BTS The Odyssey

IBC

Art and technology combine for epic storytelling, if you believe the marketing for Christopher Nolan’s latest

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If you’re going to make a film of a poem compiled 3000 years ago and based on events 7000 years before that, you may as well as do so with the scale of set, ambition, spectacle and technology that Hollywood used to recreate Babylon back in 1919.

An all-star cast, thousands of extras, multiple exotic location shoots and a budget reported as $250 million all spell epic but it was the custom camera technology that allowed writer director Christopher Nolan to film The Odyssey entirely using IMAX cameras.

No-one can have failed to miss that. It’s such a huge part of the film’s marketing that there was surely a risk that this dry technical feat could swamp the drama. The reason is simple: There’s no way streaming can compete with the scale of this format.

Nolan has said it’s been his dream to shoot a movie entirely in IMAX since he was 16 and first saw IMAX documentary films. He’s shot progressively more of his films in the format from The Dark Knight to Oppenheimer, always wanting to go further.

“The thing that always stopped us was the sound,” he explains in a promo video released by Universal Pictures to accompany release.

IMAX cameras have gained a reputation for being noisy when turning over, perhaps unfairly since all film cameras will make sound due to the mechanical sprockets and rollers operation of moving negative through at speed. It’s just that IMAX 70mm film is bigger; three and half times the size of 35mm in fact. Each frame has five perforations and is run vertically through the camera.

That means the cameras are also bulky and therefore not particularly agile. No-one’s going to be carrying an IMAX handheld – at least until The Odyssey when DoP Hoyte van Hoytema (Interstellar, Tenet, Oppenheimer) did shoot holding an IMAX camera on his shoulder.

A year in advance of photography, Nolan, producer Emma Thomas and van Hoytema went to IMAX to see what it could do. Turns out, IMAX bent over backwards to design for them a new camera called The Keighley (in homage to IMAX pioneer David Keighley who passed away shortly after completing his review of dailies for Nolan’s film).

“The high‑level objective was to make it feel like a modern camera while keeping all the legacy aspects [of IMAX] built into one system,” explains David Kempling, IMAX Director of Film Operations in an Instagram post.

“Each individual IMAX frame is about 14 to 16K of resolution, and that’s per colour. Digital cameras are fantastic and absolutely have their place, but when you’re talking about the best possible resolution and the best possible image quality, nothing is ever going to match what you can do with one of our cameras. We’re taking a technology that’s a century old and making it cutting‑edge.”

The innovations included a custom blimp designed to encase the camera’s mechanical operation so as to not drown out dialogue.

“In reality, it’s not a new idea. People have built blimps before, but no one had ever made one for an IMAX camera,” reports Paul Constantinou, IMAX VP of hardware engineering in another Insta teaser. “It all started with Hoyte basically saying, ‘Just solve the problem for us.’”

They took a recording of the camera and played it back through the biggest JBL Bluetooth speaker they could find through different iterations of boxes, “trying to figure out how to eliminate the sound.”

“About a month into shooting,” Constantinou continues, “I got an email from one of the techs. She said Hoyte wanted me to see this video — it was a helicopter lifting a box. They were flying it up a mountain to shoot in a cave for a couple of days.

“When we met Hoyte at the end of production, he told us that this box was the most essential piece of technology on the movie. Hearing that was insane. Every time [an actor on-screen] was speaking, the camera was in that box.”

The boxed camera however increased its already sizable footprint. “It’s a gigantic, super‑heavy box, but as filmmakers we’re not supposed to be comfortable,” says Van Hoytema in one of a series of Universal promo videos. “We’re supposed to give the audience the best experience possible.”

Star Robert Pattinson said it was like “shooting with an SUV” which could be an issue for actors who want to feed off the performance of the actor opposite them.

“The problem was you couldn’t get close enough to the lens for proper eye contact,” explains actor Anne Hathaway to Collider.

The solution was to invent a mirror system attached to the camera so that while one actor was performing their line to camera they could see the other actor as if line-of-sight in the mirror.

“It would reflect right next to the lens even though I was physically [in a different position],” actor Matt Damon told ITV News. “It worked so well that these really emotional scenes I have with Annie at the end...in my memory of shooting those scenes I don't remember that I was looking into the mirror I just remember Annie's eyes.”

The new camera is built from carbon fibre (and corrosion resistant materials) but even so with the blimp weighed 400-lb so you’d think the machine would move slowly.  “It actually moves faster than if you were shooting on an iPhone,” Pattinson claimed.

“Before we knew it we were up on cliffs with it, in boats with it, and every day it became easier to work with,” Hoytema added.

The Oscar winning cinematographer commended his focus puller, grips and gaffer for wrangling the equipment as well as the “very important” IMAX technician on set.

“These people can make life a lot easier for you. I always try to be as practical as possible [in terms of the ] infrastructure around the camera or difficulty of moving it around. These are all practical problems, [and] all easy to handle with the right mentality. So you forget a little bit about those problems and remember how beautiful the format is.”

The camera’s short magazines require frequent reloading, so they developed a protocol in which the entire set remained silent so the actors could, in Van Hoytema’s words, “stay in the zone.”

Over 2 million feet of IMAX 70 mm film was used to shoot the production which shot for 91 days between February and August 2025 on location in Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland and the US.

Nolan could have faked it on a soundstage. “I’ve developed a reputation for not liking visual effects. But, you know, my films have won three Oscars for visual effects,” he told Time. “I know a lot about [VFX] and I’m really fascinated by it. But I like to make films with a very grounded tone.”

VFX are handled by Nolan’s regular partner Dneg under the control of Production Supervisor Andrew Jackson. Wētā Workshop supported Costume Designer Ellen Mirojnick and Property Master Guillaume Delouche in creating practical creature effects. Mirojnick herself oversaw the creation of 5,300 costumes.

In a nod to the stop-motion animations of Ray Harryhausen in action-adventure movies like Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Nolan’s one-eyed monster Cyclops is a 12-metre (40ft) animatronic puppet.

While for the Trojan Horse prologue, the production constructed multiple 10-metre-high horses and marshalled thousands of extras. Nolan shot at the ancient walled town of Aït Benhaddou, in Morrocco (also famous for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator films) with the earthen architecture augmented by elaborate sets to allow for 360-degree shooting.

“Every production we look at each other and we say, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we do this entirely on IMAX?’” van Hoytema says. “On [this] film, I think we cracked the code.”