‘The Odyssey’ Actors Needed a Mirror System to See Around Gigantic IMAX Camera

Director Christopher Nolan has shed more light on what it was like shooting the first-ever feature film entirely on 70mm IMAX cameras.

In an interview on the Letterboxd YouTube channel, Nolan explained that hauling around the 300-lb IMAX system on location was “like going back to an older era of filmmaking when cameras were extremely large and cumbersome.”

Nolan reveals that when The Odyssey first started shooting, the crew wasn’t sure whether using the IMAX camera exclusively was a viable option, and that was mainly due to the audio.

“We shot a fair amount of the film before we really knew whether we would be able to do the whole film or not,” Nolan says.

“Because when you’re on the boats, for example, people project over the waves so you’re able to record the sound, even with a loud camera. You’re able to use software tools to filter this and get a usable track. It’s really about the quiet moments.”

The quiet moments mean the dialog scenes when the sound of the 70mm film moving rapidly through the IMAX camera makes a lot of noise. To combat this, the crew built a blimping system that muffles the sound, but as a consequence makes the camera even more massive.

The size means that the two actors playing a scene together can no longer see one another. So, Nolan laid down a challenge to rig a system of mirrors so that the actors could maintain eye contact. It’s preferable to the actors delivering their lines to a piece of tape on the side of the camera, which is often the case, even with a regular camera system.

Nolan, who has been championing large-format film cameras for years, says that a detail shot is “absolutely thrilling” in the same way a giant landscape is.

“They’ve started treating the camera like any other camera, and that’s when you’re really able to be free, really start to be able to be spontaneous with it and get things that are occurring in nature, particular weather patterns, or be out on a boat,” he says. “That’s the excitement of where you’re taking the format places you haven’t been able to use it before.”

PetaPixel has previously reported that actor Tom Holland believed Nolan was unhappy with his performance because he kept calling cut every few minutes.

“In my head, I was like, ‘Does he not like what we’re doing? What is happening?’,” Holland told Variety. But he needn’t have worried. The 70mm film is so large that a magazine can only hold three minutes of runtime before it needs to be swapped out.