Anupama Chopra sits down with Christopher Nolan for InFocus, days ahead of the worldwide release of The Odyssey — his adaptation of Homer's epic, starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, and the first Hollywood feature ever shot entirely on IMAX film cameras. Christopher explains how a film of this scale stays moving rather than merely massive: for him, The Odyssey is first and foremost a family story — a homecoming, a coming-of-age tale and a love story — and the spectacle only lands if the audience cares about what the characters are going through. He describes his job on set as being the audience, experiencing the story shot by shot, and credits his collaborators — cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, production designer Ruth De Jong and composer Ludwig Göransson — with pulling him through the overwhelming stretches of a 90-day shoot across six countries that consumed over two million feet of IMAX film.
Christopher also unpacks what he calls composing situationally: how the weight and immovability of IMAX cameras forces a three-dimensional way of thinking about where the camera sits in relation to actors and real environments, something he believes would be impossible on a green-screen stage. He traces his IMAX obsession back to a teenage visit to Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, through the first experiments around The Prestige and The Dark Knight, to the breakthrough blimping system IMAX engineered so dialogue scenes could finally be shot on the format. And he closes with an impassioned case for why cinema — a medium, not a technology — will always matter to audiences. The Odyssey releases in theatres worldwide on July 17.
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