Watch the Glorious Way Christopher Nolan Cuts Scenes in ‘The Odyssey’ Using Literal Scissors
The Odyssey is the first-ever movie to be shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film. The format is so large that it can only be shot continuously for roughly two and a half minutes, as that is the maximum length the IMAX camera can hold.
Recently, director Christopher Nolan took 60 Minutes to the motion picture film lab FotoKem in Burbank, California — the only lab in the world that produces 70mm prints. There, Nolan showed how he and the crew have been physically cutting the film by hand.
A negative assembly technician uses an old-school splicing machine and a pot of glue when a camera cut is made in the film. So remember that while watching the movie in the theater, every time the camera switches, a technician did that by hand.
“It takes incredible skill,” Nolan tells 60 Minutes. “It’s a really marvelous thing to see in this age of digitization, AI, all the rest. This is a human process; an analog process.”
It’s no secret that Nolan loves IMAX the format. “It’s the highest-quality imaging format that’s ever been devised,” the auteur says. “It’s a massive negative which, when correctly exposed, correctly printed, and correctly projected onto a huge screen, there’s an image quality there that you can’t get anywhere else.”
Color correction is also done by hand using filters and test prints. It’s initially done on something called an analyzer before being fine-tuned with filters that cover the primary and secondary colors: red, yellow, blue, green, orange, and violet. Nolan does it this way so he can keep all the information stored on the physical negative, rather than digitizing the film.
“It has analog color, which means infinite gradations of color. It’s not broken into a series of numbers,” says Nolan. “What you get is the benefit of the closest sort of technological analog that’s ever been created for how the eye sees.”
“Film sees very much the way the eye sees,” Nolan continues. “Particularly the way it sees color, the way it sees grays and blacks and whites, it’s a really good way of approximating the way our eyes see.”
Once the color corrections are applied to the final prints, it’s given a chemical bath, dried, and voilà, the film is ready to be shipped off to a theater with 70mm projection capabilities.
There are only 41 theaters in the entire world capable of taking such a film. Projectionists who know how to handle the film properly are also scarce. Most people will see The Odyssey via a digital scan of the film, which will still be impressive. But if at all possible, photography and film aficionados should really try to see this landmark film at an analog screening.
“It’s a really loud camera,” The Odyssey star Matt Damon says of the IMAX camera. “So for instance, if we’re shooting an intimate scene, it would have been possible up to a year ago, but the camera was much too loud.”
But Nolan challenged IMAX to build a quieter camera so that an entire production could be filmed on it, which they delivered in the form of the IMAX Keighley; the camera is currently on public display at IMAX HQ, Los Angeles.
Image credits: 60 Minutes
