:13]>> The Odyssey is the first feature film shot entirely with IMAX film. Each frame has resolution or image quality up to three times higher than digital >> action.

[00:01:28]>> The IMAX camera has to stop and be reloaded every two and a half minutes or so.

[00:01:35]>> Because the format is so large, that's the most film the camera can hold at one time. Another challenge, when the cameras are rolling, they're loud. The heavyduty mechanism that pulls the film past the shutter sounds like a sewing machine in a fight with a stapler.

[00:01:52]>> It's a really loud camera. So for intimate scenes, for for instance, if we were going to shoot this scene, that would have been impossible in IMAX up until, you know, a year ago.

[00:02:02]>> Camera's too loud.

[00:02:03]>> Camera's just much too loud. The audio would never would never work. for the Odyssey. Nolan inspired the IMAX company to engineer a soundproof enclosure for the camera. It's big. It's cumbersome, but it works. This giant thing is like the size of like a coffin. Basically, this thing weighed, I think, over 300 lb when it was all put together. They had to build special steel plating on the dollies to hold it. It was a lot. And we kind of kept shooting with it and it kept working. We, you know, it kind of dawned on us that we were going to make it through the production and we were actually going to be able to shoot entirely on IMAX.

[00:02:43]>> We went to Photo Cam in Burbank, California, the only motion picture film lab in the world that still produces 70 mm prints. We watched Nolan and the staff put finishing touches on the Odyssey.

[00:03:00]Ron Pores, a negative assembly technician, gave us a demonstration.

[00:03:05]>> Yeah. Ron, could you uh show us some splicing here?

[00:03:08]>> So, every time a scene changes, which can be dozens and dozens in a minute.

[00:03:14]>> Yeah.

[00:03:14]>> That scene change was cut by hand.

[00:03:18]>> Yes. So, they're cut in another room.

[00:03:20]These are two pieces of negative now that he's going to splice together for us.

[00:03:24]>> And every cut in the film, and there are thousands of cuts in the film, is done this way by hand. Makes me nervous just watching it.

[00:03:32]>> Look, look at the spicing machine. Yeah, >> it looks like it was made in the 1940s.

[00:03:37]>> It probably was.

[00:03:40]>> Glue.

[00:03:41]>> The glue.

[00:03:42]>> Yep.

[00:03:43]>> In this digital universe, it's incredible to see an artist with a glue pot sticking this negative together.

[00:03:54]And there it is.

[00:03:54]>> Oh, nice. Very clean.

[00:03:56]>> It takes incredible skill. It's a really marvelous thing to see. Yeah. In this age of digitization, AI, all the rest, it's this is a human process, an analog process. This strip of film, that's the highest quality imaging format that's ever been devised. There's nothing nothing that competes with it. It's a massive negative, uh, which when correctly exposed, correctly printed, and, you know, projected onto a huge screen. Uh, there's an image quality there that you can't get anywhere else. Incredible sharpness, very little visible grain.

[00:04:32]>> The film is then color corrected using filters and test prints from the negative. Lance Spindler is a lab color timer at Photokim.

[00:04:43]>> And you do the color correct here.

[00:04:44]>> Yes.

[00:04:45]>> How does that work?

[00:04:46]>> So, what we do is we initially do the coloring on an analyzer to get us closest to what Chris eventually wants.

[00:04:54]Then we come here and with the print that we just made and we fine-tune it with our filters. For example, we have uh a cyan filter. We have all six. We have the primary colors and we have the secondary colors. So I will set these on here and it adjusts for our look on the frames. So this one you can tell is less red than over here.

[00:05:17]And that would indicate how I adjust my timing lights accordingly to achieve what he wants. And this is the oldfashioned way.

[00:05:25]>> This is the old fashioned way.

[00:05:27]>> But most any other film would do this on a computer.

[00:05:30]>> Yeah. The standard practice is to do this on a computer. We've never done that. We've we've stuck to the photochemical timing so that we can get the full benefit of all the information that's stored on the original negative.

[00:05:43]So it has analog color, which means infinite gradations of color. It's not broken into a series of numbers. What you get is the benefit of the closest sort of technological analog that's ever been created for how the eye sees. So film sees very much the way the eye sees. Uh and particularly the way it sees color, the way it sees grays and blacks and whites and everything. Uh it's a really good way of approximating the way our eyes sees. The color corrections are then applied to the final prints >> slit in there where the different colored lights expose across the frame as it rolls across. Each shot in the film, the ins and outs of that are programmed. So the valves change, those lights change as it just did as the film goes across.

[00:06:36]>> After going through a chemical bath, the prints are dried. These are prints.

[00:06:42]Yeah, these are the uh final release prints.

[00:06:44]>> Probably not the entire film or is it?

[00:06:48]>> It does it one reel at a time.

[00:06:50]>> Mhm.

[00:06:51]>> And they're probably running most of the reels of the film and then once everything's signed off on, they just start making all the prints reel by reel.

[00:07:11]We watch scenes from the Odyssey with Nolan at the Vista Theater in Los Angeles.

[00:07:18]One of only a few in the country that can project 70 millimeter film.

[00:07:26]People in the industry talk about their fear >> that theaters like this and giant screens like that are going to be part of history. I think theaters like this are part of history and they're part of the future as well. Uh unquestionably, I mean, what movies do for us as a way of experiencing a story together with this incredible empathetic response that you get, you know, when you watch a comedy in a room full of laughing people or a tragedy where everybody's sad at the same time, that's very, very important and very unique to cinema. There's always been confusion about how the economics of the business, you know, might impact what this is as a medium of this relationship between movies you see in the theater and then how they are then sold to audiences uh you know ultimately in the home. Uh and that will continue to change and evolve and always does. But the idea of the movie as a communal experience, as a place we come together to experience a story, I'm fully confident that's a part of our culture forever.