In a cinema first, Christopher Nolan is shooting his Greek epic The Odyssey entirely on IMAX 65mm film cameras.
When the industry began its rapid switch to digital in the 2000s, Christopher Nolan was among a handful of filmmakers – Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson being two others – who continued to shoot on film.
From 2008’s The Dark Knight onwards, Nolan has also experimented with the IMAX film format – all of which appears to have built up to his latest production, The Odyssey. Nolan’s Greek myth epic will be the first movie to be shot entirely on IMAX’s 65mm format, according to the company’s CEO, Rich Gelfond.
Talking at the Cannes Film Festival, Gelfond said that, in the run-up to The Odyssey’s shoot, Nolan had asked IMAX to find a way to improve their cameras, which are notoriously big and heavy.
“Chris called me up and said, ‘If you can figure out how to solve the problems, I will make [The Odyssey] 100 percent in IMAX.’ And that’s what we’re doing,” Gelfond said at a Cannes press lunch (via The Hollywood Reporter) “He forced us to rethink that side of our business, our film recorders, our film cameras.”
IMAX managed to deliver on Nolan’s request, and its new camera is said to be 30 percent quieter and lighter. All the same, a can of 65mm film itself has a certain heft to it, and so shooting a potentially huge film on the format is a major commitment. In previous movies, Nolan has shot on standard 35mm, only switching to the 70mm format for specific scenes – though admittedly, the percentage of IMAX footage in his films has increased since 2008.
Behind the scenes footage on such films as Interstellar or Tenet has often shown Nolan’s cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema stomping around with a huge IMAX camera perched on his shoulder. From an outsider’s perspective, it looks about as comfortable as carrying a fridge around a film set, so hopefully IMAX has found a way to save Hoytema’s spine from permanent damage.
Other filmmakers have gotten around the weight problem by shooting digitally on IMAX-certified cameras. Such films as Avatar: Way Of Water, Dune: Part Two and the upcoming Superman have been shot entirely in large-format, but on lightweight cameras made by such manufacturers as Sony and ARRI.
Nolan and a growing number of other filmmakers have continued to champion the grain and texture of traditional film, however. Gareth Edwards, for example, has opted to shoot next year’s Jurassic World: Rebirth on 35mm.
Given that The Odyssey is Nolan’s own take on the Hollywood epic, meanwhile, shooting it on IMAX will place it in a similar arena to such 70mm expansive-looking classics as Spartacus or Lawrence Of Arabia.
Oh, and if you need a quick guide to film formats, Sinners director Ryan Coogler made an absolutely wonderful one a few weeks ago.
The Odyssey is due for release in UK cinemas on the 17th July 2026.
