Christopher Nolan has not chosen the 65mm IMAX format for ‘The Odyssey’ as a simple technical boast. In reality, for this director it is a narrative tool at the service of a mythological scale story. Homer’s poem tells of endless sea voyages, storms, monsters and a journey that tests the limits of human endurance. Nolan wanted the viewer feel that immensity in a physical waynot just intellectual. And the only way to achieve this, as the director himself explained, was to completely fill the visual field of the movie theater.
This ambition explains why, unlike previous works such as ‘Batman: The Dark Knight’, ‘Interstellar’ or ‘Oppenheimer’where IMAX is reserved for certain sequences of great impact, in ‘The Odyssey’ this format is maintained throughout the entire footage. Nolan has thus broken his own habit of alternating formats according to the intensity of each scene. The Homeric epic demands that the feeling of grandeur never wane, not even in the most intimate passages of the plot.
IMAX’s 1.43:1 aspect ratio, much more vertical than the usual widescreen image in commercial cinema, is the key to this decision. By filling the viewer’s peripheral vision, this format generates a sense of depth similar to 3D without the need for glasses, something Nolan considers essential to convey the magnitude of the landscapes and battles. The director has summed up his philosophy with a forceful phrase: it sought to offer the public “something new and exciting”, an experience that no other format could give with the same intensity.
IMAX demands as much as it promises
The heart of this creative ambition is an exceptional negative. The IMAX film format, technically known as 15/70, uses 15 perforations per frame compared to the usual four for 35mm, which increases the size of the negative tenfold. The result is a horizontal resolution that is around 18,000 theoretical pixels, compared to the 1,920 pixel width of a high definition home screen (which together with its 1,080 vertical lines makes up the Full HD standard), and a sharpness that Nolan considers unsurpassable even compared to productions shot directly in digital.
Filming with this technology for an entire feature film has required developing new equipment. IMAX cameras are traditionally very noisy for filming dialoguesso the team created a silencer they call blimp (we can translate it as soundproof casing). The resulting camera, named ‘The Keighley’ after veteran IMAX executives Patricia and David Keighley, weighs about 300 pounds packed into its soundproof casing.
Nolan maintains that the resulting image retains a quality superior to that of any digital production.
In addition, the physical support adds another layer of demand. The celluloid tape had to be recharged every two and a half to three minutes, and a mirror system had to be installed so that the actors could see each other around this bulky device during filming. This celluloid also advances horizontally through the projector using a technique called rolling loopand a single 45-minute roll can weigh 140 kilos and exceed 4,600 meters in length.
Nolan maintains that, even when this negative is scanned to digitize it and adapt it to rooms with laser projectors, the resulting image retains superior quality to that of any production born in digital. This conviction explains his insistence on defending celluloid against the advance of digital tools, a position that he has maintained consistently throughout his entire career.
All this technical demand has a very high cost during the exhibition process: only about 40 theaters around the world can project IMAX in its full combination of 70 mm and giant screen, and finding trained personnel to handle these prints is increasingly difficult in an industry focused on digital for almost two decades.
Spain, despite having several digital IMAX theaters and with projection in traditional 70 mm, it does not have any that combines both technologies, so the Spanish public will have to settle for digital versions that crop the image to a more panoramic aspect ratio, losing some of the visual information that Nolan captured at the top and bottom margins of the frame.
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