Christopher Nolan is Taking THE ODYSSEY To IMAX Extremes With Game Changing Technology
Christopher Nolan is pushing filmmaking into wild new territory with his upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey. Not only is this one of the most ambitious projects of his career, it’s also making history as the first narrative feature shot entirely with IMAX cameras.
Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, Nolan’s longtime creative partner, told Empire that he needed to know if IMAX cameras were ready to handle intimate dialogue scenes. To find out, he shot a test featuring a child reading David Bowie’s “Sound And Vision” on IMAX film.
“I presented Chris with a very big close up of a child on the IMAX screen, reciting David Bowie’s ‘Sound And Vision’ from a piece of paper,” van Hoytema said. “It was very touching: that level of intimacy in both image and sound, fused together, projected in the theatre.”
Nolan said the result was “electrifying,” explaining, “We never would have been able to get those shots before.” For years IMAX cameras were too loud to sit close to actors during dialogue, which meant Nolan only used them for action or large scale sequences. That test finally proved the technology had caught up to his ambitions.
A huge part of that leap is a brand new IMAX film “blimp” that drastically cuts camera noise. Nolan broke down why this changes everything.
“The blimp system is a game changer,” Nolan said. “You can be shooting a foot from [an actor’s] face while they’re whispering and get usable sound. What that opens up are intimate moments of performance on the world’s most beautiful format.”
This is the culmination of a journey Nolan started back in 2008 when The Dark Knight introduced IMAX action scenes to Hollywood. Since then he’s kept expanding what the format can do, hitting a major milestone with Oppenheimer, the first film to use IMAX black and white 65mm. Van Hoytema earned an Oscar for that work and previously explained how challenging that was to pull off.
“Black and white film doesn’t exist for 65 millimeters, so our first challenge was starting to talk to Kodak about if they could provide us with the necessary film stock that we needed for this film,” van Hoytema said.
“We needed to re engineer the cameras as well because those cameras have these pressure plates behind the film gates that are made out of metal and the backing is much thinner than color stock. The light would bleed back into the films creating all these artifacts.”
Now the pair are going even bigger. Nolan told Empire he shot more than 2 million feet of film during the 91 day production of The Odyssey. With Kodak pricing 65mm film at $1.50 per foot, that’s around three million dollars in film alone.
The movie stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, reuniting with Nolan after Interstellar and Oppenheimer. Tom Holland plays Telemachus, with a massive ensemble that includes Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron and Jon Bernthal.
“As a filmmaker, you’re looking for gaps in cinematic culture, things that haven’t been done before,” Nolan told Empire about why he chose this story. “And what I saw is that all of this great mythological cinematic work that I had grown up with Ray Harryhausen movies and other things I’d never seen that done with the sort of weight and credibility that an A budget and a big Hollywood, IMAX production could do.”
With groundbreaking tech, an awesome cast and Nolan swinging for the fences, The Odyssey is sure to be one of the most exciting theatrical events in years. The journey begins when Universal releases the film on July 17, 2026.